Sarnia, St. Clair R., Snow, Sycamore

Little to report today, as it was a bust.  The morning started out decent weather wise, but later in the morning snow arrived.  We were supposed to get 1-2 cm, but looks like almost 10 cm to me!

The seed ball I portrayed in a previous post is indeed from a Sycamore tree.  They are found in areas of high moisture and can grow very large.  There are a couple of prize trees just outside of Wallaceburg.  In fact, a small but significant woodlot on the SE edge of Wallaceburg is named Sycamore Woods.
The bark is easily recognized by its flaky, irregular appearance that exposes the green, beige or white inner bark.  That produces a striking mottled effect.  I do not have a photo of an entire tree though.

The aggregate seed balls appear as solitary in American Sycamore, not to be confused with the non-native London Plane-Tree that is very similar.  The seed aggregates on that appear in twos or threes.

Today I drove up to Sarnia in hopes of finding some good waterfowl.  Some were reported on eBird yesterday and I struck out on most of them!  The bulk of the ducks were in Lake Huron off Point Edward, consisting mostly of Long-tailed.  I am not sure how many were out there, but at least 800 Long-tailed.  An impressive number for location and time of year.  A few White-winged Scoters were out there too.  A Red-necked Grebe has been reported of late, but I sure as heck cannot find it!  Not in the last couple of weeks anyway.
There were very few gulls at Sarnia, but obviously most had moved downriver to the area of Detroit Edison (Recors Point-US side) and off the old Terra plant (that place keeps changing names, so who knows what it is now!).



The only white-winged gull at Sarnia Bay I saw was a first cycle Glaucous.



Off Terra I saw an adult Thayer's Gull.  I would speculate it is the same one we had at Point Edward a few weeks ago.

Two Bald Eagles were sitting in a tree at the head of Stag Island.

While viewing ducks at Point Edward, I heard a couple of Common Redpolls go over.  Obviously they are on the move right now.

Through the countryside, there was little to see.  I saw a few Harriers again today.  As I mentioned yesterday lots are around this winter.

I checked my favourite spots along Bickford Line and Moore WMA finally had some birds around the parking lot.  That is as far as I could go as the river was running higher than it has in the past few weeks.  Four species of woodpeckers including Flicker were here.  Flickers are always here in winter, but this is the first one this time.  Creepers, nuthatches, chickadees, titmice were around too.

McKellar was a complete bust!  Not sure where the birds were.

Lots of Horned Larks going over today, but in ones or twos only.

Wasp nest at McKellar

Absolutely nothing at the feeders today.  Where the heck are the birds this winter???