Northern Waterthrush

May 7 2017. RBG Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. April – now that’s a month where you know where you stand: even though spring is in the air, it’s quite possibly cold, more likely cool, and on the odd occasion there’s maybe a dab of warmth.   But May, that’s a different matter, it’s a transition month, glorious because it’s green and staring summer in the face, but you never know what just might happen; could be cool, could be hot.

This first week of May has been one of those Surprise! Gotcha! kind of weeks; rain, cold, rain again in biblical torrents, more cold and floods to follow.

Still birders soldier on, wet or dry, and I have been diligently doing our bird counts. Both yesterday and today I explored the same verdant valley I’ve mentioned so often, the one that is a happily overgrown, forest-rimmed flood plain of a small and meandering river; an inundated flood plain yesterday, a silty, squishy flood plain today.

Among terrestrial passerines the long wet spell seemed to make little difference, but among Canada Geese and Mute Swans there appeared to be a lot of upset. Both nest in the valley and probably Trumpeter Swans too.

Yesterday I noted an unusually high level of territorial aggression: goose to swan, goose to goose and swan to swan (and even goose to me). My conjecture is that the rising waters drowned some nests, killing the embryos and pushing the adult birds to disperse or perhaps seek an alternative site to re-nest.

Whether it was just a case of dispersal or whether it was birds looking to re-nest, many geese and swans were aggressively posturing and driving out intruders. One large pond has held one pair of Mute Swans for a month or so, yesterday another Mute Swan dared to show up and I was awe-struck witnessing the whistling-winged, jet-fighter approach of the male Mute Swan hell bent on driving an interloper away. So successfully that the ousted male was forced to fly low through a cluster of dense trees, twisting and stalling, quite un-swan-like.

If the Trumpeter Swans had a nest in the valley (Probably because one and sometimes two individuals have been seen regularly this spring) then I suspect their nest has been lost to the flood.

Well so much for drama, both days turned up lots of species: thirty-nine yesterday and forty-four today.

I mentioned the cold; this morning before breakfast it was seven degrees, brisk for us and really tough for insectivorous birds. I found an Eastern Kingbird hunched grumpily (hungrily) probably wishing it had never made the dash north from Peru in the first place and a Warbling Vireo working over some low dogwood shrubs searching for food. Seeing the vireo at close quarters was unusual, they are birds of the forest canopy, often heard but rarely seen. I got several decent photos of it, one showing its rear end like I’ve never seen before, but none of them showing its face really well.

Bird of the Day? Heard but not seen on both days was a Northern Waterthrush, possibly two. An unremarkable looking bird but wonderful nevertheless. Not a thrush at all, waterthrushes are brown streaky warblers, of low-light swampy woods where they build a nest at ground level in a well-hidden crevice. They have a short emphatic song which I once anthropomorphized as “heck heck not me- no he DID-IT! ‘ spillled sharply without pause.

I suspect this bird is passing through. This valley may provide suitable nesting habitat but there are better, wetter, darker, more mosquito-infested places not far away; rather them than me. The photo above was taken a couple of years ago at a time and place where mosquitoes were relentlessly drawing my blood as I worked.