Common Redpoll

Wrigley Corner Brant County, Ontario. December 14 2020.  See if you can picture this: A broad sweep of squared-off farm fields, crops long since taken, it’s cold and the sky is low and ragged throwing down thin snow squalls.  I’m driving a quiet gravel road, a scattering of lost-soul shrubs trace the line of the road-edge. It was Common Redpoll country today, and the sort of driving-snow weather that redpolls call home.

My passing scattered a group of about thirty who were picking for seed along a faint and weedy roadside ditch. Spooked by my car they stayed just a half a length ahead of me flying low, touching briefly then taking flight again. There was little opportunity to get a decent look at them but a quick pause and scan and I could see they were redpolls.

A nice sighting. This is a redpoll invasion year, they seem to move in flocks but I’d only seen a single so far, ten days ago, it would be a shame not to see more. But I was driving, with places to go and when the redpolls tumbled away, blown on a gust of wind, I knew they could end up anywhere and I let it go.

But on my return journey, and in just about the same place, I spotted them again, this time on the other side of the road and working low along the edge of a cattle compound. I parked strategically and watched, hoping they might get used to my presence and move in closer. It took a long time, but I had the comfort of a warm car and the road was very quiet; I don’t think more than one other vehicle passed us in half an hour. My patience paid off, through binoculars I could pick them out, sorting for seeds in the matted grasses and weeds. Gradually they moved closer but never still enough or close enough as a photographer might wish.

During summer, Common Redpolls are one of the commonest birds of the treeline zones of the Arctic. Every now and then a thin crop of cones sends them south for food security, this is one of those years. They are a more familiar urban bird in Scandinavia and Russia where urbanisation reaches further north. We North Americans rely on these infrequent irruption years for our sightings, good enough reason to tag these Common Redpolls as My Birds of the Day.

If it looks as though they are leaning into a stiff wind, it was just that.