Month: October 2013

17 October 2013.  Hamilton ON. With an hour or so to fill before a rather formal ‘Through you Mister Chairman’ meeting I wandered slowly through the quiet marble and yew avenues at our local graveyard.  It’s a good place for birds, quite apart from being as quiet as a graveyard should be, its on a migratory fly-way, there’s plenty of tree cover and some commanding look-out pinnacles.  A large tiered headstone makes a good place to get comfortable and wait quietly.  It was an afternoon of little birds, mostly Golden-crowned Kinglets, Black-capped Chickadees, White-breated Nuthatches and Brown Creepers. Brown Creepers always seem to take me by surprise, not in a startled way, more of an’ Oh that’s neat’ surprise.  Just when you think you know what’s around suddenly this little brown mouse of a bird drops to the base of a tree in front of you and starts its rapid climb up the trunk picking and prying for insect food.  They move quickly, rarely showing long enough or moving straight enough for me to get a good photograph, however either this one was obliging or I’m getting better at ambush photography.

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14 October 2013. Cayuga ON. The Yellow-rumped, formerly Myrtle, Warbler is a hardy soul.  Unlike its delicate, early to leave, tropical class-mates, (the Blackburnian Warbler comes to mind) the Yellow-rumped doesn’t need to go so very far south; they can live, subsist anyway, on the berries of winter. A precious few even hang around here well into the winter and with occasional sightings in March, it’s probable that they make it out the other side.  But most of them leave, turning off the lights as they go.

I spent most of the morning at the bird observatory.  The property was also the site of a classic car show and by 11.30 I gave up, the combination of the Beachboys at full volume and BBQ starter fluid was more than I needed.  But I completed the daily census and with the help of a young birder with eyes and ears one-fifth the age of mine, we turned up 27 species – a good haul.

Red-winged Blackbirds predominated with well over 150 counted, plenty of Cedar Waxwings too – about 60, White-throated Sparrows (11) and Yellow–rumped Warblers (45 – although really we lost count), all signs of the progress of fall.

This Yellow-rumped Warbler (Bird of the Day) was one of many flitting and dodging around us.  Most of them were impossible to follow but this pretty little thing decided to sit long enough for a photo-shoot. It’s probably a female hatched this year so there’s little you can point to as a clear field mark, it’s perhaps a good example of how unremarkable Yellow-rumps can appear.  For me it’s a combination of one or more clues: The time of year: their liquid contact note – ‘plip’; the sometimes streaky breast with yellow patches towards the shoulders or; the rather bulky size.  All help, but always diagnostic (provided it’s visible) is the yellow rump.

The following four shots of a male in spring show the classic Yellow-rumped field marks well.  Apart from the splashes of yellow, the back and wings are a much more intense grey/black.

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13 October 2013.  Valley Inn, Hamilton ON.  A week or so ago I wrote about the Black-crowned Night Heron, an interesting encounter.  Today I went back to that same location because it can be so fruitful with all kinds of oddities, most of them drawn by the shallow waters and deep silt.

My mental list for the couple of hours spent there include: two singing Carolina Wrens, three Green-winged Teal, large flocks of Cedar Waxwings, a fast-moving cover-seeking Winter Wren and a small group of young Hooded Mergansers.

I watched a similar group of young Hooded Mergansers at this time last year.  Then, as now, they employed a curious way of fishing in shallow waters by sinking almost imperceptibly rather than diving.  Whether this is a seasonal technique I don’t know, neither of my best reference books make mention of it.

Herons stole the show today.  First a young Green Heron stalking up and down a waterside branch, its long toes placed slowly and deliberately as it moved towards a possible catch.  I saw it dart at and catch a small fish only once, but it had endless patience, sometimes holding motionless for 10 or 20 minutes waiting for something it thought was worth going after.

A Great Egret flew in, pushed the Green Heron aside and perched conveniently a few feet from me.  The brilliant white of these birds make them very difficult photography targets, the detail of the various tracts of feathers usually vanishes in a glare of over-exposure.  This close I felt I might do better and enjoyed some success.

A young Great Blue Heron paced slowly around the edges of the pond, stepping with almost delicate precision and eventually capturing several meals.  My best photo is almost grotesque, capturing head-on a portrait of a bird perfectly adapted for its waters-edge life.

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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. 

Today’s Bird of the Day, an adult Black-crowned Night Heron, was perched on a branch not 50 feet from me,  I think it was waiting for me to leave.  It was mid-day, well past bed-time for a nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, hunter of frogs, small fish and the like.  Night herons can be hard to find during the day, but if you check carefully in the inner branches of pond-side trees you’ll sometimes spot them hunkered down at rest and anywhere up to about 50 feet above water level.

I was standing on the edge of a wide and shallow pond not far from a large well-leaved willow tree, just the sort of place a night herons would choose for a nap, when it flew low over the water towards me from the other side of the pond.  I think someone or something had flushed it from a secure perch forcing it over to ‘my’ willow, which it really saw as ‘its’ willow if only I’d move out of the way. So it alighted on a branch not far from me and after a short while moved in a little closer; all the better for getting loads of photos.

Two days ago I’d stopped at this little corner of the pond and found a Green Heron barely six inches above the water, motionless on a branch and holding a pose as if ready to strike and spear should a witless fish drift by.  I was amazed at the heron’s apparent indifference to the presence of an intent group of bird photographers that had clustered around it. I didn’t have my camera so missed some priceless pictures, oh well, there’s more to birding than photography – to me anyway.

Leaving the Black-crowned Night Heron I made my way back to my car and noticed a couple of Ruddy Ducks sifting through gloopy pond-sludge.  This particular pond is not too bad as ponds near large cities go, but what those ducks can possibly sift out of the sludge that’s edible is beyond me, and then to think that people like to shoot and eat the ducks afterwards leaves me quite baffled. 

Lots of pictures here, click on any to enlarge  it.