Author: Peter T

November 21 2012. Millgrove ON. Friends of ours live on a quiet residential street in a nearby rural community, they’re surrounded mostly by farmland but it’s not far to plenty of woodland, wetlands and old pasture. Their back-yard bird feeder attracts a good variety of interesting visitors including Red-bellied and Downy Woodpeckers, House Finches and Pine Siskins. Like many feeders it’s easily visible from the dining room table, so it adds a certain interest and sometimes excitement to meal times.
Most feeders spill some seed, which attracts ground-feeding birds like Juncos, Tree Sparrows and Mourning Doves. The spilled seed also attracts nocturnal visitors, mice in particular who in turn attract owls; all sorts of bloodthirsty games go on in our back yards at night. I’ve heard many people speak of wintering Sharp-shinned Hawks that hangs around the neighbourhood, and some have witnessed a Mourning Dove or Junco make the ultimate sacrifice.
But, back to our rural friends. We had arranged to take a long hike with them yesterday afternoon. As we were doing the usual social “Hey how are you?” and ‘Where would you like to go?’ part of the visit, we spotted a young Cooper’s Hawk sitting quietly on an overhead branch of a large Norway Maple. I think it clearly understood that it was in habitat that suggested a well-fed winter ahead. We admired it for quite a while and it obligingly let me take several photographs, but eventually we tired of each other and the bird flew off when we weren’t looking. We duly headed off in beautiful late fall weather to one of my favourite birding destinations for a five or six kilometer hike. It was a great hike but this ‘favourite’ spot was just about devoid of bird life, that’s November I guess.
So the Cooper’s Hawk was quite deservedly Bird of the Day. Here it is, note the yellow iris and irregularly streaked belly both indicators that it’s a young bird hatched this year.

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November 20 2012. Hamilton Harbour, ON. As we returned home this morning from what was mostly a domestic excursion, we ran into a traffic holdup caused by a canal lift-bridge being raised to allow a large ship to pass into our harbour from Lake Ontario . These holdups are lengthy, frequent and a part of life around here. You can be philosophical about the enforced delay and enjoy the pause in the day, or if time is at a premium, take the multi-lane highway that soars high over the canal but which also detaches you from the fabric of life and community around.
I could see that the bridge was up from quite a distance away and decided that rather than sit in line between a large cement truck and a Ford F150 pickup (both with engines running), I’d make a detour to see what ducks were to be found in one of the harbour’s backwaters.
The particular backwater is hard up against an industrial service road. Parking and watching birds at the roadside is an uneasy experience but it’s not all that busy and the regular traffic seems to make allowances for the birders and fishermen who take their chances. As I pulled alongside the pond I immediately spotted a Canvasback not very far from the road. By the time I’d stopped and got my binoculars out and focused, A pair of Canvasbacks and several Ruddy Ducks were moving away quickly. There was no chance of photographing them, the light was poor in the November gloom, the birds were moving fast and a veil of fog was starting to obscure them. To my mind Canvasbacks are aristocrats among ducks and for that reason alone they were my Bird of the Day, admittedly the competition was thin but they probably would have been anyway. I’ll go back another day soon and hope for better light and more time to see what else is there with them.
This photo of three Canvassbacks, some Ring-necked Ducks and a couple of American Widgeon, was taken in Arizona a year ago.

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 November 17 2012,. Hamilton Harbour, ON. Tundra Swans are back.  They visit us twice a year: in early March, and again in November.  The March visit is their first stop after a non-stop flight from their coastal wintering grounds in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, it’s usually quite brief.  They’re on their way to their tundra breeding grounds and waste little time socializing.  In November things are a little less urgent, they arrive when they’re pushed here and often hang around until driven further south by the promise of nasty weather; if mild enough a handful will spend the winter here.

They showed up just yesterday here at the west end of Lake Ontario.  I’d heard they’d arrived so went looking for them on our large enclosed bay.  It was quite early and everything had been touched by frosts, the water was calm and a haze lay across the entire bay veiling some of the uglier evidence of industry and commerce; quite pretty really.

I thought I could hear Tundra Swans, but just faintly.  We have wintering Trumpeter Swans and year-round Mute Swans, and the latter, while mostly silent, do sometimes make a gentle snorting whistle that could, in a pinch and from far way, be taken for the soft “Whoow” of a Tundra Swan, and there were plenty of large white waterfowl to be seen so it was hard to be sure. I drove another block east, made my way down to the shore of the bay and there, as I’d hoped, were about twenty Tundra Swans.  Most were feeding on aquatic weed, tipping up and paddling the air wildly to stay inverted.  A quiet murmur passed between members of the flock; that was the distant sound I’d heard. Almost everything about Tundra Swans appeals to me, they were certainly my Bird of the Day even before a later encounter with a Screech Owl found sitting on its doorstep and a small squadron of male Hooded Mergansers resplendent like a bunch of 19^th century Prussian army cadets with extravagant headgear.

November 16 2012. Ruthven Park Cayuga ON.   It’s duck season.  For some that means food on the table, but for me it means the return of many of our quite spectacular waterfowl, spectacular because the males have left behind their drab, mid-summer, eclipse plumage and are dressed in their finest.  Yesterday morning before a morning meeting I went to the same shallow pond where on October 17^th I’d seen a group of four Great Egrets, in their place were groups of Northern Shovelers, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal and Hooded Mergansers. In every group the males were gleaming in the morning sun, spectacular – as I said earlier.

Today I visited the bird observatory property to remove some European Buckthorn, an invasive shrub species, from the woodlands.  Naturally I was just as busy watching out for birds.  On the river were a couple of large groups of nervous looking Canada Geese, I say nervous-looking because they behaved as if they’ve visited too many seemingly quiet backwaters and corn fields that turned out to be quite deadly.  Further downstream a group of about a dozen mergansers was mixing in with some young Common Goldeneyes.  The mergs were mostly Common Mergansers, easy to tell apart when you see the stark white of the males’ upperparts which distinguishes them from the darker Red-breasted Mergansers.  But the females are not quite as easy to separate although on the Common the sharp line at the throat between the dark head and the pale breast is diagnostic.

Mergansers on the river can be quite evasive and I had a low expectation of photographing them, but to my delight my rather amateurish ambush paid off and I was lucky to get this shot of a group of Common Mergansers and a single Hooded Merganser, all females.

November 10 2014,. Hamilton Harbour, ON. Several years ago, when on-line reports of bird sightings were a new thing, there was a bit of a race to report the first singing Cardinal of late winter/early spring.  Year over year the dates crept earlier: Mid-February, Early February, Mid January and so on.  And then one year the earliest report came sometime in December and, well it all became a bit silly.  And besides, the various on-line bird group systems had become more serious and focused. No-one seems to care about early dates for cardinal song anymore.

Well today as I walked along a well used bike path squeezed between a railway marshalling yard and the shoreline of a large harbour, I heard a Northern Cardinal singing: “PEETA PEETA PEETA – Teww tewww.”; just briefly.  It was really quite heartwarming, an advance preview of the next spring so far off.  And as I was musing that perhaps I could report this record-early (or record-late) cardinal song, it continued on – but all wrong!  It was a Northern Mockingbird, doing what they do better than almost any other bird: mimicking.

I could hear it rather faintly, yet it was obviously coming from this small offshore island, which was not very many yards away. Mockingbirds do this, they’ll run through their full repertoire, but softly as if to keep it to themselves for comfort; or maybe they’ve been told to practice every day.  I wrote down some of the song’s other notes as follows: “puurrr puurr, sheek sheek, Kingfisher rattle, peeew peeew,ch ch ch ch wrrr wrrr.”  You really had to be there.

They can be quite skittish when they think you’re looking for them, or even worse at them, but as I moved closer it emerged from among the tangle of wild rose to allow me a few photos.

For that performance the mockingbird was my Bird of the Day.  There was little else of interest, although a couple of late Red–necked Grebes, a tidy little flight of four Red–breasted Mergansers and an American Kestrel atop a utility pole were nice sightings. And I did see a real Northern Cardinal, but it wasn’t singing; it didn’t need to.