Veery

9 June 2013.  Flamborough ON.  This was the day of the Dawn Chorus bird outing.  Dawn arrived okay and so did the birds, but very few people seemed to want to haul themselves out of bed for a 05.20 start; so our numbers were thin. Still it turned out to be a blockbuster morning, not just for birds but also for turtles, snakes, ferns and orchids.

We enjoyed the songs of grassland birds from the scenic top of a drumlin (an abrupt teardrop-shaped hill left as a pile of glacial till by the receding ice sheet). It was a bit early and even the birds seemed to find it hard going, but there were a few Bobolinks in the air, singing and fluttering over their hayfield nest sites. A distant Brown Thrasher was singing from atop a skeletal old elm tree. We wandered down the trail dabbing insect repellant as we entered the boggy realm of singing Canada Warblers, Northern Waterthrushes and Great-crested Flycatchers.  I tallied about 30 species before we moved a couple of kilometers  to see what we could find along the roadside between a swampy creek and some powerlines that cut across the road.  This kept us busy for a long time and was really productive, there were Alder Flycatchers calling a brisk yet buzzy “Free– bee o”, White-throated Sparrows singing far off and a Warbling Vireo getting started on a non-stop day-long rendition of its dreamy, rambling song: “ If I sees ya I will seize an I’ll squeeze ya till ya hurt.”

Bird of the Day was a Veery seen singing from the heights of a dead maple.  Veerys aren’t often seen, they’re delicate, subtle and elegant but there’s not much in the way of visual fireworks about them, it’s mostly about their song, they seem to prefer the depths of a forest to sing their “Veer-veer-veer-vv tktktkt” song.  It starts emphatically and quickly fades and tapers as if, really, it’s a secret.  It has a rolling cadence that makes you think it might be trickling down a long, cast-iron drainpipe; it’s obviously hard to describe.  I used the adjective ethereal, one that every writer seems to fall back on; nothing else quite captures the breathless will-o-the-wisp essence of this song – a song that can stop me dead in my tracks.

Dawn chorus was now well under way, everything from Swamp Sparrows to Great-crested Flycatchers, Blue Jays to American Redstarts was in full song.  We watched a large lugubrious Snapping Turtle laying eggs in the roadside gravel and admired Yellow Ladyslipper Orchids almost lost in the coarse sedges beside a small watercourse.

At our last stop, an elevated boardwalk across a large cattail swamp, we came across an entangled, copulating pair of Northern Water Snakes.  There was a marked size difference, the female (presumably since they are known to be wider and longer) was stout, with a diameter of perhaps three or four centimeters and as much as a meter or so in length, although of course this is only a rough guess as pictures will attest.  The male was half her girth and apparently somewhat shorter. All things being equal, following a gestation period of about three months, the female will bear live young, all of which will immediately be self reliant; she’s had enough of them by then.  This is not a snake to mess with, water snakes are not venomous, but they have a fearsome reputation for putting up a vigorous biting fight and we kept our distance mostly out of respect for their task at hand.