January 4 2020. Grimsby ON. I cobbled together a team to participate in the Peachtree Bird Count today, the Peachtree is a nod to the tender-fruit-growing tradition of the count area. Such counts have a long history: Christmas Bird Counts have been a regular fixture across North America for 120 years. The Peachtree Count is a new event to compliment a neighbouring Boxing Day (Dec. 26) count, today’s was Peachtree’s third or fourth year I think . Local naturalists have participated in the nearby Boxing Day Bird Count for nearly 100 years.
We were assigned an interesting territory that includes a tract of lake shoreline, a thickly wooded escarpment face, some scattered housing and farmland. The waters of Lake Ontario hold hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of over-wintering waterfowl so there’s always the chance we could spend all day trying to identify and count ducks: Long-tailed Ducks, Buffleheads, scaup, merganser and scoter species. Today it went quite smoothly but still, counting 400 scattered Long-tailed Ducks took a bit of time.
It was a relatively mild day, gloomy overcast but above freezing anyway, and always damp and sometimes wet underfoot. We tallied 33 species in our defined area and added one more, a Northern Shrike, on our way home.
Two birds, the Northern Shrike and a couple of posing Northern Mockingbirds made the day for me. The two species can be confused, they’re about the same size, both are predominantly pearl-grey with darker wings and tails (almost black in the case of the shrike) and both show in-flight flashes of white on their wings and outer tail feathers. Where we found them, under leaden skies among bare-twigged winter hawthorns, they both might have been best-man at a posh wedding. The shrikes are winter visitors subsisting on a diet of small birds and mammals while our mockingbirds get through winter on a diet of left-over summer fruit including rose-hips and crab apples.
There were other good birds on our count. A couple of Chipping Sparrows and a female Red-winged Blackbird were notable for being here rather that further south. We half expected to see a small group of Turkeys but they are famously shy and evasive so we missed them, but a small flock of Eastern Bluebirds brightened up a wet trudge around a playing field.
My only photographs of a Northern Shrike are dismal and not worth sharing but here are a couple of Northern Mockingbirds from other times.
