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The morning of May 2 2014 . Cape May N.J. My Bird of the Morning was a Yellow-breasted Chat seen and photographed at the top of an oak tree. I had just parted company from a group of happy birders; we’d had a very productive walk around Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area finding a large wave of overnight migrants. Our list of sightings was impressive including a Red-Headed Woodpecker, Northern Parulas and several Prairie Warblers. The Yellow-breasted Chat showed itself to the group just briefly, It’s been perhaps eight years since I last saw one, they’re very uncommon around where I live. They used to be, if not common, at least reliable in making an appearance every year, but populations change, much of it for the worse from most birders’ points of view.

After the rest of the group left, I headed back to see if I could see more of the Prairie Warblers.  I found a Yellow-billed Cuckoo which watched me apprehensively for a while and then just as we tired of each other the Yellow-breasted Chat appeared, perhaps it wanted to get a better look at me once the group dispersed. Anyway we admired each other for several minutes and it obliged me by holding some classic Yellow-breasted Chat poses.

It’s a handsome bird with an entertaining repertoire of whistles, clucks, hoots, snatched melodies and rasping chatters,and they have a funny way of puffing out their throat as they sing. For decades the ornithological community has considered it to be a member of the wood warbler family, albeit a very aberrant one. No-one really seemed to know why it should be a wood warbler when it is so morphologically different, at the same time few seemed to feel that it was such an outsider that it ought to be cast adrift in its own genealogical boat. Anyway, recent DNA analysis has shown that it is distantly related to wood warbler but that it is also just as distantly related to blackbirds and sparrows; it still retains somewhat honorary membership in the wood warbler fold.

The morning of May 1 2014 . Cape May N.J. It’s the geography of Cape May that makes it a birding hotspot. The low-lying, well treed and marsh-girdled peninsula stands on the north side of the shortest crossing point of the wide Delaware River estuary. It beckons spring migrants on their way to their northern breeding grounds. It is also on the Atlantic coastal route of millions of shorebirds also heading north.   It’s also warmer than Ontario being perhaps three weeks ahead in its unfolding spring, so I made my own migration to it to see what all the fuss is about.

This morning, as the remnants of a soaking, three-day storm blew its last couple of rain showers around, I set out to explore some of Cape May’s nature reserves. Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area is a jumbled collection of open field, woodland, swamp and scrubby beach dune. To provide a blow by blow account of a birder’s morning is not really the purpose of this site and would quickly become tedious. Let me just say that it was a very rich few hours that produced at least two stand-out sightings; both stopped me in my tracks with songs heard long before I tracked down the culprit.

A bold and liquid call, “CHK t-cheewoo – chk” repeated endlessly, turned out to be a White-eyed Vireo, a rarity in Ontario. After a while I realised that there were several of them around and that individuals’ songs varied somewhat. The common feature in all of them was the emphatic opening CHK!. I enjoyed long moments watching two of them and trying to commit to memory the song, or at least its general flavour. I met another other birder who suggested the useful mnemonic of “Quick – get me beer, chick.”

A little later I heard a song that I knew I should know, a thin, dry, ascending zuu zuu zu zu zu zu z-z zip. Racking my brains I narrowed it down to a warbler species but couldn’t get any closer. Finally the bird showed itself and everything fell into place, a Prairie Warbler, another Ontario rarity. I’d studied one a couple of summers ago when it seemed a pair set up to breed not far from home; it all came back to me. In a while it was apparent that there were many Prairie Warblers around. A little later as I sat on an elevated viewing platform, two of them chased each other around totally oblivious to my presence. But they are busy little things and plentiful as they turned out to be, they were devilishly hard to photograph; I have many bad pictures of them but this one of a female is pleasing.

My morning’s tally was 37 species which also included a Black & White Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Waterthrush, Yellow-rumped Warbler and American Redstart, all members of that treasured bunch of migrants the wood warblers. And then there was a Chimney Swift wheeling overhead, a Baltimore Oriole, noisy but unseen, and an adult Bald Eagle chasing an Osprey trying to steal its recently captured and still squirming fish.

Birds of the Morning were undoubtedly the White-eyed Vireos and Prairie Warblers. And that was just the morning. The afternoon was to be quite another adventure.

27 April 2014. Long Point, ON. There may be those who will take issue with my choice of Bird of the Day, a Brown Thrasher, scarcely a rarity and nor is it out of season. It was one of a large handful of really notable sightings (and soundings) in a full day spent at Long Point, arguably the best year-round bird watching location in Canada, and maybe one of the top five in North America.

This Brown Thrasher made me stop and stare, it made my jaw drop as I listened to it.   Brown Thrashers are famous for their song, a spontaneous and extemporaneous outpouring of notes, liquid, loud and frequently delivered in twos. (Follow the link and listen to a McCaulay Library recording of a Brown Thrasher recorded near Baltmore in 2000. I’m willing to bet you’ll have to stop and listen.)

I followed it around a deserted campground as it moved from tree to tree uncertain whether I posed a serious threat or was just another vague nuisance. It was reluctant to allow me to get too close but when it found a branch close to some rather desiccated High-bush Cranberry berries it was content to drop its guard for a couple of minutes and allow me to move in for these shots.

I have to say that those other notables really tugged at me. One, a Common Gallinule, was a first in North America for me. As a child in England, I encountered them often, we knew them as Moorhens and could find their nests along the edge of quiet backwaters. Today, when one flew away across a weed-choked inlet I was certainly surprised, but somehow it was more of an “It’s about time” reaction. Still, a good sighting. But not perhaps as inspiring as the American Bittern that rose clumsily and awkwardly from the constraints of a cattail marsh as I wandered along a wet trail. It came just moments after flushing a Wilson’s Snipe that was crouching a few steps ahead, it flew off exclaiming with what Pete Dunne aptly describes as “…a loud scraping protest ‘yrrrch’….” .

A singing Purple Finch, coursing Forster’s Terns, singing Pied-billed Grebes (more of a wailing yodel – click the link for another great McCaulay Library recording) and the resonant hammerings of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers all filled the day with memories. I recorded well over 50 species adding Blue-winged Teal, Eastern Towhee and Hermit Thrush towards the end of the day, then I drove two hours home, sunburned, windswept  and acutely aware that I’d wolfed down just a skimpy breakfast and completely missed lunch.

26 April 2014. Oakville ON. I made a couple of what turned out to be really eye-opening stops along the shore of Lake Ontario this afternoon.

The first stop was a pair of sheltered bays either side of the landward end of a long industrial pier, they are good spots to find waterfowl at almost any time of year. Interestingly the species mix is often different from one side to the other. There is a small cove with a white sandy beach on the west side and it was home this afternoon to about 55 Red-necked Grebes who were my Birds of the Day (plural), and one Red-throated Loon (Bird of the Day – singular).

I’ve posted several times about Red-necked Grebes. You’d think I’d get tired of them, but no. They are really quite fascinating (to me anyway). Red-necked Grebes winter along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and by far the majority nest on lakes and ponds across northern Ontario, Canada’s prairie provinces and the north west corner of the continent. But a small, disjunct population (probably no more than a dozen pairs) chooses to breed right here along a very short stretch of the shore of Lake Ontario, favouring marinas and other anthropogenic backwaters especially where kind folks help out by anchoring floating platforms (usually an old tire) on which the grebes then pile nest material. Pile is probably the best term, to say that they build a nest might be embellishing the quality of construction which can be a pretty haphazard sort of an affair.  If its base is well, not up to much, nests are prone to collapse, swamping or otherwise sliding off into the water.

Red-necked Grebes, like many other grebes, as if to make up for their lapses when it comes to construction, go for elaborate courtships. I’ve seen pairs of red-necks swimming fast in tight formation, mirroring each other and driving bow-waves of obsessed devotion ahead of them, and to top it off they bray like possessed donkeys to proclaim their devotion; it’s really quite something.

The Clarke’s Grebe of western North America takes the prize for courtship display, find a moment to watch this fabulous BBC video. Who wouldn’t be smitten by a paramour who could offer you fresh fish and dance like that?

Then there’s the Red-throated Loon, Bird of the Day. While Common Loons are always a pleasure to watch and even worthy of that much overused adjective ’iconic’, and without in any way meaning to undermine Common Loons’ deserved status as birds of the true north, around here a Red-throated Loon makes for a red-letter day. While they’re reported on the Lake Ontario with some regularity, they generally seem to be just passing through. Nesting takes place well north of the Arctic Circle and we usually see them still in their winter plumage; the pale grey head and carmine red throat patch will come in late spring and summer when the birds are on their high Arctic breeding ground; today’s bird still has a long way to go. So generally we see them like this one, mostly grey and whitish, it’s the pointed, up-tilted bill that makes them distinctive and readily identifiable. Loons have the ability to readily take in or displace air from their lungs and flatten air spaces between body feathers to regulate their buoyancy. In the pictures you’ll note how it appears to sit really low in the water.

Those were my Birds of the Day, but there were other stop-you-in-your-tracks moments worth sharing. Hundreds, maybe thousands of swallows coursing over the lake and shore: Tree, Northern Rough-winged and Barn Swallows to be sure, but there could well have been Cliff and Bank Swallows too although I didn’t pick out any. The roof of a large marina-side restaurant held hundreds of mostly Barn Swallows resting or maybe just enjoying the smell of food prepared for the wedding parties going on inside.

And on the break-wall of a harbour entrance, a dozen or so Caspian Terns (perhaps females) sat sharing opinions on the relative appeal of others (perhaps males) who were patrolling around and occasionally returning with a wriggling silver fish, presumably meant to impress. Whether they were duly impressed I don’t know, but I was impressed by them, they have such a gallant air about them.

25 April 2014. Cayuga ON. Y’know today was almost a test of the central thesis of this blog that there’s always a Bird of the Day, – that even a miserable, cold, dank day will produce something special, and it doesn’t have to be rare to be special.

I spent the better part of the morning doing the daily census at the bird observatory, in fact there were two of us: me with my Baby Boomer era hearing and my young companion Marie from Quebec, with perfect English, endless energy and acute hearing.

At the end of our trudge around, when asked, “How’d it go? or “Anything unusual on the census?” We looked at each other questioningly and sort of shrugged, “Not really. Oh, there were a couple of Rusty Blackbirds and a Barn Swallow, and some Eastern Bluebirds, but no not really.” 

What has the world come to? We tallied 39 species, the weather was fair and there are plenty of worse ways to spend a morning. Bunches of Bloodroot flowers, first of the year, were gamely looking up at us. In my working days I’d daydream of mornings like this.

Our census list included: Field Sparrows (4), a Barn Swallow, Eastern Bluebirds (5), Northern Rough-winged Swallows (2), and four Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. All nice birds to welcome back and wonder where they spent January.

But what was Bird of the Day? I think it was a splendid male Northern Flicker caught and banded early in the day. I was busy recording other data as Marie was dealing with the Flicker. I remember looking over and commenting on what beautiful bird it was and before I really knew it, it had been banded, aged, sexed and released. And that was it. Nothing really special but, as ever, there’s always one bird that makes me think Wow!

Here’s a quick shot of a White-breasted Nuthatch approaching its nest entrance.