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13 August 2014. Cayuga, ON. Three Wow! birds today: A Yellow-billed Cuckoo, a Yellow-throated Vireo and a family of Sandhill Cranes.

I started by visiting the bird observatory where I spend much of spring and fall months. I wanted to check on the fortunes of a couple of rare plants and also follow the riverside trail to enjoy its dense summer exuberance. It turned out to be a busy walk. Within moments I was being scolded: Firstly by a pair of Tufted Titmouses, quite simply for walking through their territory; Then as I stood on the riverbank gazing at the far shore, a perched Osprey picked up the theme of indignation and started ‘tcheeping’ loudly at me; Then lastly, and most impressively, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo arrived shrieking wildly, ‘clucking‘  and ‘chakking’ from just a few feet away. Cuckoos are usually very shy and retiring birds.  When we hear one, it makes us sit up and pay attention, and we count it as quite notable to catch anything more than glimpse of it.   Yet this one was an extraordinary sighting; almost certainly I was somewhere far too close to a juvenile in its care. I can think of no other reason for the noisy and determined display that also included wing fluttering, tail fanning and lots of hopping from branch to branch. I managed to get a few photos, but because of its state of anxiety it hardly ever stayed still. This photograph, while hardly a prizewinner, gives you some idea of its agitated frame of mind. Surely Bird of the Day.

To calm things down I watched hundreds of Tree, Barn, Bank and Northern Rough-winged Swallows diving and swirling along the river’s course picking at the masses of insects hatching in the warm water. A pair of House Wrens, a Gray Catbird and a female Rose-breasted Grosbeak all added to the pleasure. Then, just as I thought the fun was over for the morning, a beautiful Yellow-throated Vireo showed itself briefly, long enough for me to gasp appreciatively; a striking, if sometimes pugnacious, Bird of the Day number two.

Much later in the day, rounding a bend in the quiet road that follows the course of the river, I spotted a family of Sandhill Cranes feeding in a gently uncultivated pasture. Sandhill Cranes are not common in this part of Ontario, yet for some time we’ve been aware of evidence of a lone breeding pair in this neighbourhood; I think this was them. I left my car a distance away and approached quietly and, I thought, hidden by thick hedges. But you’ll never fool birds into thinking you’ve left the area that easily, I knew that, but I much prefer to approach slowly and minimize the drama if possible. Eventually I found myself about 50 meters from them. The parent birds knew exactly where I was and slowly herded the youngsters away. Looking at these young birds I couldn’t help marveling at the amount and complexity of the growth they have achieved since hatching. They probably emerged from eggs some six to eight weeks ago, and in that time have grown those long, matchstick legs and broad wings that will soon be capable of carrying a body weight of around two to three kilos (4-7 Lbs). They can manage their first flight at about ten or eleven weeks, although it takes ten months for the colts to reach adult size and for most of that time they remain somewhat dependant on their parents. These are elegantly poised birds with a touch of haughtiness about them. Birds of the Day number three.

Here are a couple of shots of the Sandhill Cranes. More photos from the day (for better or for worse) can be found here.

12 August 2014. Hamilton, ON. Frankly I don’t know quite what to make of this; a Snowy Owl. Here? and now?  A Snowy Owl is a marvel at any time. We saw loads of them six or seven months ago when a major population irruption occurred and individual Snowies were reported far and wide across North America, even as far south as northern Florida; but that was winter when we half expect them. But a Snowy Owl in August! In Southern Ontario!

Well one showed up just a week ago. It’s been a little elusive, but tonight I found it sitting atop a utilitarian, concrete-block building in an industrial park on the fringes of our deep-water harbour.

I took several photos.  The white building in the background was quite a challenge but it also created some compositional opportunities. Here is a gallery of those photos, (visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.) More photos can be found here.

I checked several reference books and websites looking for corroborative support, but could find scarcely a word about mid-summer oddities such as this. They don’t even breed in Ontario’s farthest north; it’s still not Arctic enough for them.  Our pre-eminent local area authority noted extreme dates of May19th (a lingering winter bird) and September 26th (earliest arrival).  But eBird, a fairly new, on-line, interactive, bird sightings website reveals that August sightings are not entirely unheard of; they’re very few and far between, but they do happen, including one reported along the Hudson River, near the Statue of Liberty in August 2009.

It all leaves me a little breathless.

12 August 2014. Hamilton, ON. It’s a little hard to reconcile quite why today’s Piping Plover should be my Bird of the Day. My mental test, that whenever or wherever I go birding, there’s always at least one bird that stands out, one bird that makes me say Wow! was satisfied.  The plover qualified but today’s sighting came at a price.The bird was about 400 metres away and barely discernable, even through a telescope. I did manage to see it, but with difficulty. It was way back picking and poking around a drying mud flat along with a mob of loafing Caspian Terns. A stiff wind made the telescope vibrate so the image was frustratingly erratic; you had to know what you were looking at; or at least believe what you’d been told.

On the plus side: Piping Plovers are a rarity in southern Ontario, and the very few known nest sites are carefully protected. It’s a plover, which immediately places it in an agreeably handsome family, and one of the engagingly pretty little ones too, along with the pale and diminutive Snowy Plover (known in Europe as the Kentish Plover.)

Last year we watched a nesting pair of Piping Plovers in an area of fenced-off beach where it was protected from wandering families, sunbathers and un-leashed dogs; It was not a very satisfying experience from a birder’s point of view. Previous to that I had enjoyed a very close encounter with a male at the edge of a shoreline pond in Cape May, New Jersey. I took my first ‘for the record’ photo when it was about a hundred metres distant and kept on clicking as it wandered closer and closer. Eventually it was picking at flies and other invertebrates barely five metres from me, and not in the least concerned by my presence.

Here are a two shots from the encounter with that charming little bird.

7 August 2014. Hamilton, ON. Lake Ontario is a pretty tidy, well-defined body of water. Most of the water flowing in is delivered by the mighty Niagara River and collected from Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes strung out above. There are plenty of smaller rivers feeding into it too. Once gathered within the tight confines of its Ontario and New York shores, it drains eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. It is part of a landscape recovering from the abuses dealt it by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet, which only retreated some twelve thousand years ago. The post-glacial imprint is on our landforms everywhere, it shapes our lives but we take it for granted; it’s just where we live.

I paddled my kayak around a smallish lake, which for complex geomorphologic reasons is separated from Lake Ontario behind two ancient beach bars. It is nevertheless directly connected to Lake Ontario and any water level fluctuations are courtesy of Canadian & American authorities jointly.

This roughly triangular lake is very shallow, it’s said the water is a metre deep at most, but that the soft muds and debris that make up the bottom go on forever. Along its eastern side is a ribbon of communication links, two noisy roads and busy rail lines that split and splice according to their purpose. The other two sides of the triangle are well wooded with many hiking trails, but here the shoreline itself is quiet and largely inaccessible, except by canoe or kayak. I decided to paddle my way around the perimeter, nosing into the many inlets and marshes to see what was happening on this quiet summer day. It was everything I hoped it could be; I seemed to startle Spotted Sandpipers, Belted Kingfishers, and Great Blue Herons at every turn, sending them peeping, rattling or croaking on ahead of me. Sun-bathing Painted Turtles, lined up on wet logs, dropped and plopped back into the water at the mere thought of me, and I interrupted a Northern Water Snake trying to organise and swallow a Brown Bullhead (catfish) which, as far as I could tell, was hanging crosswise in its jaws.

Away from the sheltered shoreline and approaching a large expanse of cattails, I found a group of seven Great Egrets high-stepping slowly with their necks S-coiled ready to strike. Great Egrets don’t breed anywhere close by, but as summer matures we regularly see a dozen or more who arrive to stalk these waters until the approach of winter drives them south.

I seem to be rambling a bit, but today’s Birds of the Day deserve some context; I’m trying to take you with me into this summery, mostly unruffled, life-as-normal (with the possible exception of the water snake’s captive catfish) marsh. We move along to a part of the marsh where restoration work means creating fenced-in expanses of replanted cattails; without fencing, the plants would be easily snuffled and grubbed out by unwelcome Asian Carp. Along the top rail of the fence, a line of young Common Terns sat expecting their parents’ ceaseless delivery of fresh fish. They were quite unmoved by my slowly approaching kayak and I eased in close enough to watch parent terns come and go for quite a while. The line included a couple of Bonaparte’s Gulls: one juvenile hatched this year, and the other (probably) a non-breeding one-year-old adult.

The  galleries above are visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.

What makes Bonaparte’s Gulls special is that they add a sparkle to the otherwise brawlers’ world of gulls. It’s their dainty, almost tern-like, flight, their decidedly fetching looks and well, they’re passage migrant that we encounter only briefly in April as flocks head to their northern boreal breeding grounds (the only gull to nest in trees), and in late summer and fall on their way back to the Atlantic coast for the winter. Here they are, I love the cinnamon on the back of the youngster.

6 August 2014 Kilbride, ON. Our aging cat spent most of this afternoon sprawled in the shade; had I done the same (and I was tempted) I would have missed my Bird of the Day, a Solitary Sandpiper.

Instead I decided to revisit the site where last week, last posting, I’d enjoyed the company of Cedar Waxwings. I went back, not for the waxwings necessarily, but for the place; a small lake in a quiet wooded valley. It has an interesting history, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the valley was the site of small scale marl quarrying, Marl is a soil conditioner that is common in post-glacial lake bed sediments and often found underlying peat bogs.The quarrying, really more like small-scale, hand-dug, open pit mining, has left a string of little rectangular lakes connected by a small stream. The whole area is now owned, managed and notionally protected by a conservation authority and is lightly used, legally for hiking and less so by a few covert fishermen.

I was struck by the silence of the birds. The sandpiper peeped weakly, just once, as it flew away from me. It didn’t go very far and I was able to watch it for quite a while. A dainty little bird, dusted with light speckles on its dark back and a conspicuous eye ring, it is the Nearctic counterpart of Europe’s Green Sandpiper. Cedar Waxwings were around, still hawking for insects and a fly-catching Eastern Phoebe too, neither had anything to say; perhaps they felt much the same way as our cat, that the afternoon was really not meant for exertion.

The Solitary Sandpiper’s name is appropriate; I only ever see one bird at a time. Presumably every now and then though, a pair gets together to ensure continuity of the species, but I’ve never seen a throng like that. This one is on its lonely southbound migration, with breeding taken care of for another year, it’s heading back to Central and South America. Here are a few photos of it (visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email) I wonder if it is the same bird as the one I saw in the same place almost exactly two years ago.

A family group of Eastern Kingbirds broke the silence. Also flycatchers, they kept up a light chattering, calling from one exposed treetop to another. Kingbirds are the standard-bearers of the family of birds known as Tyrant Flycatchers, indeed their scientific name, Tyrannus tyrannus, speaks of their I’m-in-charge-around-here personality. They have a voice that sounds like the rattle of small stones in a tin can, a sound reflected in the French-Canadian name, Tyran tritri.

 

The long, quiet sit produced more than birds: A large Snapping Turtle cruised by, barely visible just below the water surface but leaving a long trailing plume of silt. A small, malevolent-looking Northern Pike, perhaps six inches long, hung motionless in a small weedy gully; And the air was full of dragonflies: Eastern Pondhawks, Common Whitetails and Twelve-spotted Skimmers.

When I finally checked the time I realised that outside this quiet little corner, rush hour was well under way. I joined it and headed home to find that our cat hadn’t moved.