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9-11 July 2015. Wingfield Basin, Bruce Peninsula, ON. It is our privilege, on many counts, to be staying for a week in a spacious and comfortable, if slightly down-at-the-heels, cottage on the shore of Lake Huron. Any demerit points accrued by the cottage’s lack of polish are amply made up by its delicious remoteness, the spectacular view from the back porch and its almost total disconnection with the wired world.

From the back porch we look across The Basin, a sheltered harbour that finds favour with passing yachts almost every evening.

There’s lots of wildlife too. Majestic birds: Bald Eagles, Sandhill Cranes and Merlins come to mind, while the trees all around carry the songs of American Redstarts, Yellow-rumped Warblers and Red-eyed Vireos. Out on the Basin are small flotillas of young Common Mergansers, a group of Ring-necked Ducks and the odd Common Loon.

Beavers have appropriated the burned-out and decaying hull of a once-working ship, the Gargantua, we watch them plowing the waters and bringing small branches back to the lodge; perhaps food for their kits; and this morning a young Black Bear was ambling along the far shore.

The birding is brilliant in spring and fall; indeed this cottage is the home of the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory and the streams of migrants make it a very busy place.  Off season, summer anyway, it’s available to users who agree to take on the responsibilities of being the Warden.

Part of the natural charm here is the Barn Swallows‘ nest over the back door. In the days immediately following arrival, the nest was full of hungry youngsters, four of them competitively craning their necks and pleading with bright yellow gapes for the next delivery of insects.  There is no end to the parents’ day long task of gathering food, most of which is building young swallows capable of flying to the Amazon Basin in a couple of months.

On Thursday the first of the brood, perhaps the oldest by a few hours, left the nest. It evidently fluttered, rather than flew, to safety on a somewhat lower ledge. There the parents continued to feed it, dividing their attention between the three still spilling out of the nest above and the fledgling below. We were able to watch at quite close quarters as the escapee visually tracked the approach of a food-bearing parent and if that parent came close, it started the wing-fluttering and wide-mouthed begging  that had worked so well for it.

As night fell, things suddenly didn’t go too well.  The fledgling flopped to the ground just outside our window and from inside we watched the parent anxiously trying to coax it into flight.  The parent would land a few inches from the babe who immediately assumed it was going to be fed, instead the parent took off, chipping encouragement as it went, and then returned moments later for another try. We left them to it, knowing there was nothing we could possibly do to help and fearing that our presence might compromise the parents’ efforts.

It could fly, if weakly, but somehow the youngster got through the night. In the morning we found it sitting and swaying precariously at the end of the clothesline. After that we lost track of it, and by day’s end I feared that it had somehow perished. There are too many perils around Wingfield Basin, what with hunting Merlins, predatory gulls and the chance of crash landing in open water; indeed most young birds fail to make it through their first year.

The story has a happy ending though. On the last day of our stay we could once again see four hungry mouths in the nest, so somehow it had managed to get back up to rejoin its siblings. No mean feat since the nest was in the apex of the roof over our porch. What I’d taken as a fledgling taking its first pre-ordained flights seems instead to have been a case of someone falling out of bed.

(This post contains photos in galleries visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)

July 5 2015 Crane Lake Rd., Bruce Peninsula, ON. Where I grew up there were many fords, the cars yes, but more particularly those places where a river or stream flows broadly across a paved road and where neither stream nor road is particularly inconvenienced.  If winters in southern England amounted to anything much they might not be quite so common.

In Ontario’s less tamed countryside, water flooding across a road is quite likely to be the consequence of a beaver dam created somewhere not far away. Much as roads maintenance folks may curse them, you have to admire the dogged competence of a beaver at modifying its environment to suit its own purposes.  That your only access road is flooded is not the beaver’s concern.

One of our familiar back roads in Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula crosses a shallow marsh which frequently becomes a wide beaver-enhanced lake. It’s a gravel road and the appearance of big puddles of varying depths makes for an uncertain drive, the sort of slow-paced sloshing that has the kids in the back seat tingling with excited anticipation.  We don’t fill our cars with kids anymore so my more sedate pleasures come from pulling over and wandering the road to see what birds have made the most of the beaver pond.

All of that preamble is to set the stage for my encounter today with a pair of Eastern Kingbirds.  It took me a while to understand why they seemed so loyal to one particular corner of the newly grown swamp but eventually I came to understand that they had appropriated a hollow in the torn stump of a drowned tree for a nest site and that it was home to a brood of hungry chicks. It was a treat to stand back and watch the parent birds bringing food, each time presenting a frail damselfly to the open mouths. A young couple with a large pick-up truck decided to park as close to the nest as was feasible and the parent birds watched them guardedly but nevertheless continued to bring food. There was more to be seen and heard here: Common Yellowthroats and Swamp Sparrows singing loudly to mark their territories, an adult Virginia Rail with two youngsters tip-toed cautiously across the road and I could hear Rose-breasted Grosbeaks singing from a nearby woods. But I think the kingbird family were birds of the day, a reminder of how the next generation is in the making and despite immense risks in their first year some of them will survive.

2 July 2015. Ruthven Park, Cayuga ON. Early this morning I received a very polite request from the family of Jonathon, a visiting birder, asking for directions; “ ... He’s especially interested in finding a blue-winged warbler and an orchard oriole. I wondered if you would have any suggestions.” Either species is worth some effort to find, so I offered to go with them and try our luck. We arranged to meet at the bird observatory in an hour.

The two species are just about equally hit and miss. The oriole’s distribution in Ontario is patchy because we’re close to the limit of its range; and the warbler is fussy about habitat, it’s a small and flighty bird and can be hard to locate. To add to the challenge it’s becoming just a little late in the season for bird song to be helpful, and the leafy exuberance of summer tends to get in the way. As we set out I offered our chances: the Orchard Oriole as a long shot and the Blue-winged Warbler, a probable.

I called a stop in front of a large Black Willow that is always a busy place for birds; if the Orchard Oriole was to be found anywhere, this was perhaps the most likely spot. The willow was so lively with the comings and goings of Yellow Warblers, Song Sparrows and Cedar Waxwings that Jonathon described it as the ‘Tree That Keeps on Giving’.

It may be trite to start a sentence with ‘suddenly’, but that’s the way it happened; suddenly I picked out a familiar song coming from a nearby Black Walnut, it had Orchard Oriole written all over it, at least to it did to me. We searched the tree and then followed the flight of a smallish bird that flew from whence the song came, it landed, sang again and then flew back to theTree That Keeps on Giving.  And there it was, an Orchard Oriole. “There’s your bird.” I proclaimed, as if it always works that way. One down, one to go.

The Blue-winged Warbler came just minutes later. I had expected that we’d have to continue some way to an altogether drier and scrubbier part of the property.  Instead we found them at a densely green corner, quite un-Blue-winged Warbler-like, where all around us several birds were chipping anxiously. These were the sort of short, dry, chip notes I associate with Common Yellowthroats in a state of distress, scolding or anxiety. A few moments passed before we were able to find one and instantly realised that it was a Blue-winged Warbler, and not just one, but several. It seems we had barged in on a family: mom, dad and perhaps three or four fledglings, still a little fluffy. We enjoyed several long, almost intimate, minutes watching them. And well, that was it! Both species in the bag with almost Amazonian mail-order dispatch.

We continued our ramble. Warbling Vireos above us, Wood Thrushes calling from somewhere deep in the wet forest and Field Sparrows out along the field edges; it was all very nice. We parted company, Jonathon apparently thrilled with the outcome and me mentally weighing how much of our success was just luck.

30 June 2015. Windermere Basin, Hamilton ON. The exact locations of where I go birding is, I think, generally irrelevant to my accounts; unless of course I’m somewhere a little different and the place is as much a part of the story. But regular readers will know that most of my birding is in southern Ontario, Canada. In order to frame the following, I’ll share with those that haven’t yet figured it out, that I live very close to Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton is a city founded on heavy industry and one of its outstanding natural physical attributes is a very large, deep-water harbour. It would all be very nice if it wasn’t for the fact that Hamilton Harbour is one of the most polluted places on the Great Lakes; careless urbanization and heavy industry are to blame; mostly the latter.

Times change and both the U.S and Canadian governments are making herculean efforts to repair the ecological damage, and that’s where today’s bird of the day story really starts.

On my way home from a minor errand, I stopped at a fairly new, man-made lake that adjoins a tributary of Hamilton Harbour. It’s a impoundment of perhaps ten acres, generally rectangular and features a couple of rocky islands, some shoals, shallows and muddy backwaters. Not so long ago this was the nastiest of backwaters full of industrial debris and barely treated sewage. The impoundment presumably serves some water quality amelioration purposes and it has been designed to be green and to attract wildlife. It hasn’t taken very long, today this is a good place to see shorebirds and waterfowl. In the two or three years of their existence the islands have attracted a large breeding colony of Caspian and Common Terns and around the lower areas, quite a few ducks; mostly Mallards.

My stop was short; I was just ahead of an approaching wall of light rain. But in those five or ten minutes, I saw several species, which would be worth pointing out at any time: a Snowy Egret (a rarity here and something of a celebrity with local birders) a nicely marked male Blue-winged Teal, two Gadwall, many Tree Swallows and Northern Rough-winged Swallows, and of course the Common and Caspian Terns.

Caspian Terns demand your attention; they are always dominant, frequently noisy, but undisputedly handsome. The Russian name for them is Chekrava, almost onomatopoeic, the word and the bird mirror each other’s purposeful crispness.

Some might say the Snowy Egret was Bird of the Day – but I’d seen enough of them a month ago on Cape May to last me for a while, and the Blue-winged Teal was a candidate, but I have a soft spot for terns, Caspian Terns in particular, and I think it was this youngster waiting for food that won the day.

Afterwards as I drove home I saw one of our local Peregrine Falcons circling over the highway. It was then that I was reminded that despite all of the ill that mankind does to the natural world, when we just pause and try to make amends with a bit of rehabilitation and restoration, wildlife quickly moves to reclaim a niche where it can. It may just be a bunch of ducks and gulls and the odd falcon, but still an’all.

24 June 2015. Burlington, ON. It’s barely seven a.m as I write this, and there is a Carolina Wren not far away singing loudly, “SHEEbu SHEEbuSHEEbu SHEEbu.” Well actually not just singing; shouting it. It’s moving away, now a hundred yards distant, beating the bounds of its urban territory. Soon, within the next hour, I’ll probably pick up faint notes of a Winter Wren as it starts its rounds beginning in the thick undergrowth around the creek, a block or so away. It too, belting out its the cascading and tangled song and doing the rounds of its proclaimed territory, just letting everyone know this is where it belongs, for the summer anyway.

The Carolina Wren comes with a story of expanding range. It’s a bird which thirty years ago, was a rarity in Ontario and found in just a few of the milder pockets of the province. But the climate has changed, it’s been warmer for decades and the Carolina Wren’s toehold has expanded. Two years ago you might have described the Carolina Wren as a modestly well-established species. But two very hard withers in a row have thinned their population. It may be that ten years from now, if tough winters prevail, the Carolina Wren will once again be a rarity. Who knows? The ebb and flow of bird population cycles can be very long, beyond the attention span of most of us. For now the Carolina Wren is a welcome relative newcomer, valued for its upliftingly positive song and decidedly assertive behaviour.

This Winter Wren’s appearance is something of a surprise to me. It is not a species I associate with this kind of urban backyard jigsaw of mine. They are birds that prefer cool dark woods, places with lots of thick undergrowth. If I want to find a Winter Wren I know of a couple of good areas to go, but I have to travel some distance. So when I first heard one singing in my neighbourhood one early morning about three weeks ago, I assumed it was a late north-bound migrant. I liked what I heard, I always do with Winter Wrens, and I was tempted to post a Bird of the Day entry in recognition of the fleeting visit; but time ran away and it just didn’t happen. Still, the next day I heard it again, and the next and so it has continued. In time I’ve come to believe that a Winter Wren has taken up residence and maybe, just maybe, found a mate who agrees that this is an okay place to raise a family.

My day’s plans do not include being anywhere particularly birdy, but with two species of wren patrolling my neighbourhood, I hardly need to.