Category: Uncategorized

31 July 2015. Blue Lakes, St George ON. This is the last day of July and after four days of oppressive heat and humidity, people around here are emerging from shelter in much the same way they would in January following a major snow storm or perhaps as folks do along the east coast after the passage of a hurricane. Well, really no damage was done, some lawns looked a little brown, it had been scorching but we’ve experienced much hotter and some of us, myself included, like it hot.  Stay-indoors days are good for catching up on reading, emails and deferred projects, but eventually you’ve got to get back into circulation.

I checked on a couple of favourite birdy locations today but, as a birder’s day out, it was pretty uninspiring, I was surprised at the quiet. Maybe the past days’ heat had drained us all. There was little more to my first stop than the distant, juvenile ‘Caa’ of a young American Crow pleading for food, and the tired song of a House Wren.

Concluding what had been a pleasant, if largely unrewarding, ramble I followed a road called Scenic Drive. I’d never taken it before and it sounded promising. It led me on a rolling, twisting ride between large ponds; kettle lakes I believe. Kettle lakes are the remnants of the last ice age: as the ice sheets dissolved and departed they left behind large lumps like terrestrial icebergs half buried in the vast piles and sweeps of glacial debris. It must have been a doleful sight, but after ten thousand years those monstrous ice cubes have melted away and left behind cute little ponds in rolling countryside. Why there are kettle lakes in some areas and not in others is beyond my understanding of post-glacial geomorphology; but there they are. In late summer, ten thousand years after the fact, they are who knows how deep, choked with Button Bush, Cattails various willows and skimmed over with Lemna minor or Common Duck-Weed; what some refer to as scum but in truth is anything but. Lemna minor is a fast reproducing, small, simple aquatic plant, we’ve all seen and probably recoiled from it, it’s the sort of thing that would deter anyone from taking a swim, although I’m sure it’s clean and harmless.

In one pond there were a few lemna-streaked Wood Ducks paddling around, and a Great Blue Heron standing sentinel on a log,

At another pond I found what turned out to be the Bird of the Day, a Hooded Merganser, a female I suspect. It certainly wasn’t a full breeding plumage male. It was driving itself purposefully through the thick Lemna and every now and then eagerly seizing upon something, it was hard to make out exactly what, although on one occasion both the merganser and I saw something small make a flipping movement and the merganser reacted in a flash, darted and grabbed a small frog; one gulp – yum!

From the anonymity of my parked car I enjoyed watching the merganser for quite a while until a tractor pulling a load of hay, or maybe it was Shredded Wheat, rolled noisily by causing it to take flight.

23 July 2015. Morriston ON. There is a pond in this once-quaint village, which I intend to visit every spring but never seem to get around to doing so. Pied-billed Grebes nest there; I’m sure of it. On the two occasions I’ve visited it in late summer, I’ve seen a small group of them paddling around. I really must make the effort next April.

It’s not the visuals of Pied-billed Grebes that attract me; they look like waterlogged chickens, it’s their maniacal almost depraved spring territorial ‘song’. Variously described as: “ …a series of cooing notes… run into slower paced, gulping clucks that can fade away” (National Geographic); or according to Pete Dunne “…a loud wild-sounding keening that incorporates bleating coos and mournful wails…. Like someone blowing a satisfying series of toots into a handkerchief.” (click here for more on Pete Dunne). It’s on my things-to-do list to be visual and auditory witness to this performance. I’ve mentally ear-marked this pond as a best bet.

Unlike the village in general whose heart has been severed by a very busy arterial road and is now just a rather grubby, traffic-light controlled chasm; the pond is a pretty place and worth a diversion from the road race. No doubt a post-glacial kettle lake it would, in the normal course of things, be a rather static body of water. But, flanked by pricey homes it has been beautified to fulfill residents’ expectations of a village pond. It has a couple of small docks suitable for after-dinner dreaming, a spraying fountain and expanses of white water lilies. It can be a good place to watch Great Blue and Green Herons as I noted in an earlier post. (click here to read it)

I stopped there in the middle of the day today and sure enough there were four Pied Billed Grebes; two adults and I assume two chicks. They kept their distance as they always do. So, with my limited camera power, I was unable to get any really good shots but here’s a few rather long-distance shots from today and one taken elsewhere in late winter and which may help illustrate why I describe them as looking like waterlogged chickens.

(Visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)

21 July 2015. Burlington ON. Are these the dog days of summer? I think so and Wikipedia agrees, defining them as the sultry days of July and August. It’s not much of a time for active birding but, from my back door, I still hear the two wrens I referred to a month or so ago. The Winter Wren sings just as stridently every morning and I caught a glimpse of him today, he may even have adopted the few backyard gardens immediately south of us as his own

This evening as we enjoyed a late outdoor dinner we both caught a slip of movement along fringe edge of an old cedar, in unison we exclaimed, ‘Hummingbird!’ We don’t see many in this urban jungle – but then, I suppose if we can get Winter Wrens, then why not a Ruby-throated Hummingbird? We followed it for a minute or so as it sipped from the dusty-blue flowers of Russian Sage until it buzzed overhead and landed behind us on an almost invisible twig. It seemed to be willing us to go away, and then I realized that’s exactly what it was waiting for, we were sitting too close to our wonderfully chaotic tangle of storm-battered Scarlet Bee-balm or Monarda didyma. Those bright tubes almost certainly hold what the hummingbird wanted to get at.

Last January, I wrote at some length about the hummingbirds I met in Panama. It is a large family of over three hundred species, arguably centred in Ecuador and well represented throughout Latin America. So it is, in my humble opinion, something of a privilege that a member of this extraordinary New-World family of birds should grace us with their presence every summer.

They are incredible creatures in so many ways: tiny with the metabolism of a jet fighter; only better: they fly backwards with ease; they use grams of sugar as fuel not mega-litres of jet fuel; and they make annual round-trip journeys between tropical Central America and Ontario without paperwork. Like anything Boeing or Lockeheed Martin builds, they carry an on-board navigation system for those transcontinental journeys, but of a complexity and sophistication that we scarcely understand. It is quite possible that they steer by the stars and by visualizing and processing the relative angles of the mesh of lines of polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field; you try it.

So any time a hummingbird comes into view, it should be a time to marvel; if nothing else at their apparently effortless up-down-forward-backward flight. I’ve added a couple of galleries of some of my photos from different times and places.  They’re visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.

5-10 July 2015. Wingfield Basin, Bruce Peninsula, ON. A slight departure from my usual posting here, but I can hardly resist sharing with you this moth, a hummingbird-lookalike. I know next to nothing about moths and had it not been for an encounter with some Hummingbird Clearwings about three summers ago, I wouldn’t have been able to put a name to them this week.

But here they are, true moths with a body or thorax about the size of the terminal segment of your little finger and the hovering, nectar-dipping behaviour of a hummingbird. My limited collection of reference books tells me only that there are just two species of ‘clearwing’ moths like this in the north-east. They are members of the tantalizingly named Sphinx or Hawk Moth family. That alone is enough to make me want to know more; but that’s for another time.

Hanging at the flowers doorstep, they used their almost one-inch long proboscis to draw nectar from deep within the bright blue depths of Vipers Bugloss, working their way almost, but not quite, methodically up the spire. Just as I began to feel I could anticipate their next move they’d vanish in a wisp – and then reappear a few feet away.

Getting a photograph was an exercise in patient ambush. If I just tried to follow them around snapping at any apparent opportunity, my results were mediocre. I’m no expert in the technical aspects of photography; it took quite a bit of effort to dredge up memories of the interplay of shutter speed, ISO and depth of field to come up with a strategy for a decent picture. Their wings beat so quickly that it wasn’t until I shot at 1/1250th of a second that I could freeze the motion.

And just in case we lose focus entirely, here’s a shot of a real hummingbird, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird. 

11 July 2015. Wingfield Basin, Bruce Peninsula, ON. I was out paddling around Wingfield Basin enjoying a pre-breakfast exploration of its shallow edges when I heard a Greater Yellowlegs calling from high overhead. It was flying purposefully southward, showing no interest in stopping here to forage around the lake’s shallow margins.

I knew by its distinctive call that it was a Greater Yellowlegs, a ringing and far-carrying Tew Tew Tew Tew. Its semi-sibling, the Lesser Yellowlegs, which is confusingly similar in almost all respects except overall size and relative bill length, has a call that is less strident and usually comprises just two, softer tew tew notes, rather than three or more.

Assuming its internal compass is not defective and that it’s not hopelessly lost, it’s my suspicion that this bird was on its southbound, ‘fall’ migration. Quite possibly it’s a one-year-old bird that failed, for any number of reasons, to breed. Local records contain a few records of one-year-old yellowlegs that never quite complete the spring migration back to the mosquito-rich, sub-arctic lands of their origins but instead wander aimlessly around, a thousand or so miles short of their predestined breeding grounds. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of yellowlegs of both species are now, still in the far north completing their breeding cycle.

Many of this year’s hatch will now be semi independent and capable of flight, but they need a few more weeks of growth and development before they will start their migration south. We generally don’t see the current year’s young on their fall migration until well into August and the flow of all ages of yellowlegs continues into September and October.

As ‘fall’ migrants go, today’s Greater Yellowlegs was definitely an early bird. If you were overly sensitive to signs of approaching summer’s end it might be a touch discouraging. But it’s still high summer, holiday season to most of us and the odd aberrant sighting only enlivens the days.

Here is a gallery of photos from past days, some are Greater Yellowlegs, some Lesser Yellowlegs.  There’s not a lot of difference between the two species, except overall size (for which you need something to compare with)  and relative bill length, as I noted above. I think I have i.d them properly but welcome any hair-splitting discussions if you think I’m wrong. One photo is of mostly Short-billed Dowitchers with one dozing yellowlegs. The gallery is visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.