10 October 2013. Burlington ON. There is a valley not far from home where families take their children, grandparents and visitors for a breath of nature. It’s a well-worn area with many environmental issues but really wonderful despite them. The terrain is varied, there’s a long easy boardwalk along the wide valley-bottom, a meandering river and oak forested flanks. Best of all the bird life is usually diverse and, for the families, tame enough that they’ll feed from your hand.
We have been hosting two visitors from Apeldoorn, Holland as part of this city’s cultural twinning arrangements. You would not by any stretch of the imagination describe our guests as birders, but they certainly appreciated the ‘nature’ around here, the ready access to plenty of open and more or less unspoiled spaces. I took them down to the valley where I knew I could turn them into birders if only for an hour or two. And sure enough, once I put birdseed in their hands and showed them how to make the offering, the Black-capped Chickadees and White-breasted Nuthatches moved in.
It’s interesting to compare the Dutch to English names of birds. Many of our birds are familiar to them, chickadees and nuthatches included. Nuthatches have quite an eponymous name in Dutch – Boomklever; roughly translated as Tree-chopper I’m told.
While today’s bird selection was hardly sensational: Mallards, Great Blue Heron, Red-bellied and Downy Woodpecker, the best of the walk were those tame enough to steal the hearts of our visitors the Black-capped Chickadees and White-breasted Nuthatches.