Category: Uncategorized

Copenhagen, Denmark. October 28 2022.  Watching a couple of Magpies scavenge noisily from one face of a high-sided city street to the other, an inner voice sneered, ‘Urban urchins”. In that setting it might seem apt but another voice, the voice of reason, protested, “No, wait. Not urchins; urban opportunists!” Opportunists they certainly are, equally at home in open countryside, suburbia and the heart of this city. I love Magpies; they always seem to come with a story, they are striking to look at and self assured in behaviour;  but then as members of the crow family assertiveness is their brand.

I hand-reared one when I was a teen, I raised it from lost nestling to become the raucous tenant of my dad’s shed. It grew quickly, and my dad was happy when I released it to woodlands where it belonged, he could then restore order among the many bits and pieces that he had once sorted, labelled and filed.

One of our favourite urban walks here is along the paths of a large, walled cemetery.  Magpies criss-cross the paths wherever there’s room to fly.  With a bit of imagination I like to think they add a little atmosphere to the much-visited grave site of Hans Christian Andersen.

Hovvig, Nakke, Denmark. October 23, 2022.I have a boyhood memory of seeing a couple of  Redwings somewhere near my home in the south of England. I remember being quite excited because Redwings were, and still are, winter visitors and not easily seen. They were not uncommon or remarkable to a well equipped and resourceful birder, but I was neither so was impressed within my limits. It’s been decades, therefore, between that vivid, one-off sighting and my encounter with restless flocks of Redwings today.

By lucky happenstance I had been directed to Hovvig, a bird sanctuary, near the coastal village of Nakke on the Island of Zealand. Birding had been pretty thin  in my Danish weeks so far and I didn’t have very high hopes; but then I had no idea what the sanctuary was like.  Hardly had I arrived than I knew I’d struck visitor/birder’s gold.  The sanctuary is a failed attempt at land reclamation and is now a vast wetland of open water, soggy fields, reed-beds, mudflats,  scattered woodlands, scrubby margins and open rough pasture; nearly everything birds and I could wish for.

Redwings are common birds of winter in rural Denmark and I was half expecting to see some sooner or later.  They are handsome members of the thrush family, superficially not unlike a young American Robin, a European Song Thrush or a Fieldfare. They breed across a very broad swath of high-latitudes northern Europe: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, but with winter’s approach the entire population heads to continental Europe, from Denmark, south, west and east, everywhere, through to Iberia and the Balkans.

The Redwings really caught my attention, not just because I’d been hoping for them but because of the flocks’ restless behaviour. It was hard to get a fix on any single bird for very long, they always seemed to be on the move and if one did alight it would usually be somewhere deep in foliage.

As Birds of the Day, Redwings were up against some tough competition because  the morning’s birding was very satisfying with many really good sightings.

My other stand-outs for the morning were: A male Bullfinch, dapper in crimson and grey;  A White-tailed Eagle methodically harassing a group of ducks knowing eventually that one of them would show itself as weaker and thereby become a meal;  and trio of Common Snipe, all but invisible. If one hadn’t shuffled forward and caught my attention,  prompting a bit of camera-aided searching, I would not have seen them.  In the photo below they are along the lower waters-edge and hard to make out.

I try not to share exhaustive lists in these pages, but partly for my own records here are some of the rest of my morning’s observations:  Northern Lapwing, Northern Shoveler, Mallard, Coot, Shelduck, Teal, Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Greylag Goose, Mute Swan, Great Cormorants, Black-headed Gull, Grey Heron, Ring-necked Pheasant, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Chaffinch, Eurasian Robin, Dunnock, Blackbird, Eurasian Wren, Kestrel, Grey Heron, Rook, Jackdaw, Hooded Crow, and Blue, Great, Marsh, and Long-tailed Tits, – no doubt many more went unseen but still an embarrassment of riches.

Rørvig, Denmark. October 22, 2022. Scanning the length of a long sandy beach, I could see far away a large bird resting on the biggest of a cluster of tide-washed rocks. It was large enough to be a goose but puzzling because it had a distinctly white back above a dark body and in my experience, waterfowl are more often the the other way up, dark above and white below. It was the sort of thing that needed to be investigated, but for a lot of effort; and what if it was just a farmyard escape?  Such was the debate: was it was worth the time and effort to march the half kilometre or so to take a look. 

But the bird looked settled, unlikely to fly off and my son was engrossed fishing for sea-trout so, following a rough and occasional path, I set off for a closer look. Eventually it became clear that it was not an escapee and nor was it a goose, but a large duck, a male Common Eider.  It was indeed settled and generally unconcerned by my approach. I took several photos including this one below where it has been joined by a female. An impressive bird and quite common along arctic and subarctic shorelines of the northern hemisphere.

Nearby was a small cluster of Sanderlings, who were similarly unmoved by my presence, charming and they also allowed me to take many photos.

As I turned to head back, I disturbed a small bird that flitted just a few yards to settle close to the water’s edge. I immediately recognized it as a female Snow Bunting, an identification that might have been tricky had I not spent so much time working with them in past winters.  They are very pretty, even cute little birds.  Snow Buntings are high-Arctic, circumpolar in distribution and are not seen very often in Ontario, not that they’re particularly rare but, for us, they are a bird of the coldest months and you do need to be in the right, bitingly cold, snow-drifted field at the right time to see them.

The three species: Common Eider, Sanderling and Snow Bunting are alI Arctic breeders. I had been musing that the eider was my best bird today until the Snow Buntings appeared, becoming a true My Bird of the Day surprise, a small group of three, all females working their way among rocks at the edge of the Kattegat, the straits separating Denmark from Sweden.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. October 8 2022. Two days ago it was warm, then a cold front swept through and today it was blustery, almost wintery. Such an upset gets birds moving, many birders relish such cool days with north-westerly winds to stir things up.

I completed one of my transects this morning, the valley was beautiful in its fall colour, all shades of oranges yellows and reds, in sweeps and swatches, entangled or even swirling loose in the gusts.

The transect produced about thirty species and I was sometimes challenged to make an identification: A single Rusty Blackbird was a struggle for a long time, it was silhouetted high on a bare limb and it was only by analysing photos later that I able to draw a conclusion. A young Chipping Sparrow had me searching my mental files for a match, it was showing key field marks, pink bill, a clear breast yet, perhaps because the habitat was wrong, I didn’t clue in for a while. My Birds of the Day, three Green-winged Teal, had me puzzled too.

From a large footbridge spanning the wide creek that meanders this valley, I gazed down at Mallards, about twenty of them, males and females. Behind the Mallards and making their way upstream, towards where I stood, were the teal, different in size and behaviour, and more richly patterned than the Mallards, though not distinctively so. When a male Green-winged Teal is in his nine-months-of-the-year plumage, he looks like this. Unmistakeable.

But these were not males at their handsomest, they may be females, young males or males in eclipse plumage (relatively drab late summer, early fall when they lose their showy breeding finery.). At first glance they looked like female Mallards. Here they are, including a female Mallard to make my point.

I took several photos, mentally reviewed the options, discarding Blue-winged Teal, Gadwall, wigeon, shoveler and pintail for one good reason or another. Left with Green-winged Teal, I remembered that they are small, much smaller than a Mallard and that there’s quite a few around right now. Looking at my photos I noted a few glimpses of the iridescent green speculum, from which they get the name.

I always like to see Green-winged Teal, apart from their beauty they have a daintiness that appeals. Speaking to another birder later, she said her duck-hunter father always brought home a couple of Greenwings for the kids, being smaller he thought them more appropriate. She hated finding lead shot in her dinner. Kids’ meals have changed.

Our house. Burlington Ontario. October 6 2022. I like to think of our back garden as colourful and chaotic.  It is both of those but not entirely unplanned. I invest several hours in spring setting things in motion and several hours in fall preparing for the hard freeze ahead and there is enough turfgrass to justify some effort in mowing. But otherwise it looks after itself with little trimming or transplanting. The late season outcome of this near-neglect is dense tangles, dark corners and lots of colour.

Just a year ago I wrote about a Ruby-crowned Kinglet who had found plenty to pick and eat on the stems and flowers of our backyard Gaura. I noted how stepping outside will often send a small migrant, darting for cover, usually too fast to identify. It’s that time of year again, fall migration, and our colourful-chaos garden is a bit of a bird magnet.

The past five days I’ve been catching glimpses of a Winter Wren, a Hermit Thrush and, late this afternoon, a Lincoln’s Sparrow, all birds worth stopping work for.

Golf ball size Winter Wrens value secret places and dense cover and true to form, this one appears at garden edges, picks for food and withdraws at the faintest hint of a threat.  I’ll miss it when it finally decides to move on. Today it was My Bird of the Day.

I nearly missed the Lincoln’s Sparrow, I was about to burst out the back door but fortunately paused to glance ahead . The sparrow was close and indeterminate, I went for my binoculars half expecting it to vanish before I returned.  The day was fading but still I was easily able to make out the few key field marks: dark streaks drawn finely on a buff breast. Lincoln’s Sparrow has been a Nemesis bird for me for many years but having finally clinched it a couple of years ago I am content.

The Hermit Thrush posed long enough for me to get several decent photos and considering they were taken through two layers of window glass, they’re pretty good. This is it, above and below.

As I write this I’m aware that a White-throated Sparrow is somewhere close, I can hear it. But for today it’s the Winter Wren that comes out top.