Author: Peter T

February 28 2013.  Yesterday I decided to shake off winter and take a look at the waterfowl along the Niagara River.  It’s a short river; in some ways it’s more of a large spillway than a river. Rushing just 60 Km. to connect Lakes Erie and Ontario, it’s a stocky and frighteningly powerful waterway, not just for its sheer volume but because it includes the precipitous drop over the famed Niagara Falls.  Swans, geese and ducks love it because there’s lots of food and the fast moving water stays open through the most penetratingly cold days of winter.

We started our leisurely riverside drive at Fort Erie and followed the river downstream almost as far as Niagara Falls, which is about half way along the river’s length.  We made frequent stops at the many lookouts and parking lots and almost every stop included wonderful birding.

We saw all three Merganser species: hundreds of Red-breasted and Common Mergansers, a single Hooded Merganser, which seemed a little curious at first, but then they are a species which prefers smaller ponds and quiet backwaters. A Hooded Merg’ up close is quite spectacular, Pete Dunne in his Essential Field Guide Companion, describes it as a “Long, slender, low profiled dart of a duck with a histrionic headpiece…”  and “…The boldly patterned drake, adorned with a crest that opens and closes like a Chinese fan, is hard to overlook…”  For a while I thought it might be my Bird of the Day even though it was rather hard to pick out from among a mass of Buffleheads. However there was much more to come.

For a while we admired a Great Black-backed Gull standing on a rock close to the shore with some Ring-billed and Herring Gulls.  When I raised my camera to snatch a photograph it moved away and shoved a young (second winter) Herring Gull aside from a more secure and distant rock.

Sometimes I’ll spot and celebrate a species for its scarcity then quite soon after discover that it’s really quite abundant.  That happened to me in Mexico when I spotted my first male Vermillion Flycatcher brilliant atop a mesquite bush, I was exultant, but within an hour I’d found dozens more.  Their eye-candy status was not diminished in the least, but it permitted my heart rate to steady a bit.  Yesterday the same happened with Canvasbacks and Tundra Swans.  First we’d find a small cluster and then as we moved on, more and more.  Once, when stepping out of the car we disturbed a near-shore flock of hundreds of Canvasbacks who paddled away nervously and then spontaneously took collective flight in a roaring whoosh.  They flew away, circled, watched us for a while, then settled back not too far away. As the historically most-favoured ‘table duck’ they have good reason to maintain a healthy distance.

We came across a small group of six or seven Tundra Swans loafing by the shore and as I looked them over I could hear many more farther off.  It turned out there must have been something in the order of a hundred or more up and down the mid reaches of the river, just gathering in small groups and cooing gently among themselves to maintain contact.  They were my Birds of the Day, displacing the Hooded Merganser and Great Black-backed Gull, which had both prompted a Wow! response earlier on.

The open water would have been enough to hold this group here all winter, by far the majority of Tundra Swans (hundreds of thousands probably) are wintering along the Atlantic seaboard and around Chesapeake Bay.  But within the next couple of weeks they’ll all take advantage of the first signs of spring to move northwards in long straggling skeins heading for their far-north breeding grounds.

Every glance across the river included dozens and sometimes hundreds of: Common Goldeneye, Buffleheads and Greater Scaup.   These flocks were liberally sprinkled with many Redheads, Mallards and American Black Ducks. On the far opposite bank, a group of Great Blue Herons high up in some willows set us speculating whether they were over-wintering birds or spring arrivals; or maybe some of each.

If waterfowl populations are, as is generally believed, a sad fraction of what they were before Europeans appeared on the scene, then the Niagara River may at one time have been almost solid with wintering ducks, geese and swans.

February 23 2012. Burlington On. Around mid-day today we were walking down our street,  two sons, a daughter-in-law, one small mongrel dog and me.  Seeing a quick flash of wings rising from a snow pile at the edge of a neighbour’s lawn, I rather impressed myself with my quick processing of the evidence: a large fast bird; an urban setting; mid- winter; it must be a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

I halted my family, “Stop, stop!  Look!  There – in that tree. Right in front of you! A Sharp-shinned Hawk.. It just flew up.”  We couldn’t quite see it but I was as sure as I could be.  Two more paces, and there it was, about four feet off the ground, in the outer branches of a small lilac, almost within touching distance and looking at us.  It was a youngster, brown with a streaky breast and it was making barely audible ‘cheep’ sounds. As Sharp-shinned Hawks go it was unremarkable.

My older son looked at me, pityingly I think, and said, “How do you see this stuff?”  “Well I just saw it fly up.” I replied. Then we talked about how Sharp-shinned Hawks have learned to prey on unwitting small birds at back-yard feeders, and how I’ve heard from several people tell me about a Mourning Dove or Junco that disappeared in an explosion of feathers from their bird feeder.

He said, ”Cool.”

I thought: Bird of the Day.

February 16 2013.  Burlington ON.  I’ve shaken off the remnants of any longing to be in the sub-tropics where, if nothing else, bird action is unceasing, lively and productive. Reinvigorated and resigned to the monochromatics of winter birds I set out to see what waterfowl could be found around a nearby marina.

My wandering was memorable as much for sounds of the pans of ice grunting, sighing and rattling, as it was for the birds. This is a reliable gathering place for dozens of Mute and Trumpeter Swans, hundreds of Mallards and countless American Black Ducks, Coots and Scaup.  They are drawn, I believe, by the regular provision of feed corn brought in daily by swan enthusiasts. Who wouldn’t be? A little way offshore Common Goldeneye, Common and Red-breasted Mergansers and White-winged Scoters cruise around.

Flotillas of White-winged Scoters were diving for plentiful food discovered close to the shore, but rather than hang around and feed, they tended to stay offshore,  paddle purposefully in, dive and feed and then hurry back out again; there was a steady parade of comings and goings.  Watching them closely I thought how menacing the males look with their dark eyes underlined in white and their wide bill flattened like a prizefighter’s nose.

Every now and then an oddity shows up at the marina, last winter it was a young Common Eider, this year it’s a fine looking male Wood Duck who is every bit as determined to share in the offerings of food as the larger and jostling Mallards.  I watched a corps of heavy-lens photographers crouching and waiting for the perfect shot, and wondered if birds feel any sense of unease at the cold, dispassionate lenses eyeing them; they very well may, many times I’ve had a bird fly away apparently spooked by the pointing camera, even when I think I’m standing unthreateningly still.  I grabbed a few pictures of the Wood Duck, none of them a money shot but this one captures a bit of its feisty stick-up-for-itself nature.

As I was about to leave I watched a couple of Trumpeter Swans walking across the thin ice sheet, apparently it was too thin because a sudden collapse left one floating in a very small opening and struggling to climb out. Its companion showed little concern and left it to its own devices.

February 13 2013. This morning’s sky was overcast with some threads of sunshine trying to find an opening.  As I walked into the YMCA I heard the first real cardinal spring song coming from a garden a short distance away.  It’s amazing what a few notes of “Tewww-tewww-tewww’ can do to a mid-winter morning.

This was a male Northern Cardinal responding to something telling him spring courtship is on the agenda and he had better stake out his home turf before someone else gets in ahead of him. Probably the cue was daylight length, we get nearly 12 hours of daylight now (ten and a half hours between sunrise and sunset). Time to get organized; and besides, tomorrow is St. Valentines’ Day, a sweetheart would be in order.

When we get a bright sunshiny day there will be more males vying for territories and while their clear songs may be heartwarming for us, for them it’s the start of a serious and often combative breeding season.

 

February 9 2013.  My mind has not been on winter birding lately, but yesterday we received about a foot of snow and that got me thinking of Snow Buntings.  To cut a long story short, this morning I ended up sitting in a cold minivan at the side of a windswept country road helping with a spot of banding.

Snow Buntings were the target species, so in a sense they were Bird of The Day.  But the cuteness competition was fierce, Snow Buntings flock together with Lapland Longspurs and Horned Larks, and this morning two Common Redpolls picking at the dried seed-heads of some goldenrod added charm to the morning.

There’s a small group of dedicated academics and citizen scientists who study Snow Buntings; they’re trying to establish the links between various breeding populations and where they spend the winter.  We know Snow Buntings breed above the Arctic Circle in North America, Greenland and Eurasia, and we also know they spend the winter further south in our latitudes.  But who goes where is the question. With almost no-one to observe and study them on their breeding grounds, precious few to check on them in the winter months and vast distances between winter and summer grounds, not a lot is known about them.  Where do ‘our’ winter Snow Buntings breed; and how do they get there?

I am no authority on this, but it appears that Snow Buntings who breed on islands in Hudson Bay, head towards Canada’s prairie provinces for the winter. Further, there’s some evidence that, in April our winter populations make their way to Greenland via the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and then north through Labrador.  Such evidence comes in little pieces and maybe one of today’s birds will add to our knowledge in a couple of months.