14 December 2013. Burlington ON. We don’t get a lot of snow around here, not compared to some parts of Ontario, but last night about six inches of really light and fluffy snow settled quietly upon us; apparently there’s more to come. It makes a change, and I suppose a change is as good as a rest. For birds it can make life tough, which is why so many of them head south like the sensible creatures they are.
I cleared an area in our back yard and scattered some mixed bird seed around; I know the squirrels will find it and make short work of the sunflower seeds, but the rest of it, mostly millet, will go down well with chickadees, juncos, sparrows and maybe the odd goldfinch.
It didn’t take very long for a Slate-colored Junco to spot the opportunity, although it spent a long time in our old clematis-draped pear tree assessing the risks of dropping down to ground level, the possibility of a predator: a cat or maybe a Sharp-shinned Hawk, is real. I had only cleared a narrow swath, effectively a trench, through the snow. Perhaps it didn’t care much for the limits a trench places on its ability to spot trouble. Then, once I had cleared a larger area a few more juncos arrived.
The Slate-colored Junco is one of twelve sub-species of the Dark-eyed Junco, a member of the sparrow family. To complicate things these twelve subspecies fall into five major groups: White-winged, Slate-colored, Oregon, Pink-sided and Gray-headed. Our happy little Slate-Colored Junco is the most widespread and the only one found regularly east of the Rockies. We generally consider them a winter visitor (refugee) but you don’t have to travel very far north or to higher elevations to find them during the breeding season.