Friday, June 17, 2016: Prince Edward Island, Canada

 Sunday, June 19th: Happy Father's Day - we are heading out of Canada today down into Maine and will bird the area around Bangor, ME on Monday.  Our plan is to meander southward west of the coastline that we traversed heading into Canada, planning to end up at sister Marti's home in Winston-Salem, NC around June 26th or 27th depending on what all we see along the way.  Since we had good photographic days on both June 17th and 18th, we will try to send two posts a day (when we have internet coverage) until we get caught up.  We will also probably be publishing a couple of posts that are all videos as we made about 15 videos of things in Canada but none of them transferred from our I Phone to our computer so we weren't able to send them along as they happened. Hope you enjoy them.

Today (Friday, June 17th) was a beautiful spring day on PEI.  We actually had sunshine and blue skies all morning and into the afternoon until about 2 pm.  Temperature started out at 46 degrees and never reached higher that 52 but the ever-present 25-30 mph winds made us feel like we were back in the Falkland Islands where the winds are constant at that level or higher.

Two more stories on today's hike made it an interesting one.

Today's hike

Male Yellow Warbler

As I've mentioned before, these birds are so striking that I photograph them at every opportunity. 

Almost all of this species that we've seen have been males until today when we watched a pair interacting and bathing.

 The handsome male with the red streaks on his breast and belly would come down to the puddle to bathe

While the female was in a bush about 10 feet away alert for predators

Females don't have the red streaks on their front

Then the female would come down to bathe and the male would take over watching for predators

And bathe she did!

Territorial Imperative!
Black-throated Green Warbler

Another male Black-throated Green with a definite attitude.

The first male was singing his "aggressive" song over and over and over

The 2nd one was also repeatedly singing his "aggressive" song and they were in the same small tree.

Finally the songs turned into action and the two males went after each other in a knock-down drag-out tussle, several times actually.  And both were still singing their "aggressive" songs at each other when we finally left them some 20 minutes later.

Gadwalls 

This pair of ducks (male on the right) was the only duck species we saw today.