Wednesday, March 17, 2010

No, It's Not a Swallow

Eastern Kingbird, Toronto photographer Robert Rafton
Yup, the weather is beautiful in Toronto this week. Sad to say though, your Toronto Wildlife photographer is still grumpily flopping about in his cave, waiting for the effects of a long winter to wear off. So here's another older image, this one from 2008.

It's quite easy to mistake the bird you see here for a swallow, but in fact it's an Eastern Kingbird. There's lots of these around in summer and they should be showing up in Toronto soon. The swallows are coming too, maybe any day.

Just to show how far birds can migrate, these Eastern Kingbirds spend our winter down in the Amazonian rainforest where they fly around in huge flocks. Up here they're quite solitary. If you see something that kind of looks like a swallow but is maybe a little bit bigger, one of these is probably what you're looking at.