Author: Peter T

16 December 2013. Burlington ON. A few months ago I met a young exchange student from Switzerland who, in the course of a wide-ranging conversation, happened to mention her strong interest in birds.  Of course that’s bound to catch my attention, I’m ever eager to share, and as a consequence, we’ve made a couple of trips to the bird observatory.  That was back in September when it was still T-shirt weather, but she made a comment then that has stayed with me, owls, she said, hold a special place in her heart.

With all the Snowy Owl activity around here lately I felt that it would be negligent of me if I allowed her to miss what might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one.  I offered, she accepted, and so today we went owling after school. I did a quick check around beforehand and was a little dismayed, I could only find one, either many of them have moved on, or (more likely) now that we have wide expanses of snow and ice everywhere, they’re harder to find. Still, we had one to look at, it was one on the roof of an industrial building, so our after-school trip was a success even though the setting was pretty gritty and access a bit challenging.

Pleased with progress, and to be frank, very much enjoying her evident pleasure at seeing these remarkable birds, I suggested we get back on the highway and make for a distant cemetery, (the dead centre of town) and try for one more species, an Eastern Screech Owl.  I gave us a scant twenty percent chance of success but she was quite happy to give it a try, better than doing homework I’m sure.  I wrote about this target Screech Owl a month ago, it’s a reliable (well 20% reliable) habitué of a Silver Maple knot-hole, it likes to pop out of his hideaway and take the sun if it can, soaking up whatever warmth there may be.

When we arrived the sun was fading and the owl’s knot-hole was in deep shadow so not surprisingly there was no sign of it. We shrugged and drove away, meandering slowly among avenues of snow-topped granite monuments, looking at promising knot-holes as we went; and in no time we found one. A very obliging red-phase Eastern Screech Owl catching the last drops of sunshine. A wow bird for sure and Bird of the Day; here it is.

14 December 2013. Burlington ON. We don’t get a lot of snow around here, not compared to some parts of Ontario, but last night about six inches of really light and fluffy snow settled quietly upon us; apparently there’s more to come.  It makes a change, and I suppose a change is as good as a rest. For birds it can make life tough, which is why so many of them head south like the sensible creatures they are.

I cleared an area in our back yard and scattered some mixed bird seed around; I know the squirrels will find it and make short work of the sunflower seeds, but the rest of it, mostly millet, will go down well with chickadees, juncos, sparrows and maybe the odd goldfinch.

It didn’t take very long for a Slate-colored Junco to spot the opportunity, although it spent a long time in our old clematis-draped pear tree assessing the risks of dropping down to ground level, the possibility of a predator: a cat or maybe a Sharp-shinned Hawk, is real.  I had only cleared a narrow swath, effectively a trench, through the snow. Perhaps it didn’t care much for the limits a trench places on its ability to spot trouble.  Then, once I had cleared a larger area a few more juncos arrived.

The Slate-colored Junco is one of twelve sub-species of the Dark-eyed Junco, a member of the sparrow family.  To complicate things these twelve subspecies fall into five major groups: White-winged, Slate-colored, Oregon, Pink-sided and Gray-headed.  Our happy little Slate-Colored Junco is the most widespread and the only one found regularly east of the Rockies.  We generally consider them a winter visitor (refugee) but you don’t have to travel very far north or to higher elevations to find them during the breeding season.

11 December 2013. Burlington ON. On my way to pick up a book at the library a swirl of light snow blew around in the watery light and it got me thinking how how monochromatic is the urban world at this time of year. It’s like an array of paint chips, you know the ones with improbable names like fieldstone or granite or even smokestack. Then to liven things up (thankfully) a Red-tailed Hawk swept low overhead, it banked left and dived between two Silver Maples, perhaps with a squirrel in its sights; as it passed I caught the foxy red of its tail.

A summer day’s Red-tailed Hawk seen overhead, wheeling and sunlit has a certain fundamental geometric balance to its wide, no-nonsense wings and broad triangular tail, but when watched, as this one was today, on a low level hunting mission you’re looking at a solid uncluttered bird with fluidly pointed wings. Watching it disappear I mentally tagged it as my Bird of the Day, in fact quite possibly the only bird of interest I was likely to see.

I later found that I had time to take a detour and see if one of the Snowy Owls of two days ago was still where I’d last seen it. It was, at least probably, whether I saw the same bird or not, I’ve no idea.  But where there had been one, there were now two Snowy Owls; and here, just because they are such neat birds, are a couple of photos in an appropriately bleak landscape of rocks and ice.

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9 December 2013. Hamilton ON. This posting has to be about Snowy Owls, after all I saw four of them this morning. Seeing one is always a thrill: they’re owls, and everyone loves owls, they’re Arctic birds that star in really good wildlife documentaries, and they’re so, so ghostly beautiful dressed in white. So you’d think that seeing four in one morning would be a quadruple thrill, but I find seeing that many to be rather disquieting; what’s going on?

Snowy Owls breed on the tundra and we know they head south as winter closes in.  We also know that sometimes, when their usual supply of voles and lemmings is scarce, irruptions of Snowy Owls descend to the Great Lakes provinces and northern states. It is my feeling that these irruptions used to be occasional events, once every ten or fifteen years, but that they have become more frequent.  What’s going on?

Two winters ago Snowy Owls invaded the Lake Ontario shores in large numbers. Anyone wanting to see one was more or less assured of success; this one even ventured onto the window ledge of a local office building allowing me this photograph.

My reference books note that Snowy Owls are expected winter residents.  Robert Curry, in his excellent book Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas, says, “We see it annually along the shores of Lake Ontario’s shores or in the open fields south of Hamilton.” and “..we have a long history of large numbers of Snowy Owls occurring during various southward irruptions.  These flights are generally believed to be the result of a crash in lemming populations after several years of increase and concomitant high owl breeding success.”

Whether I’m right in sensing there’s something wrong about too many owls too often, or whether I just don’t know enough about their biology gives me something more to think about.

Anyway, back to today.  I decided to take a look at a few of the easier to access windows to our large industrial harbour.  Even though the temperature was above freezing, it was cold birding with a strong southwest wind driving surf-topped waves across the harbour. Wherever there was shelter there were ducks and gulls (notably Northern Shovelers looking quite strikingly colourful and many Great Black-backed Gulls) taking refuge.

Other birders had I think, already reported two of the owls I saw, but the other two may be new discoveries.  Had it not been for the owls I might be writing about the large groups of Canvasbacks, Ruddy Ducks and Ring-necked Ducks bouncing around on very cold and choppy waters.  Perhaps they’ll star another day.  Here are my four Snowy Owls of today.

5 December 2013. Bronte & Hamilton ON. What a day! Let me count the ways: Great Black-backed Gull, Nashville Warbler, House Finches galore, Golden Crowned Kinglet, Pine Warbler, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Snowy Owl, and Peregrine Falcon – to name just a few.

I’m an acknowledged fair-weather birder and today was a fair weather day.  What choice did I have but to check out some of the birdy places that people are talking about.

First stop a yachting harbour just along the lake from home, the place where last winter a Snowy Owl hung around for several weeks; no sign of one today, but I came upon a Great Black Backed Gull (GBBG) gorging itself on a washed-up fish corpse, actually salmon, a delicacy.  An obviously hungry and envious Herring Gull (HEGU) who was looking for any opportunity to grab a piece of the pie was monitoring the GBBG, and my presence unnerved the GBBG enough to allow the HEGU to grab a mouthful.  I took several photos and then left them to their power struggle while I moved on to see what birds might be seen at a nearby park where unexpected birds are said to show up; I thought I should see what all the fuss was about.  It’s a nicely unkempt and wooded park that kind of embraces a large sewage treatment plant, and at the same time buffers it from the sensitivities of the happy neigbourhood; a good thing as it turns out.

Sewage treatment plants have a lot going for them, they’re: very expensive to build, very efficient at advancing civilization through elimination of such dread diseases as cholera, and very attractive to birds.  I’ve written several times of the magnetic attraction of sewage settlement ponds. Well it turns out that the more sophisticated urban aeration plants are choice places too.  It must be because of their relative warmth (all that flushed-away domestic waste), which attracts and supports insect life and perhaps also through burning waste gasses.

There were lots of House Finches here, more than I’ve seen together for a very long time, they and American Goldfinches, Northern Cardinals and the odd American Robin were scrambling through the tangles of Dog-rose and Goldenrod. Among them a bright Nashville Warbler, which really surprised me for most Nashvilles should be in Mexico or Guatemala by now.

There was more to come: around the fence of the sewage treatment plant were dozens of Yellow-rumped Warblers and a Pine Warbler, both a pleasant surprise although both species are capable of making it through an Ontario winter on a diet of seeds and berries, and if the warmth of the treatment plant sustains an insect population, well they just might do okay. Hope for a mild winter.

And in the also-ran category at this site were a single Golden-crowned Kinglet, an American Tree Sparrow and a Carolina Wren. So, amply satisfied I decided on a change of pace and left to look for a Snowy Owl;  and to my delight I found one on the margins of our large industrial harbour.

It was quite close and doing what Snowy Owls often do by day; crouching and trying to look inconspicuous.  I posted news of it on our local birding group as follows:  “A Snowy Owl was easy to see on the closest island at WIndemere Basin. As I was about to leave I spotted a Peregrine Falcon flying past me, low and fast and just above the canal, it flashed past me heading towards the downstream bridge where it arced up, banked left, smashed the living daylights out of a just-happened-to-be-flying-by passerine and, in a blizzard of feathers, carried it away to dine at leisure.  As a postscript, a Red-tailed Hawk registered a fly-by protest at the intruder on his turf.”  It all left me quite breathless.

Book-ending the day with a neo-tropical warbler and an Arctic owl is an event that will be hard to replicate.  On a day such as this no single could possibly be my Bird of the Day.

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