Author: Peter T

Rivière du Loup, Quebec. September 27 2022. Every early March I use these pages to celebrate Trumpeter Swans and how they usher in spring with their sensational migratory return. Well now, six months later, I experienced those same exhilarating sights and sounds, this time of hundreds of Snow Geese in their southbound, fall migration.  Doing much the same thing as those swans except the geese (just as white and just as sparkling in the sun) are paving the way for cold seasons to come. Still, there is something really spine-tingling about the sight and sounds of clouds of excited white birds following a course inherited from ancestors through many thousands of generations.

Our Snow Goose experience came this morning as we whiled away time waiting for the noon ferry to take us north across the St. Lawrence River to St. Simeon on the far shore. As we gazed across the scenically spectacular river, we could hear what we though were gulls calling behind us, far in land.  I shrugged for a few minutes but eventually a shoulder-tap realization, ‘those-aren’t-gulls-they’re-geese,’ got through to me and I turned to see a blizzard of Snow Geese.

Snow Geese nest in hundreds of thousands in the Hudson Bay lowlands; their spring and fall migrations are always spectacular. Perhaps locals get used to them but birders are awestruck at any time while hunters can hardly wait for their fall arrival. We rarely see Snow Geese on Lake Ontario, their migratory path passes far east of us. But today I was in the right place for perhaps this autumn’s first wave, there will be many to come through October and early November; hundreds of thousands of them.

It took us a bit of needless driving to finally find the flock on a recently harvested field.  There were small groups of Canada Geese dotted around too, they’ll often clean up spilled grain and I suspect the Snows spotted them from high above and promptly crashed the gleaning party.  The Snow Geese were noisy and restless while the Canadas watched from margins with a sort of who-invited-them demeanour. 

For a while, noisy groups of Snow Geese came and went, large groups arriving from the north parachuting in and small excited clusters taking off, circling around and catching up on gossip. Then something serious alarmed them and in a mass of urgent honking and gurgling all the Snow Geese lifted off and streamed low over us. They were last seen swirling over a cityscape behind.

Port Ménier, île de Anticosti, Quebec. September 25 2022.  We went ashore from our small ship today, our first steps on land following two days of flirting with Monster-Hurricane Fiona. Cruise ship itineraries include plenty of shore excursions including shopping opportunities and local colour, but going ashore from our working supply ship, Bella Desgagnés, means moving carefully on strictly functional concrete wharves whilst watching for shipping containers swinging overhead  Hikes, when possible, lead up quiet roads to the associated village or settlement. So it was today, that we disembarked on the working end of Port Ménier’s very long, straight, open and windswept jetty. Windswept by a buffeting northerly wind that was okay on the long walk to land but hard going on the return. Still, the birding was interesting.

At the start I could see an expanse of large white birds gathered on a faraway sheltered shoreline. From a distance I wondered if they were Snow Geese, but no, instead they were almost all Great Black-backed Gulls. They are the world’s largest gull, thuggish by nature but quite handsome and spectacular whether in ones and twos (the way we see them on Lake Ontario), or loafing in hundreds as they were in front of us. Every bit as interesting was a single Red-throated Loon paddling around not far from shore. It was interesting to watch and to appreciate its lighter, more streamlined build than that of a Common Loon. I managed to get a few photos of it despite the threat of a rapidly fading camera battery. I muddled through and am pleased to see that my photos show a little of an emerging wine-red throat patch, suggesting that this is a one-and-a-bit year old bird, hatched in 2021.

That there-and-back walk also produced several Greater Yellowlegs, an American Pipit, and finally a single Semi-palmated Plover in the company of two mystery shorebirds. The mysteries’ mirrored posture, size and companionship suggest they are the same species, yet there are differences: one has a more richly patterned back, the suggestion of a rufous collar and a clear white breast, while the other is generally darker and has fine spots on its breast. I suspect they are young birds, hatched this summer, and in slightly different stages of moult. So far they are mystery birds to me and I welcome help in identifying them.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Arboretum, Hamilton. ON. September 14 2022. A few disruptions in my social calendar and weather mean I’ve had little good birding for the past week or two. But today I walked one of our transects with a new recruit to our team. We enjoyed good birding in fine weather.

Much of what we saw was indicative of the fall migration now well under way: Lesser Yellowlegs picking patiently for wriggly stuff in the mud; Palm and Yellow–rumped Warblers flitting about tree-tops, almost impossible to track, and a handful of Chimney Swifts in wheeling arcs high against a clear blue sky. Out on the shallow water were herons: 24 Great Blue Herons and a siege of 75 Great Egrets. This has become a staging area for egrets who don’t breed locally and 10 or 15 years ago were uncommon here. We examined small groups of Green–winged Teal and Northern Shovelers, both rather hard to make out in difficult light and both in a stage of molt that sees them in mottled greys and browns.

We quite easily compiled a list of 42 species and would have been quite content with that. Then as we walked the last few metres to our cars we made a quick scan of the horizon and saw a soaring American White Pelican some distance away. It certainly seems incongruous, pelicans in Canada, but they breed around large lakes across a large part of the continent roughly from Manitoba to Alberta and south to Kansas. They have to get to and from their wintering grounds somehow, right now they’re heading to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast, so it’s not a big surprise that a few show up every year even if maybe blown a little off course.

Today’s American White Pelican was an easy Bird of the Day, quickly displacing those Great Egrets and Chimney Swifts.

The pelicans in the photo above were a  group that stopped here one June day about ten years ago.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Carrols Bay, Burlington. ON. September 4. 2022. You know about trigger warnings don’t you? Well this Bird of the Day story may be hard on sensitive souls, it’s about short life and ugly death in the mud.

Mid-afternoon today, a message about some interesting shorebird arrivals caught my interest and sent me off to an expanse of wet and gooey mudflats about twenty minutes from home. In the absence of birds, I don’t normally give these mudflats two minutes of my time, there’s far too much anthropomorphic debris and discard there. But today I had some hope of seeing reported Stilt Sandpipers and maybe a Red Knot (but failed on both) and maybe Short-billed Dowitchers (success) as well as Least and Semi–palmated Sandpipers, Semi–palmated Plovers, and Lesser and Greater Yellowlegs. All of the last noted were there, as they had been for a few days. (‘Semi-palmated’, by the way, is a reference to the presence of some webbing between the toes. Useful for pattering around on soft silts.) These birds are all south-bound migrants making a refuelling stop having already flown several hundreds of kilometres from their Arctic breeding grounds.

With a quick binocular scan I could see dozens, maybe hundreds of birds and, mysteriously, one unusually low in the water as if it had wandered out of its depth into too deep water and had decided to stop and think about it for a while. I couldn’t make out what it was, surely too low for a shorebird most of whom stay well up on long legs, and not a duck, who are larger and always buoyant; this mystery bird seemed to be anything but buoyant.

I was relieved to see it take flight and pleased when it flew closer to me, I was really keen to see what bird would behave in this manner. It came to rest a short distance away, and rather than alight as I’d expected it to, it belly flopped onto mud, wings splayed (above).

Now I understood, an injured bird.  In fact I could now see it was an injured Lesser Yellowlegs.  What befell it is anyone’s guess but I’m certain that it had lost the use of one or maybe both legs; in the picture you may just be able to  make out its yellow leg splayed out to the right, not where it belongs.

Another flutter and it came to pathetic rest to lie in grimy mud for perhaps 20 minutes. A companion Lesser Yellowlegs came over, looked at it for a moment or two and stalked away.  It looked around for a while, then stopped struggling and died.  Unable to stand it would not be able to feed the way a yellowlegs should. I suspect that it soon became soaked and cold.

Other than that it was a joy to see so many shorebirds who in a week or two will be anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to Patagonia. Below is one of the Short-billed Dowitchers.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. August 26 2022. I walked the valley this morning, I wanted exercise for one thing and I was curious to look for hints on what to expect when we resume regular transects next week. There was a Mother-Nature’s-up-to-something feel in the air,  it was all about summer winding down to let fall take over.

It was an encounter with a Cooper’s Hawk that made my morning. As I made my way up an inclined trail, I turned to look back and could see the silhouette of a largish bird strategically high in a bare tree, quite far away. A quick look and I felt it was probably a Cooper’s Hawk but possibly a Sharp-shinned Hawk. Cooper’s are more common around here but a Sharp-shinned can’t be ruled out. It was a long way off, partly obscured and they are confusable.

A young family came down the path towards me and two of them, a bold and cheerful girl of about 7 or 8 with her brother, perhaps 10. She came up to me and asked brightly. “Have you seen any interesting birds?”

“Well yes’ I said, ‘There’s a hawk in that tree way over there. Can you see it?”

She had a monocular and searched briefly. “Yes, I can see it. It’s hard to see in the bright light. What do you think it is?

“I think it’s a Cooper’s Hawk.” I said, now quite enjoying this lively wiser-than-her-years birder.

Her brother seemed only mildly interested, said nothing and continued on down the path, their mother took over his spot beside us to listen quietly to our hawk conversation.

“Is it a Red-tailed Hawk?”

“No, I think it’s a Cooper’s Hawk.  It might be a Sharp-shinned Hawk, but I think probably a Cooper’s.”

“Hmm. We should ask my brother. He’s a bird expert. He’s got a big book of bird pictures and knows all the differences between them. He reads it all the time and won’t allow anyone else to look at it.  Should we go closer?”

“Yes, I think it’s worth a try.”

Getting closer meant a bit of backtracking for me, but happily so. In time we all gathered at a spot where a decent gap in the trees afforded us a much better look.  Even so the bird was high up, still strongly back-lit and we were only debating a silhouette.

Now the brother became fully engaged, he had drawn his own conclusion. “It’s either a Cooper’s Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk.” He proclaimed. I was impressed.

I managed to take this photo which, despite the distance and back-light, was helpful. We gathered around to inspect it. The young birders were engaged, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, it felt like a teachable moment.

For a few reasons I favoured Cooper’s Hawk and I shared my thoughts.  “I think it’s a Cooper’s, and here’s why: Cooper’s have a rounded tail whereas Sharp-shinned Hawks tails are more squared; and the head profiles are different. Also these little fluffy plumes at the edge of the tail are more often seen in Cooper’s.”

They considered the photo evidence, weighed my contribution and I think the brother was close to agreeing with me.

“Hmmm, you can’t make out the tail shape very well, but you really know your stuff.” He said. Their mother shot me a raised eyebrows look.

That Cooper’s Hawk (for that is what I believe it was) was My Bird of the Day.