Author: Peter T

23 March 2013. Cootes Paradise Hamilton ON. We are excited around here.  We’ve had a pair of Bald Eagles hanging around and taking shots at breeding for several years but never successfully.  Last year it seemed they’d finally got on track but in the end it seems the eggs were infertile and nothing came of it.  This year despite a cold and miserable winter, we became aware in mid-late February that the female was on the nest and sitting tight, presumably incubating eggs.  Yesterday a little fuzzy head was seen reaching up to the attending adult and today after several of hours of patient watching we saw two little scrawny-necked heads.  Bald Eagles incubate eggs for at least 35 days so egg laying probably took place in early-mid February.  It will take 10 or more weeks before the young will leave the nest, so lots more drama and anticipation ahead.

I’d made a point of visiting the distant viewing spot to see the Bald Eagles so they were hardly a surprise.  But getting a glimpse of the eaglets was a treat and eclipsed all other sightings.  This photo, taken late last year, is of one of the resident pair, and now a proud parent.

20 March, 2013. Hendrie Valley RBG, Burlington ON. I’d really like to be able to draw birds in the field, I’d like to produce realistic sketches from live birds as they present themselves. It would make for such a cool and professional looking field notebook, just like in the introduction pages of some field guides. It’s a dream I fear, but it helps that I am already able to draw reasonably well, although almost everything I’ve drawn in my life so far was either obligingly stationary or posed. I’m embarking on a disciplined approach to learning; we’ll see.  If it goes well I’ll share it.

Today, in search of some obliging life models, I visited a boardwalk in a valley where people regularly come to feed the birds.  The birds are so conditioned to handouts that they approach closely, wait patiently, stay to eat and generally cooperate.  However, it was eye-wateringly cold and I was so taken by many of the birds that I took more photos than made sketches. Better days lie ahead.

Sightings in scribbled notes alongside the sketches, include those classic family entertainment birds: Blue Jays, Northern Cardinals, and Black-capped Chickadees; no wonder this place is so popular. There was a pair of Trumpeter Swans, many Mallards, and Canada Geese in the ice-rimmed river. A couple of American Tree Sparrrows, a Red-bellied Woodpecker and several male Red-winged Blackbirds had also figured out the easy meal too and hung around.

As I left I noted a male Northern Harrier circling over the valley causing several Blue Jays and Canada Geese to raise alarm calls.  It passed directly overhead and quite low so I was able to clearly make out the overall blue-grey body and wings with ‘dipped in ink’ black tips.  Bird of the Day!

A few Northern Harriers stay around southern Ontario all winter, usually in places where they can hunt over large expanses of fallow or scrubland with a rodent population.  This site was not that sort of place and I suspect that today’s harrier was a spring migrant; coincidentally a nearby hawk migration station reported its first Northern Harrier of the year today. Maybe a coincidence.

 

March 18 2013.  Kilbride & Cootes Paradise, ON. With no intention of looking for birds I went in search of signs of spring, anything spring-like would do. My expectations were low because there’s still plenty of snow where I went and anything brave enough to be thinking of new season growth would likely be buried, but at least I’d get some exercise. The walk and scramble down into a wet valley was pleasant enough and I’ve written a bit about it on the Understory blog.

I paid scant attention to the few birds, a couple of calling Red-winged Blackbirds and a circling Red-tailed Hawk, until I heard the unmistakable hoarse chuckle of a Common Raven. Looking up I spotted it swooping low and disappearing into the tops of some nearby White Pines, Ravens usually seem to fly smoothly and swiftly as if aided by a tail wind. Well, it was an easy  Bird of the Day even though I wasn’t really paying attention.

Ravens have started to make something of a comeback to this part of southern Ontario, where once upon a time they were abundant but have been largely absent for the past century or so.  Over the last ten years there have been regular reports of ravens nesting around here, but never more than one or two sites so their advance is tenuous although probably gaining momentum.  Still, Common Raven is a notable bird.

Perhaps the final note this spring on migrant Tundra Swans. Last week after they left their Atlantic wintering grounds, thousands of them decided to stop over in our immediate area. It was a swan bonanza unlike any for many years.  Yesterday I heard reports of several hundred gathered on one of the wetlands bordering Lake Ontario and after my earlier Raven encounter went to admire them.  The weather has been threatening all day, and a winter storm was brewing, and when I arrived at the swan site there was a group of just 70 or 80 of them.  I wasn’t altogether surprised because on my way there I had seen several small groups of swans low overhead and heading northwest, I had my suspicions where they’d come from, but I wondered why they’d be leaving so soon, especially with this storm brewing.

From a cold and punishingly windy lookout above the remaining swans I could tell that they were restless, and as I watched, every now and then a small group of 6 to 10 swans would gather and lift off flying hard into strong east wind.  They made little headway but gained height quite rapidly and then, when perhaps two or three hundred feet up, they turned and headed north west, and away they went. Then I put it all together, or so I like to think, that it’s that strong east wind that will carry them on towards the next staging spot.  As for the approaching storm they’ll deal with it as it happens or maybe they’ll skirt around it.  I’m sure by mid afternoon they had all gone and their arrival somewhere a few hundred miles north and west of here will be another birder’s pleasure.

March 17 2013.  Stoney Creek ON.  Before the sun was up and long before anyone else in my household was stirring, I left to drive out to an old flooded quarry that seems to hold special appeal for migrant waterfowl.  It was cold, there was a light dusting of snow across the fields and all shallow ponds and puddles were firmly iced over.  The quarry too was rimmed with ice but there was plenty of open water in the middle and it was full of birds; Canada Geese mostly, hundreds of them.  Milling around with them were Ring-necked Ducks, Mallards, a single Redhead, a few American Widgeon and to add a touch of elegance, a pair of Northern Pintails. Around the edges, as if shunned, were about 30 bulky, necks-tucked-in Tundra Swans.

We don’t see much of Ring-necked Ducks around here.  They’re an early migrant, arriving in late February or early March when the first open water is available.  They’ll congregate for a month or so on larger ponds but then move north to breed in the near north of Ontario. They look much like a Greater or Lesser Scaup, being of the same genus Aythya, but somehow they are touch more dapper, certainly longer necked, taller and rather conical headed, a lot less like a bathtub-duck.  For their handsomeness, and partly because they’re a harbinger of spring, they were today’s Bird of the Day; although I was mightily impressed by the Northern Pintails too.

Later I saw long V skeins of Canada Geese heading my way from far out over Lake Ontario, dozens of them, high and moving quickly.  I stopped to get a better look and felt that they must be migratory flocks heading north from more southern wintering grounds.  Something about them, perhaps a more purposeful look, marked them as different from the parks and gardens variety that has become such an irritant to we urban humans and our sensitivities.

11 March 2013. Tundra Swans, a touch repetitive I know, after all they were my Bird of the Day a couple of weeks ago.  But today was a landmark day, the swans’ return.

These elegant and seemingly gentle birds breed in Alaska and Canada’s far north, and winter (most of them) in their hundreds of thousands along the Atlantic coast and around Chesapeake Bay.  Somehow in very early March they know that the ice is retreating, so in what must be an amazing spectacle, the wintering flocks lift off en masse and head north-west.  The non-stop, first leg of their flight takes them about 500 miles to the Lower Great Lakes, Lake Erie in particular, with many of them passing right overhead; over my head that is.

I had been expecting them for a couple of days now and this morning, reading the newspaper with coffee in hand, I thought I heard the faint call of swans! I was too slow and there was no sign of them by the time I scrambled outside.  An hour or so later, as I left the house to go to the gym, right overhead was a large V formation of perhaps 120 Tundra Swans, I couldn’t have asked for more, although it got better because another two large Vs were following close behind.

Now, what’s special about this is the drama and beauty (in the eye of the beholder admittedly) of the moment, the confirmation that spring is upon us, the undulation and flashing white of the flock and the music of their characteristic whistling  “whoo… whoo” as they go.  Several more times during this cloudy and often rainy day, more skeins of Tundra Swans passed over, each group as arresting as the first sighting.

Worth noting, but hopelessly overshadowed by the swans, was hearing and seeing the first male Red-winged Blackbirds of the year standing sentinel around a wetland.   I was intrigued by the fact that they were not yet down in the cattails as they will be before long; rather they were posted high around the perimeter of the wetland as if overseeing it from afar.  As more males arrive I expect to see them move in to establish the boundaries of their piece of paradise.  They’ll squabble over boundaries, reworking the shape of their jigsaw of territories and then they’ll have something to offer the females who’ll follow in a few weeks.