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28 October 2014. Cayuga ON.  For a long time this morning, doing the census round at the bird observatory was like walking into a theatre which, save for a few stragglers, held nothing but empty seats. Where, metaphorical moments ago, there was life, today our rich woodlands and river valley seemed deserted; not entirely of course, but what a contrast to those busy fall migration days of just a few short days and weeks ago.

I was counting American Crows, Red-winged Blackbirds and Blue Jays in ones and twos. I could hear a Carolina Wren on the other side of the river, and an Eastern Bluebird somewhere not too far away but I couldn’t see either of them.

Things looked up when a group of six Purple Finches flew up into the lower branches of a Black Walnut and obligingly sat around to be photographed. Purple Finches are neither common nor uncommon, but they always seem to be noteworthy because the males are so striking. Field guides often describe them as looking as though they’ve been dipped in raspberry juice, a little over-folksy I think, but not inaccurate. It’s quite easy to confuse them with House Finches, but the males of the latter species, while quite surprisingly crimson at times, are not as expansively tinted from head to tail. To illustrate, I have included a couple of House Finches along with some of today’s birds in the gallery below. (Visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)

Later, I found a small group of Cedar Waxwings feeding on the bright orange fruits of Multiflora Rose briers. My presence made them flighty, so I sat down and remained quite still.  After a while they seemed to accept that I presented no mortal threat  and I was able to get the photos below (Also visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.); and in those same quiet moments caught sight of a Golden-crowned Kinglet.

I was quite pleased to find the Purple Finches and had notionally flagged them as Birds of the Day, but then much later I heard a quiet, distant, bugle-like call which, at first, I thought might be a Sandhill Crane . But moments later a V of twenty-seven Tundra Swans swept low overhead, calling softly, “wu wu”, amongst themselves as they went. They’ve come from their breeding grounds on the arctic shores of James and Hudson Bays and are on their way to Chesapeake Bay.

I have chosen Tundra Swans as my Birds of the Day many times, but usually in early spring. Today they are a sure signal that cold weather is on its way, but that same high-in-the-sky conversation when heard again four months from now, will be welcomed as a sure sign of the end of winter as they return from their Atlantic coast wintering grounds and head north once again.

Ancaster, ON. 25 October 2014.  Baby-sitting three pre-school boys for a weekend doesn’t leave much room for birding; none really. But I managed to find a couple of hours, having previously agreed to join a group examining a tract of land which has recently become a restoration project.

Well, when we arrived, a southwest wind was blowing a gale and rain was threatening. With every gust, another branch was stripped clean and the air filled with tumbling leaves. A sky full of leaves is a betrayal, things airborne being the stock in trade of most birders.

We traipsed around the field, which the owner, a university, had forgotten it owned until just a few years ago. In the half-century or so that have elapsed since the land was acquired (and forgotten), this one-time farm fell victim to the march of European Buckthorn, an invasive species. Using undergraduate labour, the university is trying to restore the land to its original post-glacial, pre-contact state; chainsaws and bonfires are blunt but effective starts to the process.

We saw precious little in the way of bird life; everything with wings seemed to be staying out of the wind. But our day brightened considerably when we came upon a mixed-age flock of Eastern Bluebirds gathered in a sheltered valley; they were deservedly my Birds of the Day.

Eastern Bluebirds are widespread across the eastern half of the continent and are year round residents everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But we are well north of that line and our bluebirds are migratory, most of them anyway; a few sometimes overwinter. We often see these mixed flocks at this time of year and usually they’re loose, rambling groups. Just when you think there’s a dozen birds, more appear and then more again.

The sight and sound (they have a charming fluting call) of the bluebirds certainly brightened up a rather dreary outing, which was otherwise only punctuated by a wind-tossed Turkey Vulture, a solitary Red-bellied Woodpecker and a few robins and goldfinches.

Jamestown Island Va. 16 October 2014. Every now and then you’ll run into what seems to be a moving convention of birds of a feather. Birders often talk about waves of warblers, a fairly common occurrence in spring and fall migration when birds are moving en masse and they seem to be all around, I’ve experienced it several times.

Today I found myself in a gathering of representatives of the Picidae family; the woodpeckers, I think it was just coincidence, not a migratory wave; but whatever the reason, it was memorable.

This was our last day in Virginia and I had the day to myself again. For the purposes of this posting, it’s sufficient to say that the State of Virginia, in and around tidal waters, is a great place for finding birds. I spent a few hours on the botanically and historically rich Jamestown Island, stopping now and then to examine trees like Blackjack and Post Oaks, Persimmons and Black Tupelos, and exploring in general, trying to imagine how this looked as the capital of the Virginia Colony in the mid 1600s. Making my way out to the once strategic end of the island known as Black Point, meant passing through an open glade of Loblolly Pines where I could hear the churring calls of two or three Red-headed Woodpeckers. That certainly stopped me in my tracks and moments later I was rewarded with one landing on a decaying tree trunk nearby.

But there was more to this place than Red-headed Woodpeckers, I also noticed a Downy Woodpecker bashing noisily at something overhead and, if the Downy was bashing noisily, a Pileated Woodpecker was positively pounding, if not axeing, a pine tree just across the way. Words don’t do its efforts justice, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a comic-book illustration with blurred action, sprays of wood chips and Bam! star-bursts would be more like it!  It was soon evident that there were, in fact, two Pileated Woodpeckers when they started calling out to each other with their rather slow mezzo-soprano laugh . They hung around for quite a while but were last seen flying away, one chasing the other like two overweight crows. The soft ‘chfff’ call of a nearby Red-bellied Woodpecker and a yellow flash overhead, the under-wing of a Northern Flicker completed the woodpecker clan gathering.

I lingered to watch the Red-headed Woodpeckers for a long time. In Ontario they are a rare treat and a rapidly vanishing species. A pity since, in a world where looks count, they are really quite spectacular.

Williamsburg Va. 16 October 2014. With a full day to do as I pleased I opted to take my time investigating the rich habitats along Williamsburg’s Colonial Parkway. Encountering a group of quite entertaining Black Vultures was an unexpected surprise and it added a rather amusing novelty to an already bird-rich day.
The parkway is a winding, two-lane road that amply deserves its name. It threads through dense forests which include many of my favourite trees: Black Gums, Tulip Trees, various oak species and Paw Paws included. It leads to the shore of the wide, tidal James River and follows it along, crossing a number of reedy tributaries that empty into the James.
I pulled into a picnic area under a canopy of towering Loblolly Pines intending to explore a stretch of waterfront beach and an adjacent river-mouth. Locking my car and glancing down at the beach I saw that I was being watched carefully by a group of Black Vultures, two on the strip of sandy beach, the other somewhat closer to me and up hill a bit. I appeared to be spoiling their fun, the lower two seemed to have been enjoying a seaside stroll while the upper one was pulling on the juicy remains of a large fish. They watched me cautiously while trying to continue with their fun, the lower two started to trot away for a bit, they actually seemed to be capable of quite a canter, but after a moment had second thoughts and strolled back. The fish-dinner individual sauntered further up hill until it stood at the top looking down at the others below. By this time a fourth individual had joined them and it became quite a party. Eventually they’d had enough and spread their wide wings into the wind and lifted off, wheeling away to rise quickly above the treetops.

They were quite a contrast to the many smaller and prettier birds that I’d spend a couple of hours watching beforehand. The cover and abundant supply of food along the shore supports a large population of Northern Mockingbirds, Eastern Bluebirds, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Carolina Chickadees and even a Saltmarsh Sparrow – a new bird to me!

I watched three Bald Eagles, an adult leading two juveniles, in a purposeful chase after an Osprey which had just caught a fish. The eagles soon caught up to the twisting and turning Osprey which then, perhaps as a result of hard lessons learned, chose to let go of its fish. I expected the eagles to make a mid-air catch, but instead the fish fell several hundred feet to the river below and as far as I could see, that was the end of it. Perhaps, if the fish survived its initial capture and then the fall, there was a happy ending; but there seemed to be nothing in it for either Osprey or eagles.

October 13 2014. Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Virginia.  The Eastern Seaboard of the USA can be characterised in any number of ways, for millions it’s somewhere to live and work, for birders it’s the Atlantic Flyway; a migration pathway followed by millions of birds. I spent a little time today on one of the hotspots along the Atlantic Flyway, on the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, a long stalactite of abundantly fertile land that separates the teeming waters of Chesapeake Bay from the vast spread of the Atlantic Ocean.

The thing about this long finger of land (and Cape May, its little brother to the north), is that it’s a great birding destination. Most of the Delmarva Peninsula is in Maryland but the southern tip lies in Virginia, not that it makes much difference to the flyway. Away from the Atlantic or Chesapeake Bay shorelines, the land is intensively farmed on wide, flat fields of cotton, beans and sweet potatoes. Dense stands of oak, Sweet-gum and Tulip Trees, impenetrably tangled with vines and briars, encircle the fields, making them suffocatingly hot for many long summer weeks.

This southern tip is alive now with migrating birds. I watched large passing flocks of Tree Swallows, hundreds strong and tailed by hopeful Merlins, Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks. At lower levels I could hear small birds chipping and calling in the bushes and trees and just above the horizon were groups of drifting Turkey Vultures and Black Vultures.

But I set out to tell of the Peregrine Falcons seen today. The first one passed low over our car and was noteworthy simply because, like all Peregrines, it flew as if it owned the skies; the second one, much later, was quite a different experience.

The tip of the Delmarva Peninsula is connected to mainland Virginia by a twenty-and-a-bit miles long bridge and tunnel combination; mostly bridge. The bridge-tunnel links the north and south shores of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay where it opens to the Atlantic Ocean.  Needless to say it is a very commercially important and strategically vital waterway. On a fine day it’s an easy drive, a touch tedious at times, but if you like ocean views and the thought of the engineering task that made it all possible, it’s a rather thrilling experience; but I imagine an approaching hurricane makes it a quite different story. As we drove across, a steady east wind was blowing and Great Black-backed Gulls were riding on the ridge of wind deflected upwards by the bridge structure. To drive north and be passed by a southbound gull surfing a wave of rising air just a few feet away and at eye-level was to make me wish I could stop for a dramatic photo. But while such a picture could be magnificent if done well, stopping to get it would be dangerous and thoroughly illegal.
But the greatest picture, held only in my mind’s eye, was of a Peregrine Falcon, my Bird of the Day, seen streaking south along that same pathway of rising air and, I like to imagine, looking each car driver in the eye as they passed.