December 18th. 2018, Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON. In need of exercise and a dose of nature I walked into my valley today. Stripped of the colours, the textures and the piled-on distractions of spring, summer and fall, the crooked bones of December hid little. It was deadly quiet except for the thin squeaks of Black-capped Chickadees and hollow, far away crow-sounds, anything that moved was worth binocular-inspection. It was a reminder of birdlife rhythms that ebb and flow like a tide in the valley, rushing to full flood in May, a slack-water pause for summer and then withdrawing by the end of October; now is low tide.
Almost where expected, I caught the small ‘prip’ note of a busy Winter Wren and found it making its way among the riverbank tangles, managing to stay all but out of sight. A lone walker passed behind me, absorbed in his own thoughts. Sometimes such passers-by are curious to know what I’m looking at and I’m usually happy to share, though the wren, I knew, would end up as a ‘well-if-you-say-so’ type of discussion.
Passing under a group of high-reaching American Sycamores a drifting-down mote caught the sunlight and told me to look up; something at work overhead, it said. A pair of American Goldfinches was drawing seeds from the sycamores’ dense ball-like fruit. It was work that demanded their full attention although they kept in touch with each other with an occasional, soft ‘p’tink’ note. I watched them for a long while, musing that a charm of goldfinches is an apt collective noun.
My Birds of the Day were a group of thirty or so Mallards. My attention turned to the females whose usual role in life is to be overlooked but today seemed every bit as eye-catching as the males. (Perhaps it is the male role to draw attention from the critical female task of incubating the next generation.) Their late summer and fall moult is well behind them and they are dressed and ready for the hard days of winter in crisp plumage, waterproof and snug.
I was struck by the clear and beautiful definition of each individual feather. How they fit and lie in precise groups and overlays to give contour and function. Examine it for a while and you’ll never again think of plumage as random.