NeilyWorld      Birding Ottawa - Winter Birding

Many birders try to make the best of our long, COLD winters here in Ottawa by keeping a "Winter List". Birders have arbitrarily set the temporal bounds of "their" winter to include the three months of December, January and February; this despite the thousands of years old convention of reckoning the seasons. A winter list of 90 or more in the Ottawa checklist circle is excellent, but the goal serious listers usually gun for is the 100 species mark. The Cumulative Ottawa Winter List stood at 186 prior to the winter of 2010-11. Species new to the cumulative list are shown in red.

One serious drawback to winter birding, especially in a place like Ottawa, where winter keeps getting worse through the entire three month period, is that the law of deminishing returns eventually sets in. The first weeks of December are the most critical for building a large winter list. Lingering birds, not yet cold enough or lacking in food supplies, make up a large portion of the variety in a "winter" list. This is the major argument for sticking to the old seasonal "winter", most of those birds have departed by the time winter really begins on the 21st or 22nd of December. By mid-January (if not by mid-December), Ottawa birders can predict their final winter species count fairly accurately. It can make February birding somewhat less interesting (but then, you could work on your February list!).

Despite this, interest in winter listing has grown in leaps and bounds here in Canada. Most provinces now keep winter lists. See Blake Maybank's Winter Listing Web Pages for links to these and several reional lists. These lists help generate interest in an otherwise quiet season, birdwise. And they provide listers with a list of possibilities for their next outing. These may be either birds seen that they need for their winter list or birds that should have been seen but haven't yet been reported. Thus the Birding Ottawa Ottawa Winter List page. It will require your input. If you see any species not listed as seen this winter, please let me know so that they can be included. If the species is not easily found in the area, the location of the sighting or sightings may be given. If the location has its own page, you can access more details and directions by clicking its link.