Author: Peter T

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. November 21 2022. With a few days of unseasonably cold weather behind us, we walked the valley today. It was above freezing, at last, and the valley had a bruised and battered feel about it.

The birding was meagre: Black-capped Chickadees, Red-bellied Woodpeckers and White-breasted Nuthatches followed us hoping for handouts. We took several minutes to admire a male Northern Cardinal, brilliant against a rather drab background, and glimpsed what may turn out to be the last Fox Sparrow of the season.

Our walk was more about getting fresh air and exercise.  Anything airborne turned out to be a late-falling leaf or so we thought,  until we spotted three large black birds surfing the blustery south-west wind. Three young Bald Eagles, maybe migrants but quite possibly locals.  One moment they were soaring and sliding on the opposite side of the valley and disappearing behind trees, and the next minute, one would reappear swooping up and circling around behind us. It was a short-lived performance. It endorses my view that no matter how apparently unproductive or dismal the day may be, there’s always at least one bird that stands out and makes me say (or maybe just think) Wow!  Bald Eagles – My Birds of the Day today.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON November 17 2022. If there really is an Old Man Winter, a windblown, mean-spirited soul who touches ponds with ice and scatters snow squalls, then he just paid us a visit. We woke to a thin touch of snow, a centimetre maybe, enough that you could (and I have) use its novelty to get a twelve-year-old to wake up on a school morning.

But discouraging as a touch of winter may be, it doesn’t last long in November and you can always dress for a cold day. So, I hiked the valley today, aware that species after species has paraded through and gone south, it has become all but emptied of birds.

Almost last in the transients’ parade are the Fox Sparrows of October/November, and today I was surprised and pleased to come upon a group of five searching the trail-side leaf litter for food. They have a distinctive and apparently efficient jump-scratch technique for sorting the deep leaf debris, that and their foxy-red colour are what makes them so eye-catching. Where sparrows in general are brown, Fox Sparrows are a rich reddish-brown and their pale breasts are dotted with chevrons of a somewhat darker foxy red. I spent a few minutes watching and enjoying them, doubly pleased because now it was a big Fox Sparrow year for me. Just four days ago I’d spent several minutes studying another one who was busy doing that same jump-scratch search for food.

Later, as I was about to start on the home stretch, a small group of Hooded Mergansers caught my attention as they scurried away from a pond edge. I’m sure I’ve commented before that the male Hooded Merganser looks almost military in dress and style, perhaps a junior officer in a brigade of Habsburg hussars. The females by contrast are rather plain but the males take on this handsome plumage in early fall and small family groups are fairly common, you’d probably miss them if the males weren’t so conspicuous. Hooded Mergansers could have been My Birds of the Day were it not for the Fox Sparrows who won hands down.

Haldimand County. ON. November 12 2022. With some trepidation I drove to a quiet country roadside where another birder said he’d had the lucky sighting of a Short-eared Owl.  Trepidation because owls in daytime can attract a lot of unwelcome attention, sometimes amounting to harassment, and I was quite prepared to give it a miss if anything like a crowd seemed to be gathering. But the road was deadly quiet so, when I identified the supposed spot, I pulled to one side and scanned a large hayfield.

It was a field bounded by overgrown hedges and dotted with large hay bales, each about the size of a Fiat. The area had a rather tired, nearly-given-up feel about it, as if the heavy clay soil had proven farming to be a poor investment in time, money and effort.

I scanned each hay bale but was soon distracted by the sight of a large bird on a far-off fencepost. Not an owl I thought, but what? Maybe a harrier. A minute or two’s study aided by my camera’s zoom and I was sure I was looking at a male Northern Harrier, pale grey-blue above and white below.  (That’s my diagnostic photo above – not great quality but it served its purpose.) Moments later a large, low-flying bird to the right turned out to be another Northern Harrier, this time a female, rich brown and chestnut and showing the bright white rump that is distinctive of the species.

This habitat of scattered trees and unkempt fields with secure refuges under hay-bales, was probably thick with voles and mice, and ideal for harriers who hunt by steady, low-level quartering of wide-open spaces.

I was camera-ready for the second harrier and followed its progress around, up and over an old pear tree in the fence line, and then wheeling around to fields behind me.

Another female appeared briefly and I was able to follow her too as she swept low over the field and eventually landed to take stock. That was harrier number three. Was this a family group? How many might there be?

There were a few other birds around: an Eastern Bluebird, a trio of Wild Turkeys and a few scattered flocks of Dark–eyed Juncos. If indeed there had been a Short-eared Owl as reported, then I didn’t see it. But I was thrilled to have the quiet time and space to watch at least three Northern Harriers; My birds of the day.

Copenhagen, Denmark. October 28 2022.  Watching a couple of Magpies scavenge noisily from one face of a high-sided city street to the other, an inner voice sneered, ‘Urban urchins”. In that setting it might seem apt but another voice, the voice of reason, protested, “No, wait. Not urchins; urban opportunists!” Opportunists they certainly are, equally at home in open countryside, suburbia and the heart of this city. I love Magpies; they always seem to come with a story, they are striking to look at and self assured in behaviour;  but then as members of the crow family assertiveness is their brand.

I hand-reared one when I was a teen, I raised it from lost nestling to become the raucous tenant of my dad’s shed. It grew quickly, and my dad was happy when I released it to woodlands where it belonged, he could then restore order among the many bits and pieces that he had once sorted, labelled and filed.

One of our favourite urban walks here is along the paths of a large, walled cemetery.  Magpies criss-cross the paths wherever there’s room to fly.  With a bit of imagination I like to think they add a little atmosphere to the much-visited grave site of Hans Christian Andersen.

Hovvig, Nakke, Denmark. October 23, 2022.I have a boyhood memory of seeing a couple of  Redwings somewhere near my home in the south of England. I remember being quite excited because Redwings were, and still are, winter visitors and not easily seen. They were not uncommon or remarkable to a well equipped and resourceful birder, but I was neither so was impressed within my limits. It’s been decades, therefore, between that vivid, one-off sighting and my encounter with restless flocks of Redwings today.

By lucky happenstance I had been directed to Hovvig, a bird sanctuary, near the coastal village of Nakke on the Island of Zealand. Birding had been pretty thin  in my Danish weeks so far and I didn’t have very high hopes; but then I had no idea what the sanctuary was like.  Hardly had I arrived than I knew I’d struck visitor/birder’s gold.  The sanctuary is a failed attempt at land reclamation and is now a vast wetland of open water, soggy fields, reed-beds, mudflats,  scattered woodlands, scrubby margins and open rough pasture; nearly everything birds and I could wish for.

Redwings are common birds of winter in rural Denmark and I was half expecting to see some sooner or later.  They are handsome members of the thrush family, superficially not unlike a young American Robin, a European Song Thrush or a Fieldfare. They breed across a very broad swath of high-latitudes northern Europe: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, but with winter’s approach the entire population heads to continental Europe, from Denmark, south, west and east, everywhere, through to Iberia and the Balkans.

The Redwings really caught my attention, not just because I’d been hoping for them but because of the flocks’ restless behaviour. It was hard to get a fix on any single bird for very long, they always seemed to be on the move and if one did alight it would usually be somewhere deep in foliage.

As Birds of the Day, Redwings were up against some tough competition because  the morning’s birding was very satisfying with many really good sightings.

My other stand-outs for the morning were: A male Bullfinch, dapper in crimson and grey;  A White-tailed Eagle methodically harassing a group of ducks knowing eventually that one of them would show itself as weaker and thereby become a meal;  and trio of Common Snipe, all but invisible. If one hadn’t shuffled forward and caught my attention,  prompting a bit of camera-aided searching, I would not have seen them.  In the photo below they are along the lower waters-edge and hard to make out.

I try not to share exhaustive lists in these pages, but partly for my own records here are some of the rest of my morning’s observations:  Northern Lapwing, Northern Shoveler, Mallard, Coot, Shelduck, Teal, Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Greylag Goose, Mute Swan, Great Cormorants, Black-headed Gull, Grey Heron, Ring-necked Pheasant, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Chaffinch, Eurasian Robin, Dunnock, Blackbird, Eurasian Wren, Kestrel, Grey Heron, Rook, Jackdaw, Hooded Crow, and Blue, Great, Marsh, and Long-tailed Tits, – no doubt many more went unseen but still an embarrassment of riches.