Watch out(side)! 22-year-old Hamiltonian sets his sights on Ontario birdwatching record

Thrushes and warblers, and kestrels and wigeons, buntings and juncos, and sparrows and ... pigeons? ... dowitchers, owl hawks and cedar waxwings, these are few of his favourite seen"s.

It's spring and, as they used to say, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of ... birds.

Not in the British sense of girls" - Ezra Campanelli already has one of those, and he just wants one. But birds, real birds - you know, famous for their wings, plumage, distinctive songs, windshield-soiling skyfalls" - these Ezra can't get enough of, but 348 or 349 would do the trick, each of a different species.

Despite what poet Emily Dickinson once wrote of hope," birds are really the thing with feathers." Ezra is the thing with hope."

Hope, because it's spring, and not just spring, but spring of his Big Year, the Big Year during which he hopes to break the Ontario record for species observed and/or heard.

For bird watchers, a world Ezra has immersed himself in since childhood, a Big Year is special. A Big Year, according to definition, is a personal challenge or an informal competition among birders who attempt to identify as many species as possible by sight or sound, within a single calendar year and within a specific geographic area."

She's very understanding," the 22-year-old Hamiltonian says, with a sweet, sheepish smile, of his aforementioned girlfriend and her patience as he darts all over the province. It helps that she loves birding too but at a moment's notice Ezra will follow an instinct or a post of a sighting of a species, especially a rare one, that he hasn't yet come across, and off he goes.

He's been to Rainy River, in the far west. And, he tells me, In February we (he and several friends) were up in the Hudson Bay Lowlands (Fraserdale, Moosonee, Fort Albany, Attawapiskat), the most northern part of Ontario, and we camped by the winter ice-road.

We were in double sleeping bags and our bodies were warm but you need that hole to breathe through and my nostrils froze solid."

The worst part was the trip produced no sightings until right near the end when someone told him of a hidden road and there they encountered a willow ptarmigan and Arctic terns. That made it all worthwhile.

So far he has racked up 216 species. The record, set in 2017 and held by Jeremy Bensette, is 347. Last year Geoff Carpentier came close with 343.

Just in the last days Ezra has logged an upland sandpiper, lark bunting, American avocet, Hudson Godwit, blue-grey gnatcatcher and common gallinule.

You'd think Ezra has a good crack at things with 200 plus so far, and being only a third of the way through the year. But the thing is, spring is crucial. So over the next several weeks he's putting on a push.

Spring is when they're on the go. On a good spring day you might get neotropical migrants showing up en masse - vireos, warblers. After the spring (once migration peters out), it's diminishing returns," he tells me on a bright April morning, as we stand by the harbour shore at Bayfront Park. In the water, not far off, a couple of American coots and several white-bellied scaups bob and forage, sunlight shimmering on the ripples.

Ezra sports a sleek pair of green binoculars, Vortex Razor Ultra HDs. The company gave it to him, as a kind of sponsorship. He has a popular birdwatching blog and website - Banter With Bird Boy (banterwithbirdboy.wixsite.com). He also uses a Japanese Kowa spotting scope and a good camera.

Verification for birdwatching records is a complicated affair. It's best to have photos and even sound recordings but testimonials from other reputable bird-watchers will count, as sometimes it's impossible to get a shot or a recording, as contact can be very fleeting.

Ezra says that much of the spring he will spend around Niagara Falls, Point Pelee and Long Point, noted hot spots" for migratory birds but, he adds, Hamilton is also a great bird watching locale, especially for seabirds and ducks.

(There are 10,000 bird species, Ezra says, ranging in size from the bumblebee hummingbird to the ostrich.)

This is where he lives and where he and his older brother Giovanni were introduced to bird watching by their very outdoorsy parents Lorenzo and Ann Campanelli. Outdoorsy? Lorenzo for years would bicycle from Hamilton to Oakville twice a day to his job at the high school there - all year round.

Ezra not only watches birds but he has taken part in banding programs and worked as an environmental consultant and, through his website, he is raising money for the Haldimand Bird Observatory.

He and Kiah Jasper have been invited to lead part of the Huron Fringe Birding Festival in May.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist. jmahoney@thespec.com