Birds in Algonquin

 Took a trip up to Algonquin this past Friday to see what could be found up there. It wasn't to busy with visitors and the park staff was setting up for festivities planned for family day weekend. We drove down Opeongo road and seen a mink but not much else, found all the usual suspects at the Visitor Centre including the White-Winged Crossbill that has been seen there for some time now. On the spruce bog boardwalk there was a Great Grey Owl that the Blue Jay and Gray Jays found for me. A successful day I would say.

Pine Grosbeak

Great Grey Owl

Redpols

White winged Crossbill

Bohemian Waxwings

I took a short walk the other morning and found some Bohemian Waxwings. They haven't been here for quite a while, everything was covered in frost made some great photos:

Scenes of El Salvador: Part3

The week we were in El Salvador was focused on building the house and we were surrounded by 4 wall most of the time. But we did manage to get a fair amount of work done on the house and the Mason and his crew had a good start to the house. For the last 3 days that we were in El Salvador we Stayed at a resort across the street from the ocean on a dead end road. It was call Rancho Estero y Mar and was very nice but a bit eclectic. But this is where I finally able to get out and get a good look at some of the wildlife... mainly birds.

Additional photos can be found here

The sun rose every morning there at 6 and so did I, The beach was empty at that time except for the local fisherman. The resort backed on to a national forest reserve so I went to check this out the first morning. A few of the species seen here included:

Ruddy Ground Dove

Crested Caracara

Collared Forest Falcon

Black Vulture

The next 2 days I woke up in the morning and went up the beach a ways to where there was a widening of the river behind the resort and which was pretty close to the ocean this is where many swallows hung out as well as many other birds:

Scissor Tailed Flycatcher

Great Kiskadee

Yellow Crowned Night Heron

Yellow Crowned Night Heron

Whimbrel

Western Willet

Mangrove Swallow

 And somewhat ironically on the last morning just before leaving for the airport I took one more walk down the beach and got a shot of  a:

Snowy Egret

Scenes of El Salvador: part 2

 The first full day that we were in El Salvador we traveled from San Salvador to the smaller city of Zacatecoluca where we would be staying for the week. The accommodations here were awesome and were cared for by Juan Carlos and his parakeet Papeeto. From the moment we got there it was evident that Juan Carlos loved what he did and wanted to get to know us and make our stay there enjoyable. It is hard not to enjoy your stay at a place with a parakeet on staff.

Juan Carlos and Papeeto

After an orientation meeting with the Habitat for Humanity Officials, a bit of a meet and greet with the family we were building the house for, and the Mason we were helping we figured we could squeeze in a trip to the beach. It was pretty busy at the beach and was a bit difficult to find a place where we could go down to the water. But we did find a place and we stayed there till the sun went down and we caught a glimpse in to the local pool hall.