Author: Peter T

May 22 2018, Belleplain Forest, NJ. This bird-packed day, in which we visited three of Cape May’s birding hot-spots, was vividly illuminated by yellow-birds, notably: Common Yellowthroat, Prothonotary Warbler, Yellow-breasted Chat and Yellow-throated Warbler. While I’m at it, and to be all-inclusive, I should also toss in Lesser Yellowlegs, although circumstances were different and frankly yellow is little more than an afterthought in that case.

Our Common Yellowthroat was seen at the first stop, Higbee Beach, but we’re pretty familiar with them and since there was precious little else of interest (except the Indigo Bunting below), we left to explore stop number two, Cape May Point State Park.

The State Park is a popular tourist stop, mostly for its lighthouse I think, although headlands, capes and lands’ ends will draw a crowd, lighthouse or not. Lighthouses have their well-earned virtues: grand views from the top, interesting stories about shipwrecks that drowned other people long ago, and they’re exceedingly helpful if you happen to be under sail twenty miles offshore at night and a little uncertain of your whereabouts. But we were securely ashore and not very much interested in the long views so we chose instead to follow a rambling and well-marked nature trail through Wax Myrtle thickets, pine forests and around a couple of interesting ponds. Part way along this trail we were held up for a while by a welcome entanglement with an evasive but vocal White-eyed Vireo, and then as it departed we turned to continue when a female Prothonotary Warbler popped into view, briefly but just long enough for this photo.

Prothonotary Warblers are trophy birds for north-eastern birders, the male’s head, neck and body are about as orangey-yellow as it’s possible to be without melting, and the female is only slightly less heated. Pete Dunne in his excellent “Essential Field Guide Companion” (worth a read, follow the link) describes the male as “An animate mote of golden sunlight moving through dark swamps.” That’s a male pictured below.

Happy with the female Prothonotary Warbler we alternately led and followed another pair of birders and only stopped dead in our tracks at the sight of a male Turkey* displaying to a largely uninterested group of females. Absurd though it may be, I thought he looked rather like an armchair, certainly he was roughly the same size. And I wondered at the devices of nature that have taken a species down this particular road of extravagant courtship display  while the Prothonotary Warblers, to take a convenient example, simply makes do with a heavy dollop of colour.

 

More colour was just around the next corner when we both heard the demonstrative chattering, chuckling and whistling of a Yellow-breasted Chat; another trophy bird. Apart from being a captivating bird to watch and listen to, the chat is curious in many ways. Until very recently it was tentatively considered to be a warbler despite being twice the size and mass of any other warbler and exhibiting quite un-warbler-like behaviour. Indeed, on second dna-tested thought, it is free to go and have its own family of one, the Icteriidae. Status notwithstanding it was a brilliant bird to meet.

Three yellows in the bag.

Our final yellow bird of the day, a Yellow-throated Warbler, came this evening. This species was unfamiliar to both of us and because they prefer the uppermost tips of White Pines, it took a lot of patience to find one. They were there, we could see what looked to be them flitting from tree to tree and they were singing the right song. Eventually we managed to follow one down to a lower tier and there I managed to get some crummy photographs. But camera aside, we found ourselves breathless at the drama of a small bird with an intensly yellow breast offset by bold black facial markings. THIS was my Bird of the Day, despite all the other yellows and the White-eyed Vireo, Whip-poor-will, Least and Forster’s Terns, Chimney Swifts and too many others, it topped off the day.

* I risk of being tiresome on this point. But since I’ve taken up the Quixotic cause of the name of the Turkey, I should continue to note that while 99.999999% of the world calls this bird a Wild Turkey; I don’t for good reason (I think). i.e Of course it’s wild! If it wasn’t it would probably be wrapped in plastic. There must surely be a better adjective, I petition for ‘Woodland Turkey'(?)

May 21-23 2018, Wetlands Institute, Stone Harbor, NJ. Four years (and a bit) ago I made my first trip to Cape May. I went alone and was smitten by the place, not only by the variety and numbers of birds but also by the shoreline and marsh habitats, which were totally new to me, and the beautiful broadleaf forests.

I returned three years ago with a friend, Dan, and we loved every minute of it for all the same reasons. Today I’m back for the third time with high expectations (well actually make it fourth time because we made an overnight stop here one October) .

I remember encountering Clapper Rails on that first trip and being quite mystified. I could hear them (you could hardly miss them), but seeing them was ridiculously difficult, a glimpse was about the best I could hope for. Their calls seemed to come from the depths of the salt-marsh muds. In my entry for that late April, first day, I wrote: “I spent quite a bit of time trying to spot Clapper Rails, a fairly common bird found in these parts, but it’s so elusive that it both intrigues and frustrates me. It’s a dowdy, mottled grayish-brown, chicken-size bird with a nine-inch long decurved bill. Rarely flying far or for long, it struts and stalks around in the salt-marsh grasses, which at this time of year lie largely winter flattened, and where for the most part it refuses to show itself. But you hear them almost constantly. Presumably they greet each other from time to time, but in order to stay in contact they communicate noisily with a loud and odd series of notes that sounds like a rhythmic, almost industrial, scratching.”

That was at the end of April, but this time, three weeks later on, Clapper Rails were just as noisy but astonishingly easy to see, particularly in the last hours of daylight. The dense marsh grasses have grown to a foot or so, an easy place to get thoroughly lost in but perhaps they now need to come up for air.

 

The expanse of salt-marsh is threaded with gullies, muddy at low tide and swirling with coffee-coloured salt water at high. The Atlantic’s tidal ebb and flow stays in touch with the marsh by these gullies and the Clapper Rails use them as convenient highways, walking or swimming, depending on conditions. We watched individuals calling to their neighbours, exposed to the cold light of day and using exaggerated beak claps while bobbing their hind quarters to the rhythm of the repeated ‘sccrrraaattt scrrraaattt scrrraaattt’ notes.

I managed to take several photos, some of them with the birds standing up as if wanting to be seen and on a couple of other occasions when one of them sauntered down the river’s edge for a quick bath.

Rather than Clapper Rails being Bird of the Day on any particular day, I think Bird of the Evening is where they belong. And, it should be said, they were in the company of Snowy Egrets, Dunlin, Least Sandpipers, Semi-palmated Sandpipers, Short-billed Dowitchers, Fish Crows, Forster’s Terns, Common Terns, Willets and Black Skimmers.

May 21 2018, Cape May, Heislerville, and Belleplain Forest, NJ.  This was our first of three days birding on Cape May, New Jersey, a birding hot-spot largely unnoticed and unappreciated by Canadian birders.  It took us a full day of driving to get here yesterday, much of it through breath-taking, spring-green Appalachia. So today, Monday, as an antidote to eleven hours in the car we spent eleven hours birding.

My companion Lyn had seeing a Red Knot on her list of lifelong ambitions, one Red Knot would be enough she told me. Unfortunately they don’t come in ones, she had to make do with several thousand at a time.

The Red Knot is a strikingly colourful and compact shorebird with a story, some of it jaw-dropping and some of it hand wringing.  On the jaw-dropping side is the bird’s breeding biology, notably the almost incomprehensible 15,000 kilometer, semi-annual migration from the far reaches of South America to its breeding ground shores of Canada’s Arctic Ocean (and back); a journey made in three or four stages with non-stop flights between each refueling stop.

On the hand-wringing side is the knots’ dependence for food at each stage of its migration; at this mid-Atlantic stop they depend on the billions of eggs being laid along the shoreline by Horseshoe Crabs. Saddly a few human generations ago, came the numbskull notion to harvest (a pretty word for an ugly practice) and grind up the crabs for use as agricultural fertilizer. Catastrophic over-harvesting meant fewer eggs to feed Red Knots and less food meant lower breeding success. Ultimately, over the last half-century, the knot populations crashed by something like ninety percent; presumably the Horseshoe Crab population fared no better.

It is still possible to see Red Knots in breathtakingly huge numbers here on the western shores of Cape May, but it is sobering (and hand-wringing) to contemplate what has been lost and what this scene might have looked like a century ago.

Lyn and I watched some of the thousands of those Horseshoe Crabs tumbling in the waves and hauling themselves ashore to multiply. Around them were hundreds upon thousands of shorebirds, particularly Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, Semi-palmated Sandpipers and Laughing Gulls waiting to feast on the eggs. We were almost speechless witnesses to one of the world’s greatest bird spectacles.

Our shorebirds didn’t stop at knots and turnstones. Just outside the scattered coastal village of Heislerville there’s a smallish lagoon threaded with sandbars. At high tide when the thousands of acres of Delaware Bay mudflats are underwater, the lagoon’s sandbars and shingle banks are a gathering place for thousands upon thousands of Dunlin, Least Sandpipers, Forster’s Terns, Common Terns, Black Skimmers, plovers, and even the odd Snowy Egret, all waiting for the tide to recede.

As we studied the crowds I found myself shaking my head at the near preposterousness of it all, seeing birds in front of us which at other times of year we might meet in ones, twos or maybe a dozen; yet they were here in uncountable numbers.  Dotted among them were many Black-bellied Plovers, standing to attention in greys and white with a crisp black morning-coat, dressed as if for a royal wedding. Against the almost baffled what-shall-we-do-now skitterings of their Semi-palmated Plover cousins, Black-bellied Plovers seemed to represent deliberate confidence.

To write of a Bird of the Day from among more than eighty species seen is hardly possible, yet amongst them the Red Knots and the Black-bellied Plovers both brought out the wow! response, so I’ll let it rest there. But equally engaging, compelling and wonderous were: Willets, American Oystercatcher, Clapper Rail, Little Blue Heron, Black Scoter, Acadian Flycatcher and Olive-sided Flycatcher. What a day!

 

May 16 2018 Ward’s Island, Toronto ON. I’m occasionally asked to name my favourite bird; I can’t but I bluster around the question and come up with vague answers. But last year it came to me that while I don’t have an absolute favourite bird species, I think I might have a favourite family of birds, the vireos. Apparently a good answer for what’s just small talk anyway.

Today was a vireo day for me, we saw several Warbling Vireos, heard and perhaps saw one Red-eyed Vireo and spent several minutes at close quarters with a Philadelphia Vireo. Sorting one vireo species from another can be tricky and maybe that’s what endears them to me. I suspect though that Bob, a visiting British birder, found them to be dull fare compared to the many dazzling warblers we showed him. I’m sure for him our May warblers were a perplexing group: mostly small, often yellow with-something-else, and never staying still long enough.We assured him that the glorious male Black-throated Blue Warbler was a very good find but was not to be confused with an equally glorious male Black-throated Green Warbler which was sharing a tree with Yellow-rumped Warblers not far from a briefly seen Canada Warbler.Thank goodness though for Yellow Warblers who are exactly as named, bright yellow.

Eastern Kingbirds and Great Crested Flycatchers seemed to make a good impression on Bob, probably because the flycatchers of Europe are mostly small and inclined to the drab. Then just to confuse the issue we showed him one of our own drab ones – a Least Flycatcher (which at first blush you might confuse with vireos – another problem).

And so it went on: perhaps thirty entirely new birds, some as noted above but also Grey Catbirds, Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, a House Wren and Northern Cardinals. And there were a few which, like Tree Swallow, Cedar Waxwing and Double-crested Cormorants, were easily recognized for being closely related to similar European species, and a small group of familiar faces common to both continents: Barn Swallow, European House Sparrow and Herring Gull.

But while Bob’s head may have been spinning (I’d told him months ago that May 16^th would be peak migration and to expect the best), I was especially enjoying those vireos. And this one, our close up Philadelphia Vireo was My Bird of the Day.

May 10 2018, Rondeau Provincial Park, ON. As birding hot-spots go, Point Pelee (probably the foremost when it comes to rankings) is a bit too intense for me, I prefer Rondeau Provincial Park, topographically similar and just an hour east of Point Pelee. Both are peninsulas of a sort that stick out into Lake Erie and are welcome landfalls for the waves of northbound spring migrants.  They arrive apparently ravenous and exhausted and linger, sometimes for days, refuelling and recovering. I spent this day at Rondeau in the company of good friends looking for engaging birds as well as getting to know my new camera; the two of us seem to get on quite well. Weather conditions were just right: not too hot, not too cold, and generally overcast under light winds.

Bird of the Day from among about eighty species was a Cerulean Warbler. It came just as we were leaving a small woodland pond where Northern Parulas, and Yellow, Black-throated Blue, Black and White, and Magnolia Warblers were busy picking insects from around the margins apparently unconcerned by our presence.

Cerulean Warblers are uncommon birds of tree-tops, more often heard than seen foraging in the thick canopy of oaks and maples. It is a really hard bird to study and its social system and breeding biology is poorly understood. Even hearing their little inconsequential song is a stretch.

But today the trees are still a long way from leafing out and this bird was staying down low, probably because it was warmer and more productive of insect food. I was photographing an Eastern Pheobe when one of my companions spotted it and called out, “Cerulean Warbler.” It’s a bit of a clarion call and word spread quickly by text. In no time we three birder pals had grown to a dozen, more were arriving and the bird was obliging everyone by staying fairly low and at one time bathing in the watery shallows.

The next stop was such an anti-climax that it began to feel we’d had enough for the day, a day that had started with a White-winged Dove, (a large semi-tropical dove that belongs in Arizona, Texas and Mexico, why it was here is anyone’s guess) and many others that have a special place in my heart: Wood Thrush, White-crowned Sparrow, Prothonotary Warbler, Veery, Red-headed Woodpecker and Blue-headed Vireos, among them.