Author: Peter T

14 August 2013. Burlington ON. In the past 24 hours a strong cold front swept down from the north giving us our first hint of the leaf-drop months ahead.  It’s not that it’s suddenly turned cold, it’s just relatively colder than the past month or two, cool enough that I bring my pots of orchids indoors for the night.  As these cold fronts sweep through, starting now as summer wanes and continuing into November, they trigger a surge of birds, as if they’ve been cued that it’s time to clear out.  I noticed the first responders yesterday afternoon, I stepped out of the house to investigate the loud shrieking of a Merlin, an unusual bird here at any time, and looking up saw swirls of southwestward bound Chimney Swifts swooping and tumbling in the buffeting winds.

One of the best spots to see fall migrants around here is a certain lakeside resting-place called Woodland Cemetery.  For many the chance will surely come to spend a lot of time in a cemetery and I’m not trying to rush anyone into it, but in late summer and fall a quiet hour or two here will reward you with some good birding. I went there this morning.

I saw singles of Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Yellow Warbler and Red-eyed Vireo, any of which could just as easily have been local birds, not migrants.  I could hear a bit of commotion and soon came across a couple of family groups: three or four Baltimore Orioles, mostly juveniles although one of the group was still trying to sing so perhaps it was an adult male, and as many as five Northern Flickers.  I managed to get these photographs, (click to enlarge) both of youngsters I think: the oriole is probably a female, determined by the orangey wash being very light across its middle and strongest on its upper breast, and also its scapular (or shoulder) feathers are brownish-grey with dark centres;  The young male flicker has still not developed all of his flight feathers, some of them are still a little truncate and his red patch in the back of his head is rather muted. The malar stripe (moustache) makes it a male.

There will be many more days trying to get glimpses of departing birds, the bird population is at its highest right now with the young of the year included.  But the long journey south, predators along the way and for some the winter scarcity of food will weed out many of them before next year’s breeding season.

12 August 2013.  Morriston ON.  My only foray into the woods today drew a blank.  I think I heard distant Black-capped Chickadees and Great-crested Flycatchers, but that’s about it.  There were tons of mosquitoes though and even a liberal (for me) application of bug repellent achieved only partial protection.  As a precaution I pulled on an old white business shirt that I keep in my car for going into biting-insect territory, light colours supposedly helps minimize your mosquito-appeal and it’s also a bit of recognition that I have no further use for business shirts; retirement’s revenge.

Leaving all of that behind I set off to a country clothing outfitters in search of some really good wet-weather boots. My 45 year-old wellies, while still rugged and perfectly watertight, are absolute murder on my aging feet.  Heading west and driving along a quiet country road, I spotted a large pond surrounded in large part by pasture land and flanked on one side by a rather comfortable looking home. Those homeowners have set up a rather nice little dock at the pond’s edge with a larger sitting area at its end together with a couple of comfortable chairs and a canoe tied alongside. Just offshore a fountain of considerable capacity spews an unending plume of water.  I suspect that such a continuous aeration of the pond has significantly changed the ecology of the pond and whether it’s for the better or not probably depends on whether you ask pre- or post-fountain organisms.  But it looks pretty, there are sparkling white water lilies scattered here and there and the pond’s perimeter is defined with tall cattails.

Scanning across the pond I watched a Great Blue Heron beating the living daylights out of a small catfish. I learned how to prepare a catfish lunch, here’s what you do: shake it hard, smack it against a log a couple of times, drop it and watch for movement, lunge and stab again, shake a bit more and finally a couple more whacks seems to do the trick. Serve immediately.

Just along from the Great Blue Heron was a Green Heron, I was startled by the size difference.  It’s not that I always thought of Green Herons as big birds, it’s just that’s seeing them side by side really emphasized how small the Green Heron is.

Then in the middle of the pond I found a couple of Pied-billed Grebes, an adult and a juvenile; they really made my day.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Pied-billed Grebe; they become quite hard to find, even elusive while breeding, seeking out ponds and small lakes with dense emergent vegetation like cattails. They are an odd duck (to coin a phrase), unlike most grebes they score pretty low on the elegance quotient, they sit in the water with a rather hump-backed look and are coloured from the drab end of the palette.  Almost all authors are at pains to draw attention to their bill, perhaps it’s the most notable thing about them for it’s so strikingly chicken-like and, as the bird’s name suggests, it’s pied.

But for all that they’re neat birds.  They are the hallmark of a small lake or pond and have the ability to sink without effort until there’s just a periscope poking above water.  You can see the difference in the pictures below. It’s almost as if it has pulled out the drain plug.  That’s almost what’s happened, in fact by compressing its body feathers it has squeezed out the air and reduced its buoyancy; a clever trick.

Two pictures above will probably not be visible if you’re reading this as an email.  Go to the site to see them in all their glory

8 August 2013. Port Maitland ON. The Short-billed and the Long-billed Dowitchers are closely related, almost identical shorebirds, so alike that it takes pages of the best references to tease out the fine distinguishing details. I have a 1905 field guide which includes a footnote to the Dowitcher which reads: “Long-billed Dowitcher is found in western N.A.  The bill is supposed to be longer, but the plumage is identical and the birds probably are’. So somewhere along the way the two were declared to be separate species, which leaves us trying to figure out which is which.

Distinguishing those differences in the field is a tough go for most birders, especially when you’re looking across a mudflat to the distant far side where most shorebirds hang out.  Geography helps a bit, exactly where you are in North America in relation to the species’ distribution and migratory patterns sometimes helps; it so happens that we’re in an area where Short-billed Dowitchers are the default species.  In other parts of the continent it’s not so cut and dried and to complicate matters there are distinct sub-species of the Short-billed Dowitcher. At risk of belabouring the whole matter I quote from Pete Dunne’s analysis, “The degree of difference between Short-billed and Long-billed also varies between subspecies.  The Atlantic form of Short-billed is most unlike Long-billed in size, shape and breeding plumage; the prairie form most closely resembles Long-billed in breeding plumage and the pacific form comes closest to long-billed in size.”  Does that help?

It’s too much for me and I think local birders are on pretty safe ground to call any dowitcher a Short-billed Dowitcher.  That’s what I did today.

But what of the day?  I took a trip to some open mudflats and once I’d made my peace with the affable guardian in the Ford F150 pick-up, I enjoyed some excellent shorebird watching.  

I stopped first at a weed-clogged pond where a hen Wood Duck was shepherding her brood around.  The babes have all grown up, they’re the same size as mum, but obedient nevertheless.  Nearby a family of Eastern Kingbirds and loose groups of Barn Swallows found lots of flying insects to pick from the water lily leaves.

At the mudflats, an adult Bald Eagle flew heavily from left to right and set the shorebirds scattering for a few minutes, but they eventually calmed down, so I set up my telescope.

It was marvelous: lots of beautiful classic Greater Yellowlegs, they were easily distinguished from just as many Lesser Yellowlegs.  A few Pectoral Sandpipers showing their crisp brown bibs, some busy invertebrate-picking Semi-palmated Sandpipers, and a group of five or six Short-billed Dowitchers.  The sight of them made me gasp they were so plump and orangey, so perfectly-shorebirdish, so Bird of the Day.

Then my telescope broke and took the fun  out of it all. Without it I have NO hope of even teasing myself with shorebird i.d.

However all is not lost, there’s always spring birding along the Atlantic coast.  A little over a year ago I was on the New Jersey shore at a place called Stone Harbor, nearby were many other nautical place names like : Carnival Bay and Long Reach and what they all had in common was streets lined with seaside condo-homes and shops stuffed full of gifts, sunglasses and T-shirts.  All of which incidentally was virtually wiped off the map five months later by Hurricane Sandy. But anyway when I was there, Arctic-bound Short-billed Dowitchers were quite abundant and easily approached along the edges of the inner harbour salt marshes.  Here are some photos of various shorebirds from that visit but you’ll only be able to see them if you’re logged on the website, not if viewed as an email.

2 August 2013. Hamilton ON. It’s a jarring paradox that some of our best birding opportunities are found in some of the ugliest of places.  Hamilton Harbour can be a nasty place, sandwiched between a six lane highway and the gritty and grimy edges of a city that prospered from producing steel.  The harbour has many inlets, tributaries, hard edges, wharves and mud banks, but if you turn your back on the industrial sectors, it becomes almost gracious particularly along its west side where it borders quiet, green neighbourhoods where house prices, even with a view of blast furnaces, are chillingly high.

It’s at one of the smellier, squishy ends of the harbour that birders and shorebirds flock in late summer. Shorebirds stop here to refuel on their journey from the Arctic where they nested (or perhaps more accurately failed to nest, which may account for why some appear so early.)  The outflow from the city’s sewage plant discharges into the harbour and in a project designed to ameliorate the worst of conditions and at the same time provide recreational opportunities (!), the city has created a system of impoundments, marshes, islands and settling ponds, it’s these that the birds find so attractive.

Where there’s muck there’s invertebrates, and where there’s invertebrates there’ll be birds to eat them. Chacun a son goût.

This morning before anyone else in the house was about, I went to see what I could find and identify.  Viewed over long distances, shorebirds can be very challenging, there are many lookalikes and subtle colour and size differences are often hard to determine.  Still it was quite rewarding despite the scratchy plants around my ankles, rich odours and traffic roar.  An island in the middle distance is home to a large colony of Common Terns and some are still busy feeding hungry youngsters. Scouring the edges I found several Lesser Yellowlegs, Least Sandpipers and (with some help) a Stilt Sandpiper and two Semi-palmated Plovers.  My best bird, seen briefly and spotted running up the stony banks of the terns’ island was a Ruddy Turnstone.

Two years ago I spent two weeks at a bird observatory at Long Point, Ontario. Ruddy Turnstones were a dime a dozen there. You had to admire them not just for their beauty and approachability, but for their heavy diet of Stable Flies, a nasty biting fly which swarmed in the decaying windrows of wave-tossed aquatic vegetation along the shore.

Today’s bird was still brightly marked in breeding plumage, a lucky sighting because in short order they will moult to a less striking though still elegant plumage for the winter months ahead.  The Ruddy Turnstone is probably the most colourful and dramatically marked shorebird of the northern hemisphere although the American Avocet or Eurasia’s Lapwing might be considered rivals.  You’d wonder why some shorebirds can be so cryptically coloured while others are almost splashy in their finery.  I suspect the answer is that even a dramatic, and to us exuberant, plumage is exactly the right camouflage for a bird on its nest.

26 July 2013. Burlington ON. As if I needed it, today I got a reminder of the value of sitting down.  Not the sitting down you do to watch t.v, or even sitting down because some officious functionary tells you to, but sitting patiently in silence to watch, wait and listen; to see what pops up.

I was exploring a new-to-me woodland, following a well defined but little used path.  The woodland was open, sun-flecked and dry, mostly Sugar Maples overhead and some interesting ferns in the rocky edges.  There were family groups of American Robins and Northern Flickers around,  the robins clucked nervously and milled around, the flickers were quite vocal, chuckling and calling whilst playing improve-your-flight-for-better-fitness games. Interestingly, though not ground-breakingly so, I saw four kinds of woodpecker there, the aforementioned flickers, then Downy, Hairy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, all in the same general area. And speaking of that general area, it was a rather open expanse that sloped away towards denser cover, I found a convenient log and sat quietly for a long time watching over a wide expanse of forest.  There was lots more activity including many Black-capped Chickadees, a couple of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, an Eastern Wood Peewee, Red-eyed Vireos and far away, a singing Winter Wren.

I had to listen hard to be sure it was a Winter Wren, such a faint, tiny and thread-like song.  I sat quietly waiting to see if it would come closer, and over the period of twenty minutes or so it did indeed seem to move in my direction.  In time it grew much louder until to my delight, it came close enough to be able to see.  Despite the lateness of the season, I conjecture that it was staking out the boundary of its territory just as some traditionalist villagers do to this day in England.  Many years ago my cousin participated in the ancient Beating of the Bounds of the City of Southampton; it would doubtless be a long walk but perhaps it ended at a pub.

The delight of the day was when the Winter Wren ended up on a branch over my head, singing its heart out.  For a bird the size of a baby’s fist it packs a powerful song.  I managed to get loads of pictures and even make a decent movie of it in full song.  I have posted it on YouTube, click here and let me know what you think. It was so obliging! I’ve rarely been able to get more than a glimpse of a Winter Wren, they usually creep around among the darkest roots and lowest branches, rarely emerging, and even then only to fly quickly away to the next dark and impossible recess. This Winter Wren did everything possible to be my Bird of the Day.

Much later I stopped at a bridge that crossed a quiet slow moving river where the tinny chittering of a family of Eastern Kingbirds filled the air.  In the bright sunlight I was able to get some nice photos of one of them, rewarding because you don’t often get to look down on them like this, another obliging bird. A good day to be out.