cara_poulsen's Journal

Time and Date: (19/11/10) | 1215 – 1315
Duration: 60 minutes
Location: Hendrie Park, Burlington, Ontario
Weather: Temperature = 2 C; Cloud Cover = 75%, Precipitation = None, Wind = 3 (Beaufort Scale)
Habitat/Vegetation: Deciduous Forest, Wetland

On November 10th, 2019, I went for a hike at Hendrie Park with my sister and my dog, Kai. Coming from the parking lot, I noticed what I have always called a Woolly Caterpillar, which I later found out through iNaturalist becomes an Isabella Tiger Moth. Their orange and black banding as a caterpillar is distinctive. While my sister took my dog around, I stayed behind at the head of the trail to photograph a Cedar Waxwing. These are some of my favourite birds because of their yellow-tipped tails, how their breast fades from reddish-orange to a more yellow colour, and the black band around their eyes that makes them so unique. I saw about 6 or 7 of them over the course of the hike. We also saw a lot of Eastern Grey Squirrels, which is somewhat of a misnomer considering many of them are black, as well as Eastern Chipmunks, which were busy gathering nuts and seeds in their ever-expanding mouths to last them the winter. It’s safe to say, however, that with all the visitors Hendrie Park gets for bird feeding that these guys definitely weren’t going hungry!

Along the beginning of the trail, many birds were flying in between trees, including Blue Jays and Black-Capped Chickadees. I learned to identify the calls of these birds in a field course I took in second year, and to be honest they are some of the only calls I can consistently remember after field season. As I reached the boardwalk over the wetland, roughly 10 Mallards were eating the duckweed that floated at the top of the water, most of them males, in addition to a large Trumpeter Swan that was tagged with the label P67. I’ve been seeing these swans for several years now, usually at LaSalle Park, where they also mingle with Mute Swans, which don’t have the black beak and feet of Trumpeters but have orange colouring instead. These large birds were once hunted to extirpation in Southern Ontario, and have been reintroduced in order to re-establish their population. Other species, which were harder to get good pictures of, included the Downy Woodpecker and the Northern Cardinal. The Cardinal was obviously male, as we are taught from a young age that the males are brightly coloured, and I identified the woodpecker as female because she lacked the red plumage at the back of her head. It’s also hard to differentiate between Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, however DOWO are small and tend to have a short beak, while HAWO are large with beaks almost as long as their head.