Birds of South Porcupine and Timmins: 2025

Friday, May 2, 2025

Spring 2025 in the Timmins / South Porcupine area!

I am not great at updating this page...but here we go. After a winter that started like an ordinary winter but ended under a immense pile of snow (3 major snow storms in March!) we are now into May migration already.

2025 Spring Migration in the Timmins Area

With the wild end of March / early April weather, both here and in the southern parts of the province, most of our usual 'first migrants', like waterfowl, birds of prey, and blackbirds, were delayed by 7-10 days. However, we had 3 short stretches of good flight winds that brought a few waves of migrating birds, on April 11 to 13, on April 23 to 25, and on April 30 to May 1st.

For the 9th year now, we are again compiling arrival dates in a 100km circle around Timmins. (See Spring Arrival Dates Page. )

Some spring highlights so far:

Trumpeter Swans are now one of the very first birds to arrive in the Timmins area in spring. They arrive as soon as a little patch of open water appears. This year, waterways didn't open up as early as last year; the first Trumpeter Swans arrived in our area on 13 March 2025 (Last year's first was on 4 March 2024).

Trumpeter Swan, now one of the first migrating birds to arrive in our area.
Porcupine, Ontario (10 April 2025)

Dark-eyed Juncos: our area hosted an impressive number of migrating Dark-eyed Juncos in mid April. It was the ideal time to scan each bird carefully. We were fortunate to see our first Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon) in our yard in South Porcupine! And... there was another one found in Moonbeam at the same time.

Our first Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon)
South Porcupine (15 April 2025)

Migrating gulls on ice (Apr-May 2025)

I'm always looking forward to late April/early May; it's the ideal time to admire various migrating gulls in the Timmins area when ice conditions are good. Watching gulls gather on ice is one of my favourite things about spring! It is the best show on ice (especially when your hockey team gets eliminated from the playoffs on May 1st) Gulls first started arriving in low numbers during the first 2 weeks of April, and the numbers were still lower than usual by May 1st. Some lakes still have ice today (May 2nd), so I'm still hopeful that more migrating gulls will arrive in the next few days.