St. Rose - I took advantage of morning sun looking for winter field birds. There were few but I did come across four Horned Larks. This Northern subspecies is with us throughout the winter and will leave in early March.
St. Andrew's West - It's that time of year. We had a large flock of up to 600 buntings feasting on spilled corn beside a farm. I managed to find a single Horned Lark in their midst.
Sturgeon Falls - This bird has been high on my wish list for decades but being a Eurasian species the chances of seeing one here were slim. The last one to appear in Ontario was 42 years ago. After our success we almost added a second bird the next day in far eastern Quebec while watching a wayward Painted Bunting at a feeder. We didn't know that a bird showed up nearby the day before and we were told that it had been seen that morning a few hundred metres away from where we were. We missed it by an hour. It was not seen again unfortunately so we missed seeing two birds in two days in two months in two provinces. What are the odds of that? Both individuals likely came over from Iceland.