Chris Rees | Article and Photos

There are many articles about colourful exotic birds in faraway places . This is not one of those articles .

Centennial Park is the main baseball field park in Sherwood Park . From a satellite view , the park seems to be all baseball diamonds , but surprisingly , the park has a wide variety of microhabitats . There are two re-engineered natural ponds with marshy edges , a willow-lined marshy area , one artificial pond , a mature poplar wood with thick undergrowth , two strips of grassland , several stands of planted spruce trees , a small patch of larch trees , several rows of planted willows , open lawns , and paved or gravel trails .

I started walking the dog on the paved trails at Centennial Park when my son was at hockey or soccer practices in the adjacent Millennium Place . Several times we encountered a great horned owl as the trail entered the poplar woods . Several years later , I again walked my dog at this park because the trails were cleared of snow and ice during the winter . Flocks of Bohemian waxwings caught my attention . I have always been an enthusiastic bird watcher , but only as a youth did I journal my observations .

This changed after I retired . I started entering my

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Great horned owl is a year round resident

Common redpoll — winter visitor

Cooper ’ s hawk — summer resident

Horned grebe — summer resident

observations in eBird , a collaborative effort with hundreds of partner organizations , thousands of regional experts , and hundreds of thousands of users , managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology . eBird began with a simple idea : every birdwatcher has unique knowledge and experience . eBird ’ s goal is to gather checklists of birds , archive this information , and freely share it to power new datadriven approaches to science , conservation , and education . eBird manages lists , photos , and audio recordings , allowing real-time maps of species distribution and alerts to let birders know when species have been seen . This provides the most current and useful information to the birding community . One feature of eBird is the ability of local users to create local “ hotspots .” Hotspots let multiple birders enter data into the same shared location , creating aggregated results available through eBird ’ s “ Explore ” tools .