Amazing Birds in the Greater Montreal area

Wanna see pictures and videos of some of the most amazing birds I've encountered in the neighborhood?

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Let's start with a turkey vulture, so to get out of the way the fact that the photo wasn't actually taken by me but by my father living in Rigaud, which is a small municipality about 30 minutes by car south west from the Montreal island. My dad not being a photography buff, I think he still managed to capture a pretty good look at this rare bird for our relatively up north conditions. Doesn't it remind you of the vulture in Lucky Luke?

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Another picture taken at my parent's house, another turkey. Unlike the solitary turkey vulture above which I unfortunately never saw with my own eyes, this specimen and its other wild turkeys friends I have seen there hanging out in packs. I heard these birds had been man made implanted in my town of birth to prop up the species. Might have been for hunting reasons. One thing is for sure, I never encountered one for the first 25 years of my life I was living there.

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The last pic taken by one of my relatives, this time by mother in Pointe-Claire, is a rendering of the most gracious bird around here in my opinion. I remember back in the elementary school days when we got to meet one of those peregrine falcon with its trainer in person and just how much this bird of prey's beauty made a long lasting impression on my young self.

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This image is a pure product of mine. I was with my folks at the Parc de la Rivière-des-Mille-Îles in Laval when I saw one heck of a big giant bird, like I had never seen before in my life, flying above our heads. I had no idea at the time but I later found what it was and realized that I just had the chance to get as close as I would ever probably be in my backyard, so to speak, with this living american symbol. Probably the worst birdy picture of them all but still, even from that far, you can recognize the black body, white head and big yellow beak of a bald eagle.

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This one is very, I mean very, common around here, easy to approach and photograph, but always worth the detour for the typical bird lover when he finds one along its path and decides to take some time to interact with it. And if you are a bit lucky, you might come across an entire family of Canada goose and even be able to feed the adults and their small ones.

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The black-crowned night heron I can observe fishing simply by walking down five minutes from where I live near the Rivière des Prairies. Watching it hunting is spectacular, let me share a still of one holding a yellow perch in its mouth.

I was so impress with this little guy's battle with its meal that I decided to start filming.

Another one on another day, patiently waiting for its prey.

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Maybe you already saw one... or heard one and didn't know where it was. Either way, this bird knows how to distinguish itself from the crown with its rapid neck movement and the sound coming from its forage on trees. Not to be confused with its cousin Woody Woodpecker, an acorn woodpecker, the hairy woodpecker who also as red hair, can be differenciated with the small white dots on its black wings.

Not having been able to catch the sound with my camera, I nonetheless caught a sequence of pecking in action.

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Amazing the crow? Well, I sure ain't the only one fascinated by the corvus genus as in medieval times people believed that this bird had all kind of magical attributes, from predicting the future to living abnormally long lives. Today, what comes up as factual and an amazement is that some crow species have been found to have the ability to use tool for construction purposes.

I'll end this by saying that the raven is my Native American Animal Symbol.

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