Etobicoke - Sun Life Centre

FLEDGE WATCH - BLOOR/ISLINGTON, ETOBICOKE - Thurs, May 30

A very odd start to fledge watch this year.  It was the first day of watching for Rob, Bruce and myself.  Yesterday I checked the camera and saw 3 juvies on the nest ledge.  Since they all looked big, I thought maybe our only boy, FREDDIE (blue tape) was either under the camera or he fledged first.

But today we confirmed they had all left the nest!

Rob started the morning observing 2 on the camera, and when he got there, he reported just one juvenile on the nest ledge. He did his routine walkabout and when he came back he saw a juvenile on the condo.

I got there about an hour and a half after Rob left and thought I would do a drive around the area to the parking lot on Lomond, which is great for a view of the north side of the buildings.  I grabbed my bins and as soon as I opened the door, I heard the alarm calls of the robins and knew one of the juvies was nearby.  I figured I’d be there for awhile, so what the heck, I bought a parking ticket for the whole day.  Sure enough, it was MIA (red tape) down low on the light pole and far too close to the fledgling robin that the adults were trying to protect.  At one point, the robins had enough and just wanted her gone, so they started to physically bump her.

Since I couldn’t leave her, I waited for Bruce to come and while he was watching her, I went around to see if FREDDIE was on the condos.  Yes, he was!  And I confirmed with my camera later his blue tape.

However, white tape and yellow tape were no where to be seen.

While FREDDIE was quite comfortable on the condos, I searched for any sign of white or yellow and eventually came back to where Bruce was.  MIA was not there and since I didn’t see Bruce either and the robins were now singing their happy songs, MIA must have flown somewhere.  Bruce found her on top of the condo on the southwest corner of Bloor and Islington!  After a short respite, MIA took off and did an amazing flight to the Starlight roof, and shortly thereafter she flew to the nest building where she just missed the roof, did the batting and made her way to the top.  She then took off, circled the building with great height and landed back on the nest roof, close to mom who was perched on the FLIPP letters. I wish I had my camera at that moment because it was adorable the way they looked at each other.  MIA flew over to FREDDIE and both hung out on the condos for a good chunk of the day.

We noticed the parents didn’t look worried, in fact, they were ee-chupping while on FLIPP letters, so we hoped that they knew where white and yellow were.

As it started to get dark, I messaged Rob that all was quiet and we were going to call it a night and then Bruce saw a juvie flying low between the nest building and condos as the parents took off and started circling.  We didn’t know if this was MIA or one of the others since we didn’t know where they came from.  We searched again (I got 13,000 steps easily today) and hoped that the parents knew where that juvie landed.

Fingers crossed that Rob will have some good news in the morning.

Cheers, Lucie