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May 8 2014 . Cootes Paradise Hamilton ON. Over the years I’ve kind of kept track of the date by when our deciduous trees are fully leafed and provide a full canopy. May 3^rd, is an early date, May 13^th a latest date. As of today all trees appear utterly bare, unless we get a sudden burst of warmth I think we’re going to set a record late date. This is good for finding migrant birds although the birds may not appreciate it so much.

Today after a morning volunteering at a plant sale, I walked out along a shoreline path just to see what’s about. My intent was to end up at a marsh boardwalk in hope of seeing or hearing a Virginia Rail; no such luck.

However the woods were happily thronged with Yellow-rumped Warblers and Baltimore Orioles. The first Baltimore Orioles of the year are always a welcome sight, after about a week they are so ubiquitous and so noisy that I almost wish they’d shut up for a minute. Today I loved them.

My Bird of the Day though was my first Warbling Vireo of the year heard and seen singing high in a Black Cherry tree. In marked contrast to the orioles the warbling Vireo is a drab bird, generally olive and dingy greenish-white. What it loses in flash it makes up for in its cheery uplifting summer song which I always thought impossible to describe until a friend came up with this, “If I sees you I will squeeze ya an I’ll squeeze ya til you hurt”, this rough approximation is best recited in the silence of your head rather than aloud and in public.

Much later today a companion and I enjoyed excellent views of an American Bittern, at first singing (if you can call it that) and then we watched as it launched itself up and out of the cattails and flew surprisingly swiftly to settle in another corner of the marsh. We were pretty pleased with ourselves for witnessing this and a little later on, almost as pleased to see a Great Horned Owl.

5 May 2014. About that exhausting trip to Cape May, the one which is the subject of the previous five entries, I have posted more detail about the sites and sightings on a separate page which you can find by following this Birding Cape May link.

May 3 2014 . Belleplain N.J. My last day in the Cape May area. I joined a group to see the best of the best in the Belleplain State Forest, this was birding in car convoy, not high on my list of pleasures but in such a large and varied area it’s unavoidable; worse would be by chartered bus I should think. I remember several years ago, being at a birding destination near home when one of those large 40 seater buses showed up, the birders tumbled out gathering their wits, equipment and lunches leaving the bus driver snoozing in his seat with the engine running! Operators of large equipment vehemently maintain that leaving an engine running is more efficient, less wearing, easier (choose any one) than turning it off; anyway in the end he was persuaded to, but not until he’d quite poisoned the morning for most of us. I digress.

Our morning turned up plenty of interesting birds some of which would be commonplace to many of us but novel to others, I’d include Eastern Meadowlark and Eastern Bluebird in that. On the other hand my chance to see a Summer Tanager and a Yellow-throated Warbler were landmarks for me, the first time in my life that I’d knowingly seen either. I don’t usually gush about so called lifers simply because of that transitory status, but I have to say that the Yellow-throated Warbler was a beauty and was in retrospect my Bird of the Day. There are some indications that their population is expanding northwards and at least one individual has been seen at the same site in southwestern Ontario for the past two years. From an aesthetic point of view I would welcome its inclusion in our avifauna.

The trip ended as temperatures climbed and attention wandered, but we had enjoyed plenty of good stuff: Orchard Oriole, Worm-eating, Black-throated Green and Prairie Warblers among them. It was not a photographic bonanza (nor was it intended to be) but I managed to obtain the above rather bland shot of a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher’s nest. You’ll appreciate its exquisitely tidy construction I’m sure, a task managed entirely by a couple of tiny birds using beaks as their only tools. That’s mother bird nestled inside it.

With my head cold tightening its grip I parted company with a handful of friendly birder types and started on my eleven-hour drive home, leaving exuberant Flowering Dogwoods behind and watched spring in reverse as I passed north through Pennsylvania and New York to the distinctly cooler shores of Lake Ontario and home where daffodils are just breaking bud.

The afternoon of May 1 2014 . Heislerville N.J. I joined a small organized group on an afternoon walkabout billed as Shorebirds at Heislerville with Pete Dunne. We made our way along an elevated causeway with open waters to one side and enclosed ponds on the other. It was high tide, and I’d forgotten that shorebirds live for low tide when millions of acres of mudflats are exposed and the living is easy; at high tide they gather in large groups in peaceful refuges; just like these ponds. I have never seen so many shorebirds in one place as I saw this afternoon. I have a feeling that there will be even more in coming days and perhaps the thousands I admired are just a shadow of the millions upon billions that showed up before the days of widespread market hunting. The species variety was limited to a handful: Dunlin, Short-billed Dowitcher, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Least Sandpiper and Semi-palmated Plover, there could have been a couple of oddities around too but I didn’t find them.

But there were others that don’t so readily fall into the shorebirds group: Great Egrets, a Sandhill Crane and (Bird of the Afternoon) Black Skimmers. Skimmers are strange birds, superficially they are rather like an oversized black-backed tern with a stout scarlet bill. It’s the bill that sets them apart from all other birds, for the lower mandible is far longer than the upper. This arrangement makes for one of nature’s more curious feeding techniques, the bird skims fast and low over the water with its lower mandible slicing the surface in what I would have thought was a rather silly, if not desperate, attempt to catch dinner. Apparently it works well enough though and the group I had admired were living proof of it. Either they have an uncanny ability to discern what’s just ahead because you’d think (wouldn’t you) that any detritus lying just below the surface would be life shortening,  or they live short risky lives. I had seen skimmers once or twice before, but only fleetingly, so today’s luxuriously long study opportunity was something of a milestone. The Black Skimmer is for me one of those bizarre aberrations of nature that deserves a page to itself in one of an elaborately illustrated,19th. Century natural history works, books with titles like A Compendium of Fowles of the Air.

There was some excitement when a Tri-colored Heron was spotted flying some distance away. Quite unusual I was told, so when I found one, maybe the same one, a little later and alone, I felt quite privileged. Birds will often view a car, even a moving one, as less of a threat than a person and it so it was that I was able to watch the heron for several minutes while it stalked and eventually captured a small fish.

 

The afternoon of May 2 2014 . Stone Harbor N.J. My morning’s explorations and an oppresive head cold sent me back to my room for a long sleep. Later, still feeling a little under the weather, I opted for a short walk along a level trail leading out into a salt-marsh; it turned out to be a windy, noisy experience that battered my aching head. The wind was harder to take than the noise which came from Clapper Rails, Willets, and Laughing Gulls, all trying to out-shout each other.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to spot Clapper Rails, a fairly common bird in these parts, but it’s so elusive that it both intrigues and frustrates me. It’s a dowdy, mottled greyish-brown chicken-size bird with a nine-inch long decurved bill. Rarely flying far or for long, it struts and stalks around in the salt-marsh grasses, which at this time of year lie largely winter flattened, and where for the most part it refuses to show itself. But you hear them almost constantly. Presumably they greet each other from time to time, but in order to stay in contact they communicate noisily with a loud and odd series of notes that sounds like a rhythmic, almost industrial, scratching. Since the salt-marsh grass is, as I said, largely winter flattened, it is possible at this time of year to catch the odd glimpse of a Clapper Rail. I startled a pair that was skulking beside the path and they quickly flew away, fast and low. Then the movement of another on the other side of a scrubby bush caught my attention and I studied it closely with my binoculars. It was a strange encounter and I was able to inspect it at length, it seemed to know something was wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what. I saw a few others make a panicked dash across what for them was open ground before disappearing into a patch of standing salt-marsh grass. I would love to have been able to photograph one, but it was hard enough just getting to see one; another day.

Small groups of nearby Least Sandpipers and Brant were instructive studies and also produced some rewarding photo ops. A Green Heron, a protesting Willet and a Greater Yellowlegs also posed nicely, satisfying my notion that we all need lots of photos just in case we ever have to go back and consult our records.

(This post contains photos of Brant, Green Heron, Least Sandpiper & Willet in a gallery visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.)

The there were the Whimbrel, my birds of the afternoon. They are a curlew that stands about 18″ high and I have to say that I’m really not sure what it is about Whimbrel that appeals to me, other than I find them stately, an adjective I’d be hard pressed to apply to many other birds. This group was a little wary but tolerated me as I moved slowly out onto a small dock for this and other photos.