Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. March 6, 2022. This tipping point, the moment when the key turns in winter’s padlock, prompts a mini-surge of returning birds. They confirm that warmer days are on their way, it may be a bit stop and go, but it’s going to happen.
Today the sun shone like it meant it and temperatures spiked far above anything we’ve seen for three months, so I went birding to one of my favourite valleys. Hardly was I out of my car when I heard a Song Sparrow singing – that’s a good sign. It might have been in the valley all winter and managed to scrape by, but song is a sign of it having made it and it might have been my Bird of the Day except that…..
Down on the flood-plain, still dotted with pans of thick ice, a few male Red–winged Blackbirds were around, new arrivals, some of them taking a moment to perch on a cattail head and try out a bit of territorial song. I don’t think they were very committed though, they are very much the advance guard. In a week or two, thousands more will arrive and then staking out home turf will be a serious matter. But these few were definitely tipping point birds.
At a bend in the river, a handful of Hooded Mergansers were diving for fish, at least I assume fish but the waters were so silty-thick and murky with all the meltwater that I don’t know how they could possibly see to catch them. But they were surfacing with something edible, so fish – presumably? Alongside the mergansers was a sole male Wood Duck. He was a tipping point bird, like the Song Sparrow and Red-wings.
The valley bottom looks exhausted, flattened by the repeated battering by snow-turned-to-ice and from ice-dam flooding. Our familiar trails were either still thickly layered with ice from foot traffic compacting snow or, if clear of ice, were slippery and muddy. I questioned my wisdom in going there in the first place.
My Bird of the Day came around lunchtime. Back home, I had taken a moment to tidy a few of the uglier winter eyesores in my back yard when I heard a Killdeer calling overhead. The first Killdeer is always a heard-Killdeer, it’s as if they leave a contrail of di-deeee calls in their wake. They leave Ontario for the winter, today’s may have spent the last four months just a few latitude degrees south of us, somewhere where food can be reliably found along shorelines or open fields. I didn’t see it – and it doesn’t matter, I was glad to hear it back.