As kids, our Dad would take our family of six down to Point Pelee National Park on his birthday – May 9th – for a chance to get to experience the magic of spring bird migration. These trips became a foundational experience for my brother, Mike, and myself to experience the natural world and also getting a chance to meet other like-minded individuals interested in our natural heritage. Fast forward to today, and we have both pursued ecology and ornithological jobs in our careers.
One thing that’s been constant across the past 2-3 decades, is the birding community and people’s willingness to share information (like when we were kids at Point Pelee and random strangers told us about a Summer Tanager eating bees across the road from where we were), and encourage others in understanding different aspects of birding, whether it’s what binoculars to buy or what bird seed to use at your household feeder set-up.
When the opportunity presented itself to write Best Places to Bird in Ontario, there wasn’t really much debate about if we would write the book – we had always wanted to give back to the birding community and share any little tidbits we could with other birders, whether it’s the ten-year old kid starting to learn about birds on their walk to school, or the recent retiree with some spare time on their hands trying to transition out of their working career.
Best Places to Bird in Ontario provides the reader with an opportunity to learn about some of the best places in the province to go birding, while providing specific directions to sought after species, tips on how to bird a location, times of the year to go there, detailed maps of a location, and much more.
In order to come up with a list of the 30 best places to bird in Ontario, we each generated a list of our favourite birding destinations across the province and then cross-referencing our lists and then going from there. We also ended up soliciting some of our birder friends, but we knew that we wouldn’t be able to satisfy everyone – being from a bird ‘friendly’ province in Ontario, we’re lucky to have too many great places to go birding, rather than very few.
People often ask if we were to write another edition of the book, what other places would we include and the answer is always different, but one place that doesn’t get enough credit is Manitoulin Island.
We hope you enjoy our book and most importantly get out to new places and go birding!
By Ken Burrell
