Upper Burnside Falls are easy to find at the end of a steep(no kidding) staircase. Unfortunately if the water is high there is no safe way to get around the rocky bluff on your left after you reach the bottom of the staircase. 

On the upside there is an abundance of wildflowers to enjoy and photograph.

Upper Burnside Falls

Our native ducks are beautiful and elegant creatures gifted to and by nature. There is no need to kill these birds for "sport".  The time is well past to stop the senseless and meaningless slaughter of our wild creatures. Let them be to live out their lives as they will.

Green-winged Teal

The kingbirds are renowned for their tenacious attitude and especially the risks they will take in defending their family against predators or all kinds.

Its not a shy bird but like most flycatchers its very active.

Eastern Kingbird

The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is common in favourable habitat of mature deciduous or mixed forests and uncommon elsewhere. Our Rose-breasted Grosbeak in our yard yesterday and today is early enough to be considered rare.

I have to gripe again. This handsome male will not pose for me. I have to rely on back lit belly shots or oblique shots through the window. Fortunately this species does tend to hang around for a while when it finds a good feeder.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

If there is one bird I would travel anywhere in Nova Scotia to photograph it would be the Evening Grosbeak. The good looks of this bird, male and female, are stunning.

When I lived in Quebec I had regular visits by flocks of these elegant birds year round. I never appreciated just how fortunate I was at the time.

The Evening Grosbeak was a western bird residing on the Pacific side of the rocky mountains. In the last century they expanded their range which some believe was due to the box elder or Manitoba maple and other ornamental plantings. We had an enormous Manitoba maple tree in our yard in Winnipeg. Unfortunately it is relatively short lived and has monstrous tentacle like roots which can do a lot of damage.

Evening Grosbeak

The Eastern Phoebe is often our earliest flycatcher to arrive in spring migration, sometimes a second to the Tree Swallow. When Laura and I first got into nature we would go on early spring trips to Patricia Beach and Grand Beach north of Winnipeg. We would always have a hot picnic lunch in tow and lots of optimism. Most springs the first song we heard would be the Eastern Phoebe singing its, "pheeee.....beeee", song. It was heart warming especially after a Manitoba winter.

The upside of enduring the Manitoba Winter was the great owl photography and the promise of Canada's best spring, summertime and fall birding. The central flyway produces a lot of great visions including hundreds of thousands of geese and swans.

Eastern Phoebe

There are three ways to photograph a Cliff Swallow; find them at a mud hole when they are collecting building material to repair their nests(national parks and historic sites are good for this), photograph them in flight if you have good equipment, skill and most importantly luck, or photograph them at a nest site whilst hanging from a bosun's chair 500 metres above the rapids. There are questions of ethics when photographing nest sites. In principle I don't believe we should search out nest sites but if one by accident stumbles onto a nest site along the trail it might be OK to photograph the nest without disturbing the bird but never release the location of any nest site. If you flush the bird from its nest turn in your camera gear and take up another hobby or profession.

I've experimented with the 150-600mm lenses. They were all the rage a few years ago and some folks still use them. I was warned that the quality would be poor. Well, I've tried them several times in the field using the Tamron, Tokina and Sigma versions of the 150-600mm. These photos were taken with a 150-600mm lens with 1.4X extender. They provide good reach with slow auto focus and poor definition but they are excellent if you are just getting started in nature photography.

Cliff Swallow

The Blue-headed Vireo is among our earliest arriving passerines. Its song is slower and more melodic than its later arriving cousin the Red-eyed Vireo.

Laura and I enjoyed a walk in the sun today and we heard a Blue-headed Vireo singing as well as a Winter Wren and a Yellow-rumped Warbler. Overhead and crossing the road in front of us was a Broad-winged Hawk and a Merlin. Migration is starting to pick up!

Blue-headed Vireo

The Greater White-fronted Goose is an annual regular and better categorized as uncommon due to recent and regular annual increases in visits. Like all geese they get killed by humans so they tend to be very vary and not easily approachable unless your candidate bird is a recent escapee. 

The two photographs below are of a juvenile so the white mask around the face has not yet developed.

Greater White-fronted Goose

The Upland Sandpiper is a rare visitor to Nova Scotia. Laura and I were introduced to this bird in Manitoba where it liked to sit on fence posts and sing its "cat call" song. That's the whistle that creepy guys utter when attractive females walk by.

We referred to this bird as "button eyes" because this feature is evident when you first approach the bird. It is not shy and easily approachable.

Upland Sandpiper

The Greater Shearwater is a pelagic bird preferring to spend most of it life at sea. It is not shy if baited with fish. This is not a respectable practice but commonly used by birders. I foolishly attended at some of these off shore expeditions in my early days. 

Greater Shearwater

The Whimbrel is an early arriving shore bird, although it is seldom on the shore. It seems to prefer to forage upland in the coastal barrens. I seldom get close to this wary bird as it movies about in small flocks.

Whimbrel

The Harlequin Duck is a beautiful bird but quite the challenge to photograph as it moves about in the surf, usually in pairs. I captured one closer to shore but as it happens I neglected to focus on the eye so the photograph was compromised.

Nevertheless, they are a delight to watch as they swim and dive along the coastal rocks.

Harlequin Duck