May 9 2016. Ruthven Park, Cayuga ON. Another one of those cascading-warblers days. I left home long before most mortals were awake but checked the radar beforehand; the image was pulsating with migrants on the move. It takes fifty minutes to get to the bird observatory and the sun was up when I arrived, the woods were ringing with bird song and there was the lightest touch of frost on the grass.
Charged with the mission of doing the daily census I was soon overwhelmed: Chipping Sparrow, Wood Thrush, Song Sparrow, Warbling Vireo, American Robin, Yellow Warbler, say them to yourself quickly and you’ll have some idea of the fury. Black-capped Chickadee, Blue Jay, Baltimore Oriole, American Goldfinch and Tufted Titmouse – and on it went. I quickly filled two columns of a page of my notebook – forty-six entries.
I stared up at the sunlit side of some towering Norway Spruces and found a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, two flame-faced Blackburnian Warblers, a Magnolia Warbler , a Yellow Warbler and a couple of Black-throated Green Warblers. From the top came a clear fluting song that I thought I knew, I had the wrong species in mind but was nevertheless pleased to make the connection with an Orchard Oriole. (Here is a gallery of some of those birds, visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)
Much farther along, with my brain, binoculars and notebook all working flat out, I looked up at a small bird working over the tops of a Hackberry, it was a Bay-breasted Warbler. Wow! That’s early by a week or two, I thought. Bird of the Day for that reason alone, but also because Bay-breasteds can be a bit hit and miss, a species that is prone to population swings and, to my mind, often neck-twistingly high overhead.
I watched it and others for a while and then became aware of the unmistakable tree-top call of a Yellow-throated Vireo; I just love these guys and here they are back for another summer’s fun. Their song is a repeated, hoarse, two-phrase whistle; ‘Whee – up’ that sounds a bit the worse for wear as though last night was a late one with too many drinking games. And come to think of it, that whole image of a dissolute party-goer rather fits the nonchalantly pugnacious demeanor of the Yellow-throated Vireo. A quick search of this site will turn up many entries about vireos, all of them in praise of.
I spent three hours on the census, a job that usually takes half that time, and tallied sixty-two species. A high count that could have been higher, I missed a couple of birds that really should have been dead certainties but there it is; after a while birdy days like this can become an over-saturated blur – if happy one.