CHURCHILL & SOUTHERN MANITOBAA perennial favorite among Field Guides travelers; varied birding through prairie, forest, and tundra; always something exciting to see at Churchill, including Ross' Gull.
$3575 (2008 fee; does not include internal air). 13 days See our triplist for 2008 or 2007 or 2006 See a slideshow of photos from this tour.
Our tour begins in southern Manitoba, an overlap zone for eastern and western birds. Five species of grebes breed here, as well as seventeen species of sparrows. We’ll bird short-grass and tall-grass prairies, wet meadows, marshes, potholes, and mixed forest. After five days devoted mostly to the southwestern prairies and to Riding Mountain National Park, we’ll fly to Thompson for a day of birding in the heart of the boreal forest before boarding the Great Northern Railway, bound for spring at Churchill. Our tours typically tally more than 220 species of birds, including Red-necked Grebe, Willow Ptarmigan, Spruce and Sharp-tailed grouse, Yellow Rail (difficult), Great Gray Owl, Northern Hawk Owl, Black-backed and Three-toed woodpeckers, Boreal Chickadee, Gray Jay, Sprague’s Pipit, Bohemian Waxwing, Connecticut Warbler, Smith’s, Lapland, and Chestnut-collared longspurs, and Baird’s, LeConte’s, and Nelson’s Sharp-tailed sparrows. We also record more than twenty species of breeding warblers and an impressive variety of North Country mammals, possibly including Moose, Black Bear, Beaver, and Lynx.
Contact our office by e-mail in Austin, Texas at fieldguides@fieldguides.com.
Field Guides Incorporated, 9433 Bee Cave Road, Building 1, Suite 150, Austin, TX 78733 Copyright © 2007 Field Guides Incorporated Field Guides is a registered trademark of Field Guides Incorporated. cat07 |
Hudsonian Godwits in breeding plumage flying in noisy display above the tundra and Pacific Loons calling and courting on partially iced ponds; the haunting songs of Harris’ Sparrows nesting at treeline and a Lesser Yellowlegs in rollicking, grosbeak-like song, emerging from its pendulum flight to rest atop a tall spruce; pods of white Belugas spouting among creaking ice floes and long strings of mooing eiders mixed with Long-tailed Ducks at the edge of the shimmering pack ice...such are the June phenomena that have long drawn naturalists to Churchill, prairie seaport on the shores of Hudson Bay. And since the summer of 1980, when Ross’ Gulls began nesting at Churchill, birders have had even greater reason to go.