Dot-tailed Whiteface – Page 2

After leaving Sarsaparilla Trail I drove over to the NCC parking lot on Corkstown Road and followed the bike path beneath the Queensway to the place where Chris Traynor had seen the Eastern Red Damsels earlier in the week. The spot isn’t hard to find; just keep following the path parallel to the Queensway as it passes over a small bridge and skirts the northern edge of a farmer’s field. Eventually the path reaches a small woodlot and abruptly turns south; before you get to the small stand of trees, watch for an NCC sign on the left about the crops of the Greenbelt. Chris had found the damselflies in the grass behind the sign.

When I decided to take today off it wasn’t my intention, in the beginning, to embark on an all-out “dragon blitz” and search for as many odonate species as possible (or at least as many as I could find until my stamina began to falter); the forecast for the weekend looked terrible, so I wanted to go out while the weather was nice to look for birds in the morning and odes as soon as it warmed up. However, that’s exactly what it became as I started finding some good dragonflies early in the morning and decided to keep visiting different trails where I knew I could find different species.

My morning began with a visit to Lime Kiln Trail, which isn’t a place I visit very often. However, a Mourning Warbler has been heard singing away there for a couple of days now, and I thought I would try to find it. My walk started out fairly quiet, but I saw a Veery on the ground and a Common Raven flying overhead right near the beginning of the trail, and heard a couple of Red-eyed Vireos and a Brown Creeper in the woods.