Author: Peter T

January 6 2019. Oakville ON. Eight-fifteen a.m. is still fairly low-light in early January but despite it, three of us made an early start to hike around a large provincial park campground hoping for interesting winter birds.  It’s an area of mixed mature woodland and grassland threaded with access roads and punctuated by campsites. We were aware of recent reports of owls so made a point of looking at the sorts of places where owls might hang out by day.

Our morning started well with a Northern Shrike and shortly afterwards a Northern Mockingbird, of the two of them the shrike was perhaps the more notable, they can be few and far between.

In our meanderings we wandered different directions and astonishingly between us we quite quickly found a Barred Owl and a Great Horned Owl.  Like all nocturnal owls they spend daylight hours trying to avoid unwelcome attention, but despite their efforts the Barred Owl was quite conspicuous sitting quietly only about ten meters up in a White Pine.

The Great Horned Owl,  in another White Pine, was much higher up but hugging close to the trunk and succeeded in being fairly inconspicuous.

Much trudging and looking later, the sky grew more overcast and a brief flurry of snow marked a drop in temperature, so we started the walk homeward.  We struggled around the edge of a pine plantation and as I passed between pine branches admiring the soft sweeping needles I suddenly found myself almost eye to eye with this Northern Saw-whet Owl.

Saw-whets are one of the most common owls in forested habitats but are secretive, so hard to find; today’s was the first Saw-whet I’ve seen unfettered in the wild in forty years. It is one of our smallest owls (about the size of an American Robin) and certainly cute. But for all its cuteness I don’t think we should underestimate its capability as a hunter.  Throughout most of its range, it hunts at night from low vantage points and preys on small mammals like mice and voles which it locates unerringly by acute hearing.  The species is widespread across southern Canada and northern US states but its populations, distribution, behavior, and breeding biology is not well known.

My discovery delighted us all, a three-owl day is a red-letter day.  The Barred Owl and the Great Horned Owls were both great sightings but the day, in the end, belonged to this Northern Saw-whet Owl.

January 1 2019.  Arteban Rd, Ancaster, ON. New Year’s Day, sober or hung over it’s a day of doing nothing much. I whiled away the morning at domestic odds and ends: crosswords, tidying, sorting photos and reading the news on-line.  I kept musing that I really should get out and re-find my walking legs after too many idle days. So, after lunch I sent a message to a handful of friends inviting them, on just 45 minutes notice, to join me.  “Chance of bluebirds and shrikes. Will welcome your company.” I said.  It hit a responsive chord.

It wasn’t much a birding day but the company was bright and we more or less welcomed the fresh north-westerly breeze, cold though it was. When I say it wasn’t much of a birding day, the truth of it was that we encountered perhaps six species. Had we not come across a small group of Eastern Bluebirds quite early in our walk, I think we might have denied that we were even looking for birds had anyone asked.

Eastern Bluebirds are easily our prettiest thrush and some are hardy enough to stay through the winter. Where we were there was an abundance of rose hips and I’m sure the bluebirds were drawn to them. I found bluebirds in roughly the same location last March and wrote about them and included some very satisfying photos. They are an easy bird to photograph – once you’ve found them.

One of today’s birds (a female) perched long enough for me to get this rather peaceful photo. Bird of the Day.

December 26^th. 2018, Grindstone Creek, Burlington, ON.  I hit a new low today but proved a point in doing so. The new low was just twelve species in a morning of diligent searching; the point proved was that, despite the odds, there is always a Bird of the Day.

I was taking part in the Christmas Bird Count, a continent-wide project that has been running uninterrupted here since 1921, I participate periodically. My first Christmas Bird Count day, about thirty years ago, was so profoundly cold I have trouble shaking its memory. But a few days ago I was asked me to help out again and, feeling the lethargy that comes with December, I agreed thinking it would do me good to get out. As it turned out, conditions were good today, temperatures well above freezing, no wind and it was dry.  Dressed well, I enjoyed exploring new places and making mental notes of promising sites to revisit; the only problem was there were almost no birds.

I started by making my way slowly along some residential streets, the sort that are neither urban nor rural, looking closely for stocked feeders and the birds that might be drawn to them. My reward was just two Downy Woodpeckers.

One of these days a birder, maybe me, will have some difficulty explaining to a police officer quite why he or she is: A) Apparently prowling through a quiet nice-little-neighbourhood-like-this; and B) Using binoculars to look at folks’ homes, gardens and porches..

Leaving residents to their morning coffee and with one species to my credit, I made my way to a hikers’ trail that follows the edge of a deep valley, open fields to the left and quiet hardwood forest falling away to the right, I was hoping for anything with wings. I felt sure that an owl or two, perhaps even a group of roosting Long-eared Owls, must be watching me from their daytime hiding spots. If so it was definitely a one-sided encounter. The payoff was a mental note to revisit this corner of the world next spring; it will fairly ring with birdsong in June.  I shouldn’t forget though that, although deadly quiet, I added a far-off, solitary Red-tailed Hawk to my day’s list. Two hours work behind me and two species in the bag.

A roadside flock of about a hundred European Starlings didn’t add any particular sparkle to the day but boosted individual bird numbers. But with three species I’d reached a quarter of the day’s eventual tally. Happily a Northern Cardinal, a Blue Jay (one!) and the distant call of an American Crow soon took me to six. Then followed a long spell with nothing at all, although I noted that road traffic increased as people started to emerge from their post-Christmas torpor.

I made my way to another valley-side trail having been tipped that there, with luck, I might find Wild Turkeys (birder code, WITU) and maybe some owls.  But I saw nothing. Retracing my steps, I heard a funny gurgling sound, faint and somewhat familiar. Probably some kind of quiet turkey conversation I thought. Then came another and a third, louder and not far behind me. Semi-convinced, I penned ‘WITU? 3’ in my note book and thought how well-suited and appropriate turkeys would be to this mixture of thick forest and open farmland. I caught a glimpse of a large bird wheeling by behind me and above the tree tops, I followed its direction until it resolved itself as a Common Raven, and then it all made sense, it was the raven’s chuckle I had heard, not turkeys at all.  All thoughts of turkeys vanished and I was struck by the size of the raven with its long, tapered wings and diamond-shaped tail. It opted to pick a fight with a passing Red-tailed Hawk and the two of them engaged in a rolling, swooping entanglement until a decision of some kind called a truce and they went their separate ways. So, there it is, point made: no matter how dreary the day, there’s always something, one bird that’ll make me say wow! Today this completely unexpected Common Raven, My Bird of the Day, once rare around here but now increasing in numbers.

And for the sake of the arithmetic of the day’s short list, the others were: Black–capped Chickadee (9), House Sparrow (8), Canada Goose (7), one each of Dark-eyed Junco, and Red-breasted Nuthatch.  A short list but, as ever, it has its Bird of the Day.

December 18^th. 2018, Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON.  In need of exercise and a dose of nature I walked into my valley today. Stripped of the colours, the textures and the piled-on distractions of spring, summer and fall, the crooked bones of December hid little. It was deadly quiet except for the thin squeaks of Black-capped Chickadees and hollow, far away crow-sounds, anything that moved was worth binocular-inspection. It was a reminder of birdlife rhythms that ebb and flow like a tide in the valley, rushing to full flood in May, a slack-water pause for summer and then withdrawing by the end of October; now is low tide.

Almost where expected, I caught the small ‘prip’ note of a busy Winter Wren and found it making its way among the riverbank tangles, managing to stay all but out of sight. A lone walker passed behind me, absorbed in his own thoughts. Sometimes such passers-by are curious to know what I’m looking at and I’m usually happy to share, though the wren, I knew, would end up as a ‘well-if-you-say-so’ type of discussion.

Passing under a group of high-reaching American Sycamores a drifting-down mote caught the sunlight and told me to look up; something at work overhead, it said.  A pair of American Goldfinches was drawing seeds from the sycamores’ dense ball-like fruit. It was work that demanded their full attention although they kept in touch with each other with an occasional, soft ‘p’tink’ note. I watched them for a long while, musing that a charm of goldfinches is an apt collective noun.

My Birds of the Day were a group of thirty or so Mallards.  My attention turned to the females whose usual role in life is to be overlooked but today seemed every bit as eye-catching as the males.  (Perhaps it is the male role to draw attention from the critical female task of incubating the next generation.) Their late summer and fall moult is well behind them and they are dressed and ready for the hard days of winter in crisp plumage, waterproof and snug.

I was struck by the clear and beautiful definition of each individual feather. How they fit and lie in precise groups and overlays to give contour and function. Examine it for a while and you’ll never again think of plumage as random.

December 5 2018. Sedgewick Park, and Bronte Harbour, Oakville, ON.  An odd pairing of My Birds of the Day to be sure: Snowy Owl, a symbol of the bleakest winter landscape, and Hooded Warbler, a neotropical insectivore that breeds here but should be in Central America right now. Certainly a stark contrast that requires some explanation.

It was a lightly overcast day, cold, hovering around zero Celsius, just at the point where should-be-soggy underfoot is crunchy dry. I spent an hour or two at my favourite sewage treatment plant (see November 7^th) watching a female Hooded Warbler, an Orange-crowned Warbler, a handful of Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Hermit Thrush.  These were winter delights involving no field-craft or birding skill of my own, they were all widely known to be lingering in this little haven of relative warmth. It was perhaps the avian equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

Satisfied with warbler time, I drove a short distance to a mostly man-made harbour on the shore of Lake Ontario. In a somewhat sheltered corner, plates of thin ice clicked and clinked as they jostled on the surging waters and not many yards away a trio of Hooded Mergansers was diving for dinner.

Like the neo-tropical warblers of earlier, I’d been told exactly where to look for the Snowy Owl, out near the lighthouse.  Again, no birding skill needed just the willingness to stand where directed exposed to a cool northwest breeze and look across the water. I said a cool breeze because, although my hands soon objected, in a month or two such a breeze will more likely be bitterly cold, the sort that deadens fingers and penetrates to your core.

Snowy Owl was a youngster, the dense dark barring across its belly was a giveaway. According to the Cornel Lab of Ornithology’s excellent Birds of North America website, it will take three to four years for a female to attain adult plumage but eight to ten years for a male to reach the breathtaking almost pure snowy white state.

Back to the warblers for a minute. As discussed in my Northern Parula post of a month ago, they definitely don’t belong here in December; however, the owl does – but with some explanation. They are an arctic bird, circumpolar in distribution, and many spend long dark winters above the Arctic Circle. Others move south to tundra country and farther into Canada’s provinces. Lake Ontario is quite far south but we have been seeing Snowy Owls around here almost every winter for a few years, they’ve almost become reliable.  The winter of 2011-12 resulted in snowies being seen in every province and 31 states, (including Hawaii, albeit with much head-scratching as to how it got there, did it hitch a ride on a ship?). More recently the winter of 2013-14 saw a big irruption and it happened again in 2016-17. There are more of them and more often.  Much research has been done but logical suggestions that periodic large irruptions are tied to the boom-bust cycles of arctic lemming populations are not borne out. So what’s going on.? Can we point to climate change as a factor?  Or could it be that there are more and better dressed birders, spending more time with sophisticated optical equipment and instantly connected?