30 December 2015. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. After what must have been a record-breaking run of warm, December weather, snow finally came. It arrived two nights ago, wet and splattering in a driving storm that blew in from the southern U.S. The temperature fell just enough to make snow and not rain, then last night it all warmed up and everything turned slushy.
I walked the final census of the year and found the familiar landscape subtly changed; it was trying to lie as quietly as a winter landscape should, but neither the snow nor the cold was quite deep enough. The many ponds and inlets had tried to freeze over but it was all fake ice, thin and soft, and where a beaver had paddled around there were wide, open-water trails.
A Red-tailed Hawk flew heavily from an overhead tree and was promptly harassed by a small murder of American Crows. (Murder’ an appropriate collective noun; they didn’t but I think they’d have liked to.) Black-capped Chickadees followed my progress and pestered me, hungry, and fluttering in front of my face like mid-summer mosquitoes.
I stopped and listened for a long time at my turn-around point, a metal bridge spanning the fast-flowing creek. Where usually I’d be joined by chickadees and hear from cardinals and woodpeckers, it was very quiet. A minute or so passed and then, some indeterminate distance upstream, I could just pick out the uncertain, thread-like song of a Winter Wren, a song that can sometimes sound like a thin, tinkling stream of water. I celebrated inwardly, I remember spotting one near here several early springs ago, and maybe my Winter Wren will stay to earn its name in this sheltered little corner.
For a while the wren was best of the day and would have been Bird of the Day had it not been for a male Belted Kingfisher. I heard him twice, once far away but then, just as I was wrapping up the census, I heard it again much closer. A quick binocular sweep and I found it perched on a low branch peering straight down at the creek below. It departed as I readied my camera so I have nothing for the record, but the picture below of another Belted Kingfisher, a female, was taken last April in exactly the same spot, same branch. Maybe, just maybe, today’s bird was one of the pair who bred on this stretch of water last summer, and who knows, maybe the female will return in spring; but that’s a long way off yet. For now, today’s male Belted Kingfisher was my Bird of the Day.
