18 September 2013. Cabot Head ON. My diary notes for today start, “Another golden day just like yesterday. Sunny, light winds, mares’ tails clouds and not hot – and not cool.” As birds go, it too was neither hot nor cool. Screaming troops of Blue Jays sallied back and forth making keeping a count quite tricky; it’s funny to watch them when sometimes they fall out of the sky in tumbling unison to the tree-tops then flit around screeching at each other.
The slow laugh of a Pileated Woodpecker made us search the trees until finally it flapped away mechanically to somewhere across the waters looking for better things .
Late in the day as we were returning from an interesting hike that included finding a nervous looking Masassauga Rattlesnake, and driving along the shore road I noticed a group of about ten Red-breasted Mergansers engaged in a most curious feeding behaviour. They were close to the shore in crystal clear water no more than two or three feet deep. They could obviously see something tasty and digestible for without any apparent warning they took off scampering across the water surface and then shallow-diving to skim just below the surface creating a small bow-wave and chasing whatever it was, sometimes up to the very edge of the beach, it was almost as if they were surfing upside-down. It must have been worthwhile for them because a couple of Ring-billed Gulls stayed close enough to harass them for an occaisional snatched free meal.
I watched the mergansers from my car for a few minutes, and then realizing how important it would be to record this scene I readied my camera for a video of this unusual activity. I was sure it would be a ground-breaking recording of hitherto unreported bird behaviour. And with that they promptly stopped the chase as if they were embarrassed to have been caught in the act of something unseemly. So all we’re left with is this, my brief account, my memory and for what it’s worth the knowledge that they were my Birds of the Day.