Quebec year list 2007

Just how close can you get to a Least Bittern

Or, more accurately, how close will they get to you!

18 August 2007.

After an early morning spin around St-Lazare sand pits, with but few common shorebirds to show for it, we decided to pay L’Ile Bizzard a visit.

For those not in the know, L’Ile Bizzard is an island off the north-west of Montreal. It has a rather pretentious golf course, gothic looking posh houses with plastic owls on the roof and one of the better, and just as important, accessible parks with birds in the area.

The site has woods, lakeshore, marsh and grasslands and holds a host of scarce breeding species. Naturally all of this makes it perfect to form part of the proposed link route between the TransCanadian (highway 40) in Montreal and the north, thereby allowing those who choose to live and commute into Montreal from the towns of the north even more choice of traffic chaos than presently available. Strangely no proposal has been made for running the new road through the golf course, with a concession allowing the fee paying members to claim a free drop if they inadvertently place a drive onto the new asphalt.

Before I continue just a general comment here.

Many people in Quebec occupy three times the space they need. They have a house in or around the city, fair enough, everyone needs somewhere to live. They then buy a chunk of forest anything from 2-400 km north of Montreal for a summer cabin and then they get on their ATVs in summer and Skidoos in winter and go 3-400 km further north still for camping sauvage. Their little summer cabins need services and so up springs a town, populated by people who buy land to the north of the town to build a cabin, they then get on their seasonal vehicle and leave their, to use a modern eco phrase, ‘footprint’ further north still. I don’t blame them, it’s a great lifestyle, but it really will push the species that don’t tolerate disturbance to the limit and possibly eventual extinction, birds and animals alike. Eventually the northward push will meet the Native Americans coming the other way as greater mobility allows them to exercise their rights to slaughter wildlife as they wish just because they can.

Further south we are not blameless, oh no, even if we only own one property. Development without a plan seems to be the norm, and I don’t mean a plan designed to make a city bigger to generate more income to make the city bigger etc. I mean without a plan that is considers the ecology of the area. Where I live in the west they are knocking holes in the woods wholesale (and yes, I live in one of those holes, albeit one made 20 years ago) with no thought for the impact on every aspect of the area. Everywhere has a limit to how many people is resources will support, as we will shortly find out.

I live on a hill; I’ve always tried to live on a hill. Down the road hundreds of new houses are being built on the floodplain and are replacing the phragmites that grew there because the habitat is right i.e. wet. When, one day, high spring tides meet a deluge of the sort enjoyed by much of the rest of the World this year, verily the good people of Vaudreuil will be able to commute by canoe, enough already.

Back to the birds (thank God you cry), so, we went to L’Ile Bizzard and had a jolly fine but relatively birdless wander around culminating in views of Least Bitterns (plural) down to a few feet. They seemed to be everywhere (well six or seven birds minimum) and one, which might be a female but could be a worn male, fed unconcerned as the bikers and hikers filed past. At one point, when the camera had been briefly sheathed, it even got on the boardwalk for a stroll, before flying back to the growing young noisily calling from a nearby reedy clump.

Naturally I snapped a few and the results are below. Enjoy the photos and sorry about the rant, possibly.

PS. Any Montreal birders reading (obviously not those in their cabins, oops, there I go again) might like to know that the Chemin De L’Anse at Vaudreuil is good for shorebirds now, I had 50+ Least Sandpipers there, along with the usual commoner species last Friday.