BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="StuartReeves" data-source="post: 1290117" data-attributes="member: 12155">Day 1, Grand Pré to Brier IslandEvangeline beach near Grand Pré in Nova Scotia is renowned for very large flocks of passage waders, particularly Semi-palmated Sandpipers which are best seen as the rising tide concentrates them on the beach.. If my plane hadn’t been five hours late leaving Heathrow, then I might have go to see this spectacle, as I had booked my first nights accommodation in a motel right on the beach. Instead, I woke up the next morning to find that the tide was going out with a vengeance. Not only is Evangeline Beach on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tidal range in the world, the previous night had been a full moon, so it was going out even further than usual. As far as I could see the huge area of mud in front of me held only a few distant gulls, so I decided to cut my losses & head south.My next destination was Brier Island, off of the south west corner of Nova Scotia. On route I stopped off at Halfway lake, on Digby Neck. The lake itself was apparently bird-free, but the car park produced the first warblers of the trip, a small group of Yellow-rumped Warblers.Grabbing lunch on Brier Island, I noticed a distant flock of birds high over the island. Getting the bins on them I realised with a shock that they were all raptors, and that in the middle of them was what my instincts told me was a Golden Eagle. Remembering where I was, I managed to convince myself that it must in fact be a Bald Eagle. Bolting the remains of my meal I almost ran out of the door, and headed for the area known in my site guide as Brier’s version of Hawk Mountain, in that it is the best place on the island to watch raptor migration. And it didn’t disappoint. The large majority of the flock of at least a thousand birds, turned out to be Broad-winged Hawks, but there was also a scatter of Sharp-shinned Hawks, American Kestrels, Turkey Vultures and Merlins, as well as a single Osprey. The eagle also reappeared and proved to be a young Golden, and thus a relative rarity for the area.I finished the day at the northern tip of the island for a bit of a seawatch in the warm sunshine. The conditions were flat calm and hardly conducive to seabird movement, but I did manage a smart drake White-winged Scoter, and a distant Great Shearwater, as well as some intriguing, though extremely distant, flocks of waders out over the sea. Birds are not the only feature of seawatching in this area, and I was not entirely surprised when a I saw a long, white nobbly appendage rise from the surface of the sea than splash down again., as this strange sight could only be a Humpback Whale lying on its side at the surface and slapping its fin. More of that tomorrow hopefully, when I have a whale watching trip booked.</blockquote>

Verification