Rusty Snaketail mass emergence, Grand River, Brantford, 21 May 2022

[Bill Lamond]

Hello,

As Stephanie Allen noted in an earlier post, Rusty Snaketails were emerging today. I noted this emergence today (21 May), en masse from the Grand River in Brantford, and I can state this without having been near the river. I noted several teneral individuals in my backyard and the small adjacent Carolina Park as I was gardening. I snapped a cellphone picture of the first individual encountered. I'm not sure of the exact count but I walked the backyard and the park a few times in the afternoon and each time I would record around 10 individuals with most of these flushed individuals leaving the yard/park. My yard is 1.1 km away from the Grand River so one can imagine the large numbers emerging to get this many, this far from the river.

It was interesting to watch the Common Grackles and European Starlings chasing down and catching the snaketails and then fly off to feed their young. Even a Cardinal was in on the action. There were also two teneral Common Whitetails in the park today.

Earlier in the day at the Oakland Swamp in southern Brant, I noted a Harlequin Darner "doing rounds" on a woodland swamp trail, one of the more southern locations in the province for this species.

Bill