RBG. Arboretum, Hamilton ON. December 27 2021. This, the day after the-day-after-Christmas and I needed exercise and, more particularly, wanted a bird of the day. Looking outside it wasn’t very encouraging: a gloomy grey overcast, snow in the air and a posted weather warning of “Snow early… continuing for a few hours…up to 5 cm …. transition to freezing rain or freezing drizzle late in the morning or the afternoon.” We went anyway.
On the road to our destination I noted the strong easterly wind, meaning: it had already swept the length of Lake Ontario; was certainly cold and; as forecasted, full of moisture. I pointed to a Red-tailed Hawk riding circles above the highway and wondered aloud if that just might be My Bird of the Day. Maybe the only bird of the day.
Wrapped warmly we followed a lightly snow-covered lakeside trail. The lake was open although it had been ice-covered a week or two ago. A few hardy waterfowl dotted its surface, most notably a handsome male Hooded Merganser and small flotillas of Canada Geese. I suspected three of those geese of being Cackling Geese but couldn’t be sure; behaviourally they set themselves apart and seemed a little short necked.
Not long ago there was only the Canada Goose, but ornithology recognised therein a dozen or more subspecies based on: size, largest to smallest; plumage-shading; bill-size and behaviour. Then the arbiters of species-differentiation took a closer look and decided that the three smallest subspecies could make their own way in the world as a distinct-species, so now we have the somewhat smaller and shorter-necked Cackling Goose. They can be head-scratchingly tricky to separate and identify at a distance and the trio that started this digression were on the borderline somewhere.
Perhaps fortunately, my absorption with the geese was broken when Ruth pointed out a Pileated Woodpecker almost overhead. As I’ve written many times (I’m sure), a Pileated Woodpecker is always a bird worth dropping what you’re doing for. This one was opening up the interior of a long-dead aspen in its search for fat larvae; it had carved out a large hole, enough that I think the tree will break off at this point in the next strong blow. Pileated Woodpeckers can be either secretive and elusive or disarmingly bold, today’s was bold: it was noisily hammering out chunks of tree trunk and totally disinterested in us below. It was the bird that made our walk special, My Bird of the Day.
But it was not alone in catching my attention. I called the Hooded Merganser handsome, but so too was a solitary Great Black-backed Gull out on the water; either could have been birds of the day. But it’s hard to steal the thunder of a Pileated Woodpecker.