The first of two point count survey routes through rock barren environs in Frontenac Park was completed this past week. It has been tough going for scheduling and conducting surveys this season as the weather has been largely uncooperative for both roadside and off-road surveys of breeding birds. Cool temperatures, high winds and precipitation limit bird activity, which greatly reduces the validity of the data being gathered. This is the main reason why these surveys have yet to finish, however they should be wrapped up by the weekend (fingers crossed).

106 point count stations are now “in the books”, the last batch of which were drawn from rock barren habitat in Frontenac Provincial Park on June 20th, 2009. It was a long day of hiking, spanning over 12 kilometers through the deep interior of the park’s southeastern portion. The habitat was stunning and full of birds and other wildlife, which made for yet another exhilarating day of field studies on the Frontenac Arch. This particular section of the park is HEAVILY laden with irregularly sized and shaped wetlands ranging from beaver ponds, lakes, swamps and sloughs. More than once I was forced to wade through the water waist high in order to stay on course-there was simply no way of getting through it without a long and wasteful detour. I don’t normally object to getting a bit wet as needed but these wetlands are very soft-mud bottomed types with imperceptible footing and a great deal of mushy unpleasantness-not to mention saturated with unseen snapping turtles! In the end though, my way was found and I took in the ordeal with a balanced sense of bemusement and humour.

Blueberry, probably Vaccinium corymbosum or High-bush Blueberry, was a dominant ground cover species in areas with enough moisure (i.e. everywhere). The fruit is just starting to mature and should be edible soon. I have yet to associate any particular bird species with this plant but I can imagine that Nashville Warblers would find it an appropriately dense-low growing cover for their shallow cup nests. Blueberry is common throughout the park but is particularly abundant in rock barren areas running in a gradually narrowing band from the park’s south end through to Big Clear Lake in the northeast.

The very first survey of the day yielded Virginia Rail, multiple pairs of Wilson’s Snipe and a distant Prairie Warbler-not a bad start! The next station, some 330m away, got me closer to the Prairie Warbler territory, which is pictured above. The male was constantly singing from the the dense shrubs lining a wet draw astride a rock wall. I had no time to investigate this particular territory any further but I’ve been pleased enough overall with having mapped several territories of this species in interior and atypical habitat associations. Prairie Warbler is a rare breeder in Canada with a very patchy and sparse distribution along the southern shield ecotone in Ontario.

The route carried through a habitat I hadn’t yet sampled this season, mixed-forest dominated by Eastern White Pine and Red Pine. This area was “loaded” with Yellow-rumped and Pine Warblers, Chipping and White-throated Sparrows and lesser numbers of Blue-headed Vireo. The highlight of the birding was an adult Great Horned Owl with a fluffy youngster within 75m during a survey. Great Horned Owl is considerably less common than Barred Owl in this region.

This is the last of the panoramic shots I took of the area during the day. I was hoping that the widescreen view might help in providing a sense of scale and depth of the habitat. Vegetation in the area is quite stunted, reflective of shallow till and extensive rock outcrops. This park “ecozone” is a stark contrast to the mature woodland featured earlier, with its abundant Cerulean Warblers and towering century old ash, maple and oaks. Just a few kilometres away, Wilson’s Snipe, Eastern Towhee, Field Sparrows and Common Nighthawks, among others, inhabit vast expanses of moss and lichen covered rock with ripening blueberry shrub and stunted pines. These contrasts are a defining feature of the Frontenac Arch, an undulated, ever-changing landscape of immense diversity.