Carden Plain - Important Bird Area

Saturday, 7 July, 2012

The Important Bird Area Program is an international conservation initiative coordinated by BirdLife International. The Canadian co-partners for the IBA Program are Bird Studies Canada and Nature Canada. There are over 350 IBA’s in Ontario, one of which is the Carden Plain.

The IBA website tells us that Important Bird Areas are discrete sites that support specific groups of birds: threatened birds, large groups of birds, and birds restricted by range or by habitat. The breeding Loggerhead Shrike is the primary reason for this IBA designation. As a naturalist, I travel often to the Carden Plain hoping to see a Loggerhead Shrike. As a photographer, I long to have a decent image of one.

The Carden Plain is famous for its rare alvar habitat which hosts a variety of grassland species of birds. There are other habitats that have an impressive number of other breeding birds, some of which I would like to share with you in this post.

Golden-winged Warbler - Carden Plain - Little Bluestem trail

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One of my great friends and fellow photographer, Scott Martin is a strong advocate of using Photoshop as his post-processing software while I use a program from Apple called Aperture. You often hear the term that an image was ‘photo-shopped” which implies heavy manipulation. While Scott and I differ on the programs we use to post-process our images, we do agree that minimal edits are best. Sometimes we will remove a twig or other insignificant portion of an image which will create a more pleasing image. In the above image of the Blackburnian Warbler, the removal of the distracting twig on the left side of the frame could be removed without any detriment to the overall image.

My program cannot easily remove an item such as the twig and since Scott is suggesting that I move to Photoshop I challenged him to edit an image I had of a Canada Warbler. It was a technically great shot except for the twig that was just touching the Warblers throat. As you can see below, Scott’s edit is excellent and I have to admit I am well on my way to start using Photoshop as part of my workflow in the next few months. Thanks Scott!

Scott was very fortunate this year to have photographed a family of Loons in Algonquin a few weeks ago and has created some marvelous images which you can see in his blog by clicking here.

Wilson’s Snipe

Savannah Sparrows

Red-eyed Vireo- Lake Hope State Park

White-eyed Vireo- Lake Hope State Park

Ring-necked Pheasant

Black-throated Blue Warbler

Blue-winged Warbler - Lake Hope State Park

Ovenbird

Black-throated Green Warbler - St. Joseph Island, ON

Canada Warbler

Blackburnian Warbler

For my next post, you will see my Loon images for this year. Any comments can be sent to my email arni@pixelz.ca