Rare bird sighting at Guelph Lake brings buzz to area's birding community

A Sunday stroll turned into plenty of commotion for bird enthusiasts at Guelph Lake.

A vermilion flycatcher was spotted at the conservation area, the first-ever recorded sighting of the feathered friend in Wellington County.

Robert Linfield, a fifth-year University of Guelph student and avid birder since 2015, was the first to take a photo of it and generated the buzz.

“It was a really quiet morning there. We’re entering the late fall, latter end of migration where all the migrating birds have already passed through,” he said. “So I wasn’t really expecting much when I was going.”

After not seeing much at the main beach, he moved on to the second beach.

That is when he noticed a bird come into his line of sight, a more common species of flycatcher to Ontario.

Or so he thought.

“I noticed it looked a little different,” Linfield said. “It had more of a brightly coloured wash to its underbody, so I quickly took a picture of it.”

He posted it to a Discord channel dedicated to birders in Ontario with over 3,000 members.

Someone immediately confirmed Linfield’s suspicions. It was a vermilion flycatcher.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY – who runs the eBird platform birders use to confirm bird sightings – this bird is found in all seasons of the year in open country in the American southwest.

“They are especially reliant on stream corridors within the scrub ecosystem, in areas where willow, sycamore, cottonwood, mesquite, and other bottomland trees grow,” Cornell said on its website. “South of the U.S. they occur in similar open, shrubby country in tropical lowlands and to as high as 10,000 feet elevation.”

After passing along word of his find on Ontario Bird Alert – a website that records bird finds, locations and more – many flocked to the area to catch a glimpse.

“Within the hour, there were about 25 people there,” he said. “Slowly, more were filtering in. I think when I left, there was about 50 people near the bird, and then as I was leaving, walking back, probably saw 10 or 15 more. Just an incredible experience to find one of these.”

He said the bird has been seen in Ontario before.

The eBird site has multiple recordings of the bird showing up in Chatham-Kent in 2015, and as far north as the Algoma district in 2020.

“The main difference with this one was that it was a bit more chasable than a lot of the other ones because sometimes, one person just sees it, it flies away and it's gone,” Linfield said, adding he was able to keep eyes on it and provide updates until someone else showed up 20 to 30 minutes later.

After sending in photos and his checklist of other bird species that day, he got an email from a regional reviewer, confirming he was the first to find this bird in the region.

It isn’t his first time locking eyes on a bird in uncharted territory.

He was at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory last year when a scissor-tail flycatcher made its first appearance in the area.

While the 22-year-old management major has schooling to concentrate on, he doesn’t expect to stop birding any time soon.

“I think it’s my calling moving forward, and look for these types of birds at least,” Linfield said.

The work is important to him, but more importantly, the pastime allows him to be a part of the birding community that has been welcoming to him.

“When rare birds like these show up, it’s really important that we have community standards where usually the person who finds it tries to stay with the bird, at least until someone else is able to go and also stick with it for other people,” he said.

“There was a couple young people who were there too, and it means a lot to me that they get to see it as well, cause some of them, their parents are driving them there and stuff and they’re really excited to see the birds.”