African Affinity Birding

October
Canada and Texas!

Back across the pond again to see Charlotte and a quick trip up to cottage country where we stayed with friends in their lovely cottage on the lake in the forest, got some fishing in too!

But the main reasons for coming this time were to attend the Hawk Migration Association of North America in Detroit to meet up with people to discuss among others, the Broad-winged Hawk Project based at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary with our friend Rebecca McCabe who is doing her PHD on the species.
Then we travelled down to Harlingen in Texas to stay with my friend and mentor Bill Clark. Here we had a wonderful week road trapping with Bill and got to see and catch many new species. In particular it was very exciting to help Bill with his Harris's Hawk project and to catch this wonderful cooperative breeding species.
We also caught Swainson's Hawk, Red-shouldered Hawk and a real treat was getting two juvenile Grey Hawks (Bill only gets one or 2 a year!) and new sub species of Red-tailed Hawk! We tried for White-tailed Hawk but were unlucky. Good to see White-tailed Kites and Crested Caracaras and a real treat to find a couple of Aplomado Falcons!
Loggerhead Shrikes are at their northern range limit in Ontario in specific habitat, so it was great to get to be chewed by these birds which are very common here.
I was also able to convince Bill of my Kestrel trap I get made which i modify to catch small raptors, especially kestrels. In return he gave me a copy of his new book African Raptors!

It was wonderful to see such a massive migration, thousands birds were on the move heading round the Mexican Gulf and out last mission was to go to Padre Island to help with the Peregrine Falcon Survey which I had been introduced to by the Great Falcon man, Bud Anderson.

Detroit was over with fairly quickly, good to meet some very fine raptorphiles and stay up late taking shop. Then Charlotte and I flew down to Texas where the fun really began!