Category: Uncategorized

30 May 2015 Cootes Paradise, Hamilton. ON. My Bird of the Day today? A Pileated Woodpecker; without a doubt. I had just started a census round on this very warm and blustery morning, and hadn’t gone more than perhaps two or three hundred metres when I heard the unmistakable, ringing laugh of one. Their call carries well and hearing one is usually all you get, seeing one is the icing on the cake; perhaps you’ll get one sighting for every ten hearings.

I was standing talking to a nature interpreter when I noticed a large in-flight shadow pass over us. Flying shadows, as bird cues go, are tricky because following up usually means looking up towards the sun – and all that goes with that. Still, this time it worked for there just above us, a Pileated Woodpecker had arrived to explore a large old willow tree. It was gloomy in the recesses of the tree and my camera’s battery quit after I’d taken four or five not-bad photos in the low light. Here are a couple.

The census turned up just a little over forty species, but a strong south-west wind backed by a murderous looking pile of clouds evidently unnerved bird life; they were quite quiet, especially for late May. Later in the day those clouds rolled out some epic thunderstorms.

I tried counting the Common Terns weaving and diving across the lake but could only make a best guess. The count of Canada Geese was higher than it has been for a while, perhaps the many one-year-olds and failed breeders have given up trying to hold territory and have decided to hang out together, or perhaps sensing the approach of bad weather they had headed for a sheltered area. That birds sense the approach of bad weather is well understood, we often see them feeding heavily before an approaching snow storm. There is a astonishing account, recently published, of five Golden-winged Warblers (a species rarely seen around here) in Tennessee who were tracked flying 450 miles south to avoid a tornado-bearing storm system that was 250 miles west but heading their way. After the storm had passed, the birds returned to resume defence of their Tennessee territories. This is no place to go into much detail of why or how they were tracked except to say that they had been fitted with tiny geolocators which returned quite precise information.

I spotted a small, tight formation flock of about 25 sandpipers wheeling around an offshore islet. It was impossible to be sure but they were probably Least Sandpipers; I saw thousands of them on Cape May a week ago. They are within a few thousand kilometers of completing their spring journey to their Arctic breeding grounds. They have to get there at just the right time; today those grounds may well still be snowed covered. But soon there will be a window of a few weeks with open ground and abundant food in which to establish territory, mate, incubate, feed and raise young and then head south again before the snows of late summer. A bit like waiting for a gap in the ocean waves to run in, grab your wind-tossed hat and retreat before the next swamping. A lot of well-timed effort for the prize.

29 May 2015 Cayuga ON. I puzzled over two funny sightings today at the bird observatory. First a mystery sparrow and then a Trumpeter Swan.

On my early morning arrival, I heard a Savannah Sparrow singing from quite high in a Black Walnut tree. It’s a distinctive song, a sound of wide-open, sometimes weedy fields, dry and high pitched, and described adequately as “tist tsit tsit t-seeeeeee rrrr”. If your upper range hearing isn’t what it once was, it’s an easy song to miss. Savannah Sparrows are quite common in appropriate habitat and I’m very familiar with them. To hear one at the bird observatory is a little out of place because it’s better described as a well-treed parkland or garden setting than dry field, but well, stranger things happen.

I took some long-shot photos of it before it flew away and, given the looking-up-at-its-belly angle, it is a credible (though far from conclusive) Savannah Sparrow. A little later we heard it in another tree and managed to get closer, again it sang the Savannah Sparrow song, but just for a while and then it switched to a Song Sparrow’s song. At that point we all agreed that it was in fact a Song Sparrow; the habitat was the right fit, Song Sparrows are common and we managed to get a good look at it. We all shrugged and went back to the day’s routines; if the others thought I was hallucinating they were gracious enough not to mention it.

It leaves many questions in my mind: Why would a Song Sparrow sing a perfect Savannah Sparrow’s song? Songbirds learn their appointed song during their first few months of life. And they don’t just sing any old song; they faithfully learn their own species’ song from their parents and others of their species. I suppose it’s possible that this Song Sparrow had somehow mixed in with Savannah Sparrows somewhere and become imprinted with their song, perhaps on its wintering grounds; but then, singing isn’t something birds do in winter. How did this happen? I have no good answers, and I don’t think I’m given to hallucinations. The above photos may only confuse the issue.

Later on, as I reached the river during the course of doing the daily census, I heard the absolutely unmistakable sound of a Trumpeter Swan trumpeting. Now, Trumpeter Swans are a species in recovery in Ontario. Once extirpated, a small reintroduced population has grown in size and breeds fairly regularly to the north of us. They also winter in large numbers close to home, so I’ve come to know them fairly well. There’s no mistaking a Trumpeter Swan from anything else- especially when you hear them call; they sound just like a one-note blast on a trumpet. Had I found a pair of Trumpeter Swans on a pond or lake, I would have been pleasantly surprised at the expansion of their nesting range; as I said earlier they breed fairly regularly to the north of us. But all I found was this solitary bird paddling steadily down river and blowing a single trumpet blast about every hundred meters, an “Anyone there?” call I think. Had it lost its mate? Was it still, at this late date, looking for one? Was it just joy-riding. For all I know it might have continued on downstream, calling it’s plaintive “Anyone there?” note every hundred metres for the rest of the day.

20 May 2015 Jake’s Landing Rd NJ. Along the New Jersey coast, close enough to Atlantic City to be a probable distraction to birder office-workers, is one of the most wonderful wildlife refuges ever, the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. Quite what Mr. Forsythe had to do with it and why his name has supplanted the earlier far more evocative maritime name of Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge, I’m not sure. But that’s U.S. politics, none of my business, and more significantly, I don’t suppose the thousands of birds that live and feed there, care one amphipod’s antenna whose name is glorified.

We spent the best part of the day prowling the twelve-kilometer roadway around the estuarine reserve and scored multiple jaw-dropping sightings of birds. It was quite cool, verging on cold, with a northerly wind blowing and I could only begin to imagine what a wickedly exposed and bone-numbing place it would be in February. Still, the birds knew it was indeed May and there was more on their minds than where the wind was coming from.

Starting with an early sighting of a group of Glossy Ibis, the day just got better and better. Mud flats with scampering Semi-palmated Plovers, Least Sandpipers and Snowy Egrets were flanked by wide expanses of salt-marsh where Ospreys on nest platforms are commonplace and singing Seaside Sparrows every hundred metres or so, stake out their territory. Overhead were squealing Least and Forster’s Terns strategizing to push each other from patches of key shoreline. At one stop we watched a large group of dozing Black Skimmers and Dunlin, every now and then an imagined alarm sent a few of them wheeling around, maybe it was really just about getting some wing-stretching exercise, I’m not sure. This gallery of photos from the day, gives I hope, some idea of the richness of Brigantine. (Visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)

But despite everything that Ed Forsythe could produce, my Bird of the Day was yet to come. As the day wound down, and we pondered our late day birding, my companion suggested that we might want to make one last ditch effort to find a Saltmarsh Sparrow; his nemesis bird. So we spent a couple of pre-dusk hours at a rather down-at-the-heels, former fisherman’s dock at the edge of a tidal inlet sorting through various false alarms: calling Clapper Rails, a skulking Least Sandpiper and Seaside Sparrows that refused to change identity. Finally with light fading, no Saltmarsh Sparrows, and Black Flies making it increasingly difficult to concentrate, we left the salt marshes.

The way back to the main road led through a large forested area where, according to reports, a Chuck Will’s Widow was said to be. I’m a fan of Chuck Will’s Widows and all of its near-relatives, collectively known as Nightjars or Goatsuckers. They are a marvelously named group of odd-looking birds with equally odd habits, calls and in some cases, odd onomatopoeic names. The collective name Goatsucker, refers to the ancients’ belief that while the goatherd slept, these birds sucked the she-goats udders and thereby blinded her; quite why they’d bother to suck goats is beyond me. The familiar names: Chuck Will’s Widow and Whip-poor-will, refer to their far-carrying calls as they fly circuits around their territory.

This picture taken in Spain last year of a Red-necked Nightjar is pretty much what they all look like. Exquisitely camouflaged, they spend the day out of sight just waiting for nightfall.

Anyway, despite several quiet listening-stops at the side of the forest road, the putative Chuck Will’s Widow eluded us . Finally as we left to go – and you’ve probably guessed how this is going to end – we made one last stop. Almost immediately we heard something. Getting out (ignition key removed to silence the pitiful dinging of an insecure car) we heard it; a Chuck Will’s Widow doing its rounds. If you say its name aloud (not whispered to yourself) clipped and with the emphasis as follows,CHK–whi-WHDo you’ll get some idea of its call: then repeat a thousand times. Or better yet follow this link for a recording.  I was ecstatic! It’s been some thirty years since I last heard a Chuck Will’s Widow; and I have certainly never seen one; with Nightjars it’s all auditory for me. They’re almost never seen or heard in Ontario and besides they’re virtually invisible anyway, so it’s up to the imagination and, as night falls, the imagination is a powerful magnifier.

19 May 2015 Stone Harbor Beach. NJ. This was a full day of birding and my notes spill over with really wonderful sightings, many of which should be or could be Bird of the Day. The notion of singling out just one as Bird of the Day is a very difficult on an adventure like this, but there’s a blog to write and so I’ll try. Setting aside glimpses of an Acadian Flycatcher Hooded Warbler and Yellow-Throated Warbler (all of which would be treasured sightings in Ontario) perhaps the birds that really took the biscuit were late in the day shorebirds, a pair of Purple Sandpipers.

We had an idea that walking the length of the wide, white gleaming beach of Stone Harbor would turn up a few new birds; we had Black Scoter and Northern Gannet in mind. Both of which would be distant sightings at best and we soon realized there’s far too much Atlantic Ocean out there and specks in the ocean haze are well, just specks; so neither of them made the day’s tally.  But we encountered some Piping Plovers, little, scampering, sand-coloured shorebirds, a handful of American Oystercatchers and the pair of Purple Sandpipers.

Purple Sandpipers are a wonderful example of a species adaptation to and exploitation of a niche. They look like other sandpipers in that they are generally small to medium sized, mottled and spotty, on the long-legged side and certainly relatively long-billed. Most sandpipers live close to water where they feed by wandering around picking at invertebrates and other shoreline delicacies. Purple Sandpipers are no exception to the general rule, but have chosen to find their food in perhaps one of the most perilous and hair-raising of places, among the always wet, surf-splashed rocks and jetties of ocean shorelines. They spend their feeding hours scampering among rock crevices, skipping and dodging the battering of surging surf.

I’m certain they know all there is to know about staying one fluttering step ahead of the breaking waves, but I can’t help recalling how it was for me as a boy. I grew up on the south coast of England where scrambling over the sort of rocks that Purple Sandpipers would find good footing and easy pickings, was part of growing up. We went crab-fishing on shorelines like this, but on those slippery-as-ice, sea-weedy rocks ended the day with bruises, grazed shins and soaked feet. My poor mother!

Purple Sandpipers are not really purple; they are little darkish side and perhaps with some imagination have a purplish sheen, although I never saw it. But what I did see was a wonderful little creature that understood and exploited life on the edge. Bird of the Day despite almost too many contenders.

May 18 2015 Cape May N.J.  There are dozens of well-recognised places for excellent bird watching on Cape May. It’s kind of the Manhattan of avian society with some parts of the Cape as crowded with birds as Time Square is with people. To carry the analogy a little further, certain corners of Cape May draw purposeful shorebirds while others attract foppish passerines; just as Wall St is for deal making and Midtown for shopping.
Today we spent half a day in at Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area which is widely known as one of the best places to see newly arrived migrant passerines. It was hard going because the trees had pretty well fully leafed out and the sun was quite fierce. We could hear plenty of birds so we knew they were close, but finding them was really challenging. Still in the few hours we spent there, we made some good finds including a talkative Yellow-breasted Chat, an inquisitive Prairie Warbler and a fly-catching Blackpoll Warbler.
It was getting hot by the time we left, and we headed to a rather ramshackle conservation area which comprised the parts of an active farm that are either too wet or too overgrown for cultivation. It was there that we found a male Prothonotary Warbler, a spectacularly glowing little bird that lights up the dark, wet habitat it favours. In this case it was sharing a soggy thicket of old willows with a Black-throated Green Warbler, a Red-eyed Vireo, a Blue-headed Vireo and a Red-bellied Woodpecker.

The Prothonotary Warbler has a rather handsome slate-blue back, but the rest of him is a fiery yellow-orange and he truly stood out in the dank gloom. It is one of those birds that enthusiasts seek out and exchange smug ‘if-you’re-lucky’ tips as to its whereabout, the sort of intelligence that come laced with discouragement: ‘…when last seen’, ‘If you’re lucky’ or ‘…but it may have gone by now.’ Other birders will know what I mean.

Well, we had the good luck to enjoy it for quite a while even though it remained fairly high above us; I even managed to get a couple of decent photos.
p.s. The next morning we went to another site, a quiet lonely road in a delicious hardwood forest. We spent some time at a bridge over a small creek that flowed through dense dark undergrowth, the sort of place where mosquitoes thrive and so apparently do Prothonotary Warblers for there we found another; again lighting up the darkness.