The stupendous hunt for the fabulous Fulvous Whistling Duck

Chambly Basin

Geese

The plane!  The plane!

Welcome to birding in Canada.

Birding in Korea was juuust like this.

Fulvous Whistling Duck

Fulvous and friends

Canada Goose

Snow Goose (one with a broken wing?)

Mallard

Hooded Merganser (2 males, with varying degrees of crest erection, tee hee)

  Dun-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, the HUNT!  So Dance and I headed out east to search for some rare birds that were recently spotted in a reservoir there.  A European Greylag Goose, clearly lost or attention-starved, was bringing in twitchy birders from all around Canada and Merica to the Chambly Basin for the better part of a week, but it was nowhere to be found today.  We did spot a distant Great Cormorant (my old friend from Korea), rare this far inland.

  The real money bird was the Fulvous Whistling Duck, extreeeemely rare this far north.  We found it northeast of Chambly, in Otterburn Park.  Here’s where it got surreal.  We trudged into a frozen swamp to get a better view, and spotted it on a log, its head down, napping.  I was staring through the viewfinder of The Beast for about 15 minutes, waiting for it raise its selfish beak, arms quivering.  A rumbling train got its little fulvous head to pop up for a couple of seconds, and I got the picture.  When I looked around, I was fairly shocked to find that we were no longer alone in the swamp.  We were surrounded by a phalanx of about 15 birders crouched behind an imposing array of optics and fancy shoulder harnesses.  What the?  I kind of wondered why they didn’t have anything better to do on a Tuesday afternoon, but then I realized that they were me, sort of.  That kind of bird paparazzi crew feels strange to me – I pretty much had an entire sub-tropical Korean island to myself for 2.5 years, scooting around on old-school Tintin birdventures, all fancy-free and alone. 

  After we got a good look, we headed back to the parking lot, and as soon as we got there, the noisy mob flushed the Fulvous and Mallards it was rolling with, and they flew a few hundred feet over, right in front of where we were standing.  Click.  We watched the mob shoulder their tripods and slog back towards us, and The Duck.  Wacky.  Oh, we saw a Bald Eagle, and I kept calling it a ‘Wild Eagle, 100%’, in a manic Sopranos voice, and it was funny to us.

  On other fronts, the plot(ting) thickens.