Haldimand County, ON. January 30 2011. This is a bird story from before the days of this site. Curiosity got me started, I was looking back at late-January photos from years past and inevitably reliving memories from much warmer places including Panama, Arabia and Uganda. But this is a cold weather Canada story that still sticks vividly with me. It happened on this date, eleven years ago, 2011.
It was on a real January day in Ontario, cold of course and everything under a carpet of snow. I don’t like driving winter roads anymore than anyone else but I make allowances for birding and on this day I had criss-crossed the same sort of open, snow-swept farmland described in my post of two days ago. I had watched a female Northern Harrier scare the living daylights out of Snow Buntings, and noted an American Kestrel on the peak of an old barn roof: there were cattle in the barnyard below so probably mice too, enough to keep the kestrel well fed.
Far to my right at the back of a big white field, I could see movement beneath a large, bare oak, I pulled over and stopped the car. The activity was an erratic wing-flapping and tumbling, hawks of some kind. It took a while before I was able to make out that it really was birds and that there were two of them, but when I did, I saw that they were Rough-legged Hawks; a good winter sighting any time. Fortunately, I had my camera ready to go and took several reasonably good, but very long-shot photos. What the interaction was about I have no idea, it was some kind of squabbling competition, the birds seemed to tussle, skip and pull at each other’s flapping wings. Rough-legs are known to play aerial-tag in small groups, perhaps this was the mid-winter version. Eventually one broke off the play and flew up to the branches above, game over.
Rough-legged Hawks breed in the tundra of arctic and subarctic Alaska and Canada and cross the boreal forest to spend a few winter months in our open country. We don’t see many of them but when we do it’s special. To see two at once and to witness this kind of interaction, was new to me, I’ve never seen anything like it since.
But the intrigue and of that play, or whatever it was, was topped by a surprise discovery later at home. When I looked closely at my photos, I was at first astonished and then laughed loudly to see that two barn cats had watched this show from the comfort of a sheltered doorway behind. Look closely.
Great memory, Peter!