Category: Uncategorized

15 April 2015. Cayuga ON. Funny thing about early spring migration is how it can blow hot and cold. Today it was cold, bird-wise that is. The weather on the other hand was delightful, bright sunshine, no wind, not a cloud anywhere and just a light crunch of frost across the fields. Under these conditions I did the daily census at the bird observatory.

Four of us trudged around. The list of species grew quickly but it was mostly in ones and twos. Of course some of the expected nesters: Tree Swallows, Red-winged Blackbirds and Black-capped Chickadees were around in numbers, but probably more than half of the page in my notebook tells a lean story: Common Grackle-2, Chipping Sparrow-2, Eastern Bluebird-1, Canada Goose-3, and so on.

I had some really sharp-eyed and sharp-eared helpers with me, and one of them, Lisa, picked up the song of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet well before the rest of us. The Ruby-crowned Kinglet’s song is a brief scramble of sweet notes ending with a series of four or five descending clearer notes. It’s the kind of song that demands you stop, listen and look for its owner. We found it quite easily and, as is typical with kinglets, it was endlessly moving on the hunt for small insects. It was my Bird of the Day in an otherwise average census round but, consistent with the morning’s experience, we only found one of them.

 

10 April 2015. Burlington ON. Thunderstorms had been with us most of yesterday and by nightfall the weather radar showed another slab of heavy weather coming our way. As we turned in, wind-driven rain fell in torrents battering our windows. Today at breakfast, there was a note on our local birding list-serve saying that around two in the morning, under a clear sky ,(really?) the night was alive with the calls of migrating sparrows. So while I slept, thankful for my warm and dry indoors, millions of birds were on the move out there, making their ways northward, some coming our way, others leaving us and following the retreating snows.

With a not very encouraging weather forecast I decided to walk around one of our census routes this morning. The moment I set foot on the trails I could hear that overnight had indeed been busy; the sky must have been full of American Tree Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos all rushing back to their nesting grounds in the far north. They were scattered all over the woodland floor at daybreak,singing and chipping to each other and madly refuelling; perhaps they’ll push on tonight.   I could hear a few White-throated Sparrows, even a White-crowned Sparrow and an Eastern Towhee. It must have been quite a night.

My day’s census turned up forty-two species. It was a result of that large overnight flight of returning birds and the crazy skies that seemed to be the product of chaotic weather. Strong winds still threw things around, there were several mystery birds that dived or fell out of sight before I could figure them out. A low flying Rough-legged Hawk baffled me for a few moments, and thirty wind-tossed Tree Swallows together with two Barn Swallows blew up and down the valley.

Out of a tumultuous sky came rain and birds. I watched some Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows bathing in a small puddle. They were quite charming to watch but I don’t think aesthetics had anything to do with it. Where had they been, and what had they been doing that necessitated a thoroughly soaking bath?

I saw or heard many first-of-the year birds including: White-crowned Sparrow, Eastern Towhee, Eastern Phoebe, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and Belted Kingfisher. A few Golden Crowned Kinglets flitted frustratingly quickly through tangles of vines and a House Wren had me baffled for quite a while as it picked and probed at the water’s edge of a marsh. I was pleased to see and hear two Belted Kingfishers, they’ll probably stay around here until October. Oh, and this smart little Hooded Merganser was quite breathtaking; if you had to invent a cartoon duck would you ever come up with this? 

Bird of the Day was a surprising Winter Wren. There were many birds that gave me a little fizz of excitement or made me smile, but the Winter Wren made me say Wow! (quietly to myself.)   As is usually the case, I heard it before I saw it; in fact I thought it was more distant than it turned out to be. It was exploring the dark innards of a gaping rotten log; exactly the sort of place to expect them. Winter Wrens are a two-part delight: first, a tiny song, a thin, tight-knit tumble of high notes. Two or three Julys ago I managed to capture a short movie of a singing Winter Wren and inasmuch as a picture is worth a thousand words, you’ll be further off if you follow this link and see for yourself.  The second Winter Wren delight is the tiny mite of a bird itself, it’s the size of a golf ball, just as easy to lose in the undergrowth but far more fascinating.

8 April 2015. Burlington ON. I really hadn’t reckoned on a Bird of the Day entry today. It’s been pouring for much of the morning and as I write our back yard is flooded. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that winter still hasn’t quite left the soil so it’s possible that a pan of sub-surface ice is preventing free drainage through our otherwise lightish loam.

As I gazed out of a window, I noticed this wonderfully handsome male American Robin pacing around looking for food. He’s been wandering over our lawn for a while, whether he’s found anything much I couldn’t say. He has also been working over some sheltered patches of leaf litter and picking at a few desiccated ornamental berries; I think he’s doing okay.

I managed to get a few shots of him which, despite two sheets of glass between the camera and its subject, worked out quite well. Note a couple of things: The dark sooty blackness of his cheeks and head, that’s what distinguishes him as male, it contrasts with the slate-grey brown of the neck and back, these lighter tones characterise the head of a female robin. Look too at the speckling of raindrops on his tail and flight feathers.

It’s interesting (to me) to note the structure and pattern his wing feathers: the wingtips are made up of long pointy and somewhat brownish primaries, they are overlaid by secondaries (which appear in the photos with light coloured edges) and they in turn are topped with layers of coverts. The less stiff feathers of the shoulder are known as scapulars. These feathers and structures when extended create an aerodynamically perfect wing, but in these pictures’ they’re folded as neatly as a courtesan’s fan.

6 April 2015. Hamilton ON. A group of likeminded birders and I are engaged in a couple of months of regular bird censuses. Our task, over the two spring months of April and May, is to systematically walk specific routes and record all birds seen and heard. The long-term objective is to build a picture of bird species’ populations and species mix in a very bird-rich part of Ontario. This is the first year in what is designed as a multi-year project, our efforts will probably not start to demonstrate meaningful data until a decade of effort has accumulated.

We are watching and recording the return of dozens of species, starting now with waterfowl, but before long we’ll start seeing the neo-tropical migrants. Soon we’ll notice that some winter visitor species: Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows in particular have left to return north to breed; the Great South to North Spring Shift.

Today in a biting northeasterly wind (Force 3 on the Beaufort Scale) we encountered thirty-three species, a third of which we could safely say were returned migrants. They’d be ho-hum birds a little later in the year but we welcome their return even so, species such as: Common Grackles, Song Sparrows and Killdeers. Less welcome, but returned nevertheless, were the first Brown-headed Cowbirds; a species whose parasitism of small passerines made ecological sense in their original prairie habitat but their spread east into the habitat of eastern woodland species has been and continues to be nothing short of devastating.

Best birds today were a Great Egret and a Lesser Yellowlegs. Neither is a shock to the system, both species are generally and statistically reckoned to show up around the end of the first week in April. Not a shock then, but a surprise; to me anyway. The Great Egret because they don’t breed anywhere around here, I suppose this one was just passing through. We don’t see them consistently until July, August and September when dozens of them settle in to our mudflats and marshes having finished with their far flung breeding colonies.

The Lesser Yellowlegs just seemed so out of place picking its way along the fringes of the barely ice-free shallows. Like the egret, they are usually associated with the warmth of late summer when, on their return south, they rest and feed here awhile in preparation for the next few thousand miles of migration. In August our shoreline habitat must surely be alive with delicious invertebrates, today it would be a quite different matter; just wriggly things on ice.

I’ve included a couple of late summer shots to warm things up.

3 April 2015. Hamilton ON. I cannot allow spring’s threshold to go by without somehow celebrating Tundra Swans. There was a time, when I was, perforce more of a creature of the climate controlled, neon-lit indoors, when I might have had to seek them out. Now living virtually under their spring flyway and also having all of the advantages of happy retirement, I could almost sit by my window and wait for them to appear; I could, but I don’t live like that.  Three or four times this spring I have had the happy experience to have been out somewhere doing something useful when I heard the unmistakable, far-reaching calls of Tundra Swans heading north to their breeding grounds. You will almost always hear them long before you find them in the lively skies of March.

Their spring migration takes them from their Atlantic coast wintering grounds to the coastal marshes of the sub-Arctic to breed. Using the Great Lakes as open water stepping-stones, their first stop after leaving Chesapeake Bay is the food-rich farm fields and wetlands around Lake Erie. Those first refueling stops are just a short flying time away by the time I see them passing high over our end of Lake Ontario. A few flocks skim low over our harbour, perhaps wanting to make the passing acquaintance of our wintering flock of  Trumpeter Swans.

It’s those passing flocks that I love to see.  Sometimes almost out of sight just a long undulating V of perhaps a few dozen birds twinkling white in the sunlight, other times it’s an occasional low-flying formation barely a hundred feet above water level. As they go they call to each other, a soft yet incredibly far-reaching, hwhoo – hwhoo. I suppose it’s a staying-in-touch call, the leader checking with the followers or perhaps it’s the older birds showing the youngsters the landmarks around them, vital information for future years. These photos, taken in threatening weather a couple of days ago, of a small flock flying low over the harbour, captures for me something of the single-mindedness and strength of Tundra Swans on the move.

This morning I was one of a small group doing a census of resident and migrant birds. We’d had several first-of-the-year sightings: Eastern Phoebe, Brown-headed Cowbird, Tree Swallows and Northern Flicker among them. As we stared across a wide shallow lake working hard to make out a Green-winged Teal, the sounds of a couple of flocks of Tundra Swans stopped our work: one flight of about forty was very high but pretty against the blue sky, the others low enough for us to appreciate the power and order in the flock. For me they were my Bird of the Day, notwithstanding the many other welcome new arrivals.