October 15 2012. Cayuga ON. Two days ago I mentioned that we’d had a hard ‘killing’ frost overnight, the next day the weather turned strangely warm only to turn colder again today with a howling, leaf-stripping, southwesterly wind. It’s all part of the change of seasons, all part of what makes the study of nature, the natural world, so interesting.
I was at the bird observatory again this morning to play my small part in gathering and gleaning information about birds. Such information is collected by bird observatories around the world, bit by bit, much of it mundane, some of it surprising and all of it aggregating as part of the huge body of information that enables us see trends, explain changes and, with luck, head off calamity. So as part of this data gathering I did my hour-and-a-bit-long census circuit to see what birds were around us today.
With the sou-wester blowing unremittingly, bending trees and sending leaves and dust spiraling, I was not very optimistic. In reality though, it’s not as though birds vanish when the weather turns ugly; they have to be somewhere, and why not right in front of us? In fact adverse weather presents challenges for birds that can result in the unexpected; it’s just up to us to expect the unexpected and to ratchet up our field skills.
The riverbanks are somewhat sheltered and I stood for quite a while at the river’s edge and was rewarded by a Belted Kingfisher (just when we thought they’d all gone south) an Osprey (also not seen for several days) and a fast moving flight of Wood Ducks that zigzagged quickly into the sheltered valley of a tributary creek. There were Yellow–rumped Warblers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets and White–throated Sparrows staying low in the willows and grapes. At an open area, which was nevertheless out of the wind, several Eastern Bluebirds and American Robins had gathered, and to my pleasure, a trio of Brown Creepers was working up and down a bare ash tree. I watched them for quite a while, which is unusual in itself because I usually only find solitary Brown Creepers and in denser woodlands where they quickly vanish around the other side of the tree trunk; like this one. 