Black-throated Green Warbler

17 August 2016. Clear Lake, Young’s Point, Ont.  I think the tide has turned. Yesterday a big, fat blanket of all-day rain, originating in the Gulf of Mexico, swept across the north east soaking the parched land and ending a six week stretch of debilitating heat and humidity. Behind the storm a cold front has slipped down from the northwest and brought with it fair warning to the millions of summer birds in the northern forests that it’s time to think about moving on; that summer has served its purpose.

We are enjoying a family week on the shore of one of Ontario’s many delightful recreational lakes. Our days are largely taken up with the dramas, management and feeding demands of one, four and seven year-olds but it does allow some time to keep an eye open for birds; for the patriarch at least.

Probably the signature birds of this lake are Ospreys and Common Loons. Everyone loves loons, their mournful, stuff-of-ghost-stories call, long and echoey like a deranged wolf-howl, ensures their appeal. Gift shops thrive on loon bric-a-brac, the many inaccuracies in their portrayal mattering not at all.  Ospreys have their place too but without a campfires-worthy call it’s just some kind of fish-catching hawk to many people.

Ospreys mean more to me than loons, they figured large in my childhood when they returned to to breed in Scotland after an absence of some sixty years. Their return meant that I had at least a chance of seeing one when I grew up. What I didn’t know then was that the Osprey is very widespread, present on every continent except Australia.  In time I’d get to see many of them, especially here in North America. I never take them for granted though. What those nineteenth century gamekeepers and gillies, charged with the custody of expensive fishing rivers, managed to do was confer great value on Ospreys when they eventually returned from extirpation.

But I was reflecting on Ospreys as my birds of the day, when I noticed several much smaller birds actively foraging and gleaning insects from the lower branches of the many Eastern White Cedars that surround this vacation cottage. I wondered if they could be migrant warblers, partly because a friend had very recently reported swarms of active warblers around his cottage some distance north and because of the change in weather.  When later I got the chance to follow up I found that they were indeed migrant warblers, actually Black-throated Green Warblers; so the fall migration has begun, the tide has turned.

Here are a couple of photos, the one above taken today of what is probably a young male Black-throated Green Warbler.  Not the best of photos but since it was my Bird of the Day I include it in recognition.  The one below taken in May four years ago, a much nicer looking adult male.