Way back in 2011 when I was a beginning birder, I visited Point Pelee National Park for the first time. I wrote a trip report for the group I’d joined. They didn’t end up publishing it, and though I was free to do, I didn’t manage to get around to it — or if I did, it was an afterthought that went away while merging my old website to this one here in 2016. However, I did keep the Point Pelee Pictorial post from my trip there in 2013, and I recently revisited it.

In the intervening years, it’s only had 14 views, some of them surely my own. It also was of a lower quality than I’d like to have thought worth sharing, even given the evolution of expectations and image technology since then. So I just gave it a solid update—because a trip report is practically irrelevant of when it actually happens; what you see is timely for the place and the season.

Every year, migrating birds come in to Point Pelee between April and June, and depart through there again in September. The difference in the place visited is whether people build (or close) a trail, renovate a park building, how much the trees grow, how the vegetation and water ecology shifts, how the roads degrade with disuse and frost heaves and plant life that break them up. Like this, which is not a picture of a river, but of a former road, perhaps from before it became a National Park:

Upshot: I compiled my 2011 trip report into the 2013 blog post, and added the 2013 Big Day birding list (new information to the blog!), so it should actually be an interesting read for you now. So please, check out my Point Pelee Pictorial blog post — and make your own plans to go there for either this September’s fall migration, or next May’s spring arrival.