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Toronto Wildlife

Backyard ravine

Nikon D600 - Nikkor 70-200 f2.8
200mm f5.6 1/3200 ISO 4000
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Big Bird eats Alvin
Instead of in the water catching fish, it's chipmunk season for Great Blue Herons in High Park and you might see them on the grass slowly stalking the little rodents. I had to watch for half an hour but finally saw this thing nab one.
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chipmunk.JPG

It took it to a nearby small pond and spent a minute or two repeatedly dunking the doomed but still very much alive and frantically squirming chipmunk until it ran out of energy, then swallowed it whole.
Heron_dunking_chipmunk.JPG

( Not mine, but here's a link to a YouTube video of a similar occurrence, and another one -- the chipmunk in this one may be biting at the heron's bill. )

Also various smaller and more difficult to photograph birds like kinglets, thrushes, warblers, nuthatches, 'new world' sparrows/juncos, and woodpeckers.
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Not wildlife, but annual "Hawk Watch".
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SubHuman said:
Instead of in the water catching fish, it's chipmunk season for Great Blue Herons in High Park and you might see them on the grass slowing stalking the little rodents. I had to watch for half an hour but finally saw this thing nab one.
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I did not know that. I guess food is food.

A year or so ago I saw a Bald Eagle hassling a couple of crows over a dead raccoon. I always assumed Eagles were fishers but learned that they will also eat carrion. It was very late winter so I guess there wasn't a lot of open water yet.
 
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Instead of getting rid of the House Sparrows in the old Purple Martin house, it looks like a new one has been put on the east side of Grenadier Pond, presumably with the entrances to be unblocked in the spring.
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Northern Light said:
Some good news is now public; Toronto has its first nesting pair of Bald Eagles in decades.

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Image Source: https://thumbnails.cbc.ca/maven_leg..._(2).png?crop=1.777xh:h;*,*&downsize=1130px:*

Story link:


While the info will probably get out, eventually, if you happen to know where the nest is, please don't post that info here.

We want to let the would-be parents settle in; and not get too harassed by interested gawkers.
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Good news. Since they have been returning to province I'm actually a little surprised it took this long. There is a nesting family not far from us, near an active town dock and they don't seemed to be all fazed by human activity.
 
https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Birds/Bald-Eagle
Bald eagle eggs and chicks are not often threatened by predators, as the parents are almost always on the nest and are quite large, powerful birds.
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That's good. Any time I can see a bird nest, my immediate thought is that it won't last very long. If I can tell it's there, so can all the potential predators like raccoons, squirrels, cats, blue jays, crows, etc. (or house sparrows and house wrens that peck other birds' eggs just because they're aggressively territorial, technically not predators).
 
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