Carolina Wrens

18 February 2014. RBG Hamilton, Ontario. For this tale of Birds That Have Amazed Me, I must first set the scene. I spend a goodly number of winter mornings in a greenhouse as part of a happy team preparing plants for a fund-raising plant sale in early May.  We’re all volunteers and at the end of the day we make a decent pile of money, even if our net profit probably works out to about three dollars an hour.  We’re not a particularly sophisticated operation; it’s mostly about the love of plants.   But of course while we toil inside in the relative warmth, our hands in the soil and plants in various stages of tentative growth, it is still winter outside; never more so than this morning when an overnight snowfall was still flinging its last squalls about.

Our coffee break is a relaxed affair held in a neighbouring greenhouse, so for a while we abandon our benches and leave our work gloves and pruning shears to rest awhile.  This morning, for no particular reason, I happened to be the first to return from coffee and when I entered the greenhouse something small and brown flitted from me, moving fast and zipping away just above ground level.

My immediate thought was mouse, but that idea lasted less that a millisecond, mice don’t fly.  It had to be a bird.  But in here? Well why not: it’s warm, it’s sheltered and there’s plenty of food. What better reasons can there be?  If a bird, then what kind of bird?  A sparrow? Hmmm, maybe a Song Sparrow – they flit around at ground level.  All of the above reasoning took seconds only, and then I started to suspect a wren.  A Winter Wren maybe, but unlikely; a Carolina Wren was more likely.  I crouched down below the tables of plants and soon caught sight of not one, but two Carolina Wrens.

This is so typical; wrens have attitude.  They really couldn’t care less about convention.  So what if this is a greenhouse: people territory with locked doors, stuff in orderly rows, and labels on things?  So what if people are wandering around?  You can always stay out of the way and besides, half of them can’t see beyond the end of their iPhone anyway (my greenhouse friends excluded from this generalization).

Later when the morning’s work was done and most people had left, I crept around with my camera trying for a winner of a Carolina Wren shot.  They disdainfully kept their distance, they have attitude remember; but still I was able to get a few, mostly for the record, shots.  Here they are.

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