Turkey Vulture

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. November 19^th. 2020. It’s been a while since I last set foot in the valley. Blame it on an end to our 2020 transects and the need to catch up on other urgencies of life. I needed the exercise today and few places are as satisfying as this valley, both for birds and scenic value. Despite that, I did not have very high expectations of bird variety; I should have had a little more faith.

It all started rather tensely when I saw a Mink slide submerged into the river a few feet from a couple of paddling Mallards. I was sure the mink could and would happily catch and devour one of them, but how would it do it? It was worth waiting around for. I was over-dramatizing the situation though, the Mallards paddled confidently away and the mink soon emerged carrying a mollusk or maybe a small fish, shook dry like a retriever and withdrew into the undergrowth. A little disappointed I continued on my way looking for birds.

Half way around I reckoned I’d seen everything probable: Black–capped Chickadees, Blue Jays, White–breasted Nuthatches, Carolina Wrens, Downy Woodpeckers and a Red–bellied Woodpecker, it’s mid-November after all. But a then small group of Wood Ducks, surprised me, surely the valley’s last hold-outs, a soaring Bald Eagle and a sudden Hooded Merganser made me re-think the day. It was turning out to be not too bad.

I met up with a small birding group under the leadership of a friend who suggested that quiet patience on my part should reward me with glimpses of an American Bittern. They’d been watching it for several minutes until it finally retreated into the cattail background.  This bittern is a recently arrived, somewhat-out-of-place, sensation. It drew crowds for a few days last week but became old news and was soon forgotten. I waited and watched for perhaps 30 minutes but saw nothing, it doesn’t take much background to hide a bittern. I mused that it might have been a nice Bird of the Day for these pages.

A little later, the above-mentioned friend found me again. He had parted company with his small group and was now on the lookout for Fox Sparrows. I suggested that mid-November might be a little late, but he was in a Find-a-Fox-Sparrow competition with his cousin and was anxious to keep looking, particularly now since she had. As we stood around, idly weighing birdy topics, a Cooper’s Hawk dashed through the now bare branches rightly alarming various House Sparrows, Downy Woodpeckers and Dark–eyed Juncos. And as we gazed up a Turkey Vulture drifted across the tree tops.  Eight warmer months of the year a Turkey Vulture wouldn’t turn heads, but now they’ve all gone south, at least I thought they had, but not this one apparently and I was surprised enough to think of it as My Bird of the Day.

October 23rd 2013. Four vultures hanging in a funereal sky. The sort of setting that somehow suits them.