October 6 2018 Grey Doe Trail Valley, RBG, Hamilton, ON. This was a day of high expectations. Characteristically erratic October weather, one day cool and blustery the next almost summery, had pushed a massive flight of south-bound migrants yesterday; one of our transect team watched two Golden Eagles soar low overhead, crazy!. But that was yesterday and although I hoped for another such day today, it was not to be. Perhaps that one big day swept out all the available birds or maybe last night’s heavy rain dissolved them like sugar cubes, I don’t know. I completed a transect today and found fewer species (nineteen) than I might hope for on a mid-winter day.
I can’t say I was thrilled to see two Dark-eyed Juncos because they unquestionably herald the approach of winter. But they were my Birds of the Day perhaps because they are something of a milestone along the way. The last lingering Juncos of last winter left in the final week of April, hardly anyone noticed them go, we were too busy celebrating the return warmer weather.
A pair of Brown Creepers held my attention for quite a while. They were carefully working and reworking, from bottom to top, the trunks of a Sugar Maple and a Hop Hornbean. They are intriguing birds but very difficult birds to photograph. For one thing because they favour gloomy places, and cameras need light, but also because their plumage is so cryptic that they are virtually invisible against a tree trunk. If silhouetted as they move around the side of the trunk, many times the camera is baffled by the contrasts between the dark of the tree and the light of the sky behind . This is about the only decent photograph I’ve ever managed of a Brown Creeper, and it’s not bad despite my misgivings.