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10 March 2014. Bronte Harbour, Ontario. Five days ago, my birds of the day were King Eiders, but I also mentioned a White-winged Scoter and its battle to subdue a mollusk.  Today I returned to that same marina to see if I could get a better idea of what the scoter and other ducks are feeding on.  I’m almost certain that they’re plucking Zebra Mussels from the lake bottom.  Zebra Mussels are a Eurasian mollusk that was introduced into the Great Lakes from the bilge water of a visiting ship, or so the conventional wisdom goes.  Over the past three decades or so, having few natural enemies, the mussels have spread throughout the Great Lakes and become a serious nuisance.  On the bright side, their abundance is a rich and easy source of food for several Arctic diving duck species that now stay to over-winter here rather than press on to the Atlantic, as they did formerly.

The harbour, where all of last week’s reported events took place and to where I returned today, allows for marvelous close-up views of waterfowl of every stripe.  A pier and extensive seawalls extend out into Lake Ontario and curl around to embrace a small craft marina. Under current ice conditions the majority of the marina is totally iced over, but the furthest point of the pier intrudes into an area of open, yet sheltered, water and it is here that hundreds of ducks, geese and swans have gathered all within a hundred feet or so of a safe viewpoint.

For quite a while I watched several White-winged Scoters diving for food, hoping to see one repeat the food control performance of five days ago.  While none of them managed to spear anything quite as succulent looking, several brought large mollusks to the surface and worked hard juggling them in their large bills to break them open.  Frequently the food-item would slip from the bird’s hold but a quick and easy dive got it back on board.  This whole nutcracker-without-the-hands-to-control-it process made a good case for the development of forelimbs, hands and opposable thumbs in particular; but how then would it fly?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll save myself hours of typing and leave it to the following to illustrate how ducks in general were my birds of the day.  Click on any picture to enlarge it.

 

7 March 2014. Burlington, Ontario.  I witnessed a couple of unrelated mini-dramas unfold today: one a romance; the other a brush with danger, both involving Trumpeter Swans. Today for the first time in two and a half months the sun came delivering real warmth.  It will take several days of above zero to push back the ice, so when I visited one of our harbourside waterfowl gathering places it was no surprise to see Trumpeter Swans and Canada Geese standing around on the ice.  They were close to a small beach, watching a photographer who in turn was watching them; for all of the geese and swans’ anticipation there didn’t seem to be a promise of food involved.

The photographer was watching several pairs of swans performing what I can only assume was a courtship dance.  Couples facing each other with wings half open and heads held high, they were bobbing up and down, but at the same time watching the other pairs to see how they were getting on.  It gave me a feeling of déjà vu, they looked like teenagers anxious to impress, but wondering if the others were doing it any better. They impressed me though, enough to be Birds of the Day. In three or four weeks, once the ice has given way to open waters, these courting couples as bonded pairs will head for more northerly lakes and rivers to breed.

This crowd of perhaps two hundred geese and swans, apparently hopeful that food was yet in the offing, abruptly turned away from the photographer and started a quick march away from the shore.  A few moments later, three Eastern Coyotes ran out onto the ice.  For a moment I thought they were about to herd and harvest dinner, and so did the birds, but instead they kept on running and soon disappeared from view. I have no idea what the purpose of their dash was but it’s illustrative of how urbanized coyotes have become.

5 March 2014. Bronte Harbour, Ontario. I’m running out of ways to make winter birding sound like something you might want to try someday.  Today promised to be a decent, albeit chilly, birding day, so I set off to check out a couple of bird-rich sites along the shore of Lake Ontario.  An inevitable cost of lakeside birding is exposure to the wind, I accept that and dress accordingly, but for reasons that I can’t quite fathom, it seems that icy winds (in particular) are almost never at your back, they prefers to attack head-on.

There was nothing unexpected in the way of birds out there although I think I saw more than usual numbers of ducks and swans that had reached the end of their tether and died on the ice.  Perhaps at anytime there’s always a few corpses floating around but when the ice persists as it has this winter well, some stay where they drop and neither float nor sink. This young female Long-tailed Duck looks hale enough but was ambling along on ice looking quite disoriented; exposed like that she’s vulnerable to any number of opportunistic predators including: Great-Black-backed Gulls, Herring Gulls and Bald Eagles.

My day’s tally included three species that should turn heads: A pair of Peregrine Falcons, but then I had expected them, they’ve been using a large bridge structure as a nest site for six or seven years now; A Snowy Owl, but then we’re seeing lots of them this winter, and this was yet another one; and a group of King Eiders – and they were Birds of the Day.

 

King Eiders commonly winter along the Atlantic shore but are very uncommon visitors to inland waters. I had to refer to Bob Curry’s authoritative book, “Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas” to learn more.  He notes that a few King Eiders find their way to the Great Lakes in November when things start getting cold and Arctic seas freeze over.  Most King Eiders seen here are either females or young males although the occasional adult male shows up and that causes quite a stir because their “stunning plumage attracts birders and photographers.”  I have to admit that my sighting of them was distant and the in-my-face wind off the lake didn’t help matters.

I rounded out the day with a tally of some 15 or so species, mostly common ones but also including White-winged Scoters, Red-breasted and Common Mergansers, Black Ducks, Trumpeter Swans and some gleaming Redheads.  The photo series below is of a White-winged Scoter battling with a recalcitrant delicacy that he obviously viewed as needing taming.  I couldn’t quite make out what he had and hoped that one of my photos would help, but all that I can say is that it looks to be organic, slippery and succulent.

 

 

3 March 2014. Burlington, Ontario. It’s perhaps precipitate of me to declare my bird of the day before breakfast, but I’ll chance it.  Monday is garbage day here, we need to get the blue box, the green bin and the non-recyclables out to the road-side early, otherwise well, you know. And it was while doing just that, in that first hour of the day, that I saw and heard a male Northern Cardinal in full song, my Bird of the Day.

It’s a bright full-sun March morning although still January cold. The cardinal was, and still is as I write, singing loudly from the top of a small ash tree that marks the boundary of a neighbour’s back yard.  The cardinal’s song, to those not familiar with it, is a forceful series of whistles; first an increasingly assertive series of three or four notes:  feeta-feeta-feeta-feet,  followed by a couple of long exhalations: tewww tewww. It’s a hallmark song of suburban North America and heard in February or March, a sign of spring approaching.

 

28 February 2014. Dundas, Ontario. I’d been hearing of various places around town where lots of birds may still be seen, mostly waterfowl, so I decided to visit half a dozen sites with open water and see for myself.  Under winter conditions such as ours this year, there are few spots where open water remains unfrozen.  I could show you a couple of quite enchanting fresh-water springs where the water flows year-round at a steady temperature of about 5 deg, C.; or there’s the dynamic bodies of water like Lake Ontario or the Niagara River which are far too busy to have time to freeze. But at the other end of the spectrum, there are unfrozen places close to sewage outfalls and they seem to be particularly appealing to waterfowl.

My first stop was at the remnants of a 19^th century canal which at one time was the absolute limit of access by water from the Atlantic and Lower Canada into southwestern Ontario. This historic artifact is now distinguished as the discharge point for a tertiary sewage treatment plant, an irony deserving much further comment; but enough for now.  Today it’s a happy (and perhaps delicious) wintering place for ducks, geese and swans.

Upon my arrival I was pleased to see an American Wigeon among a large gang of Mallards and Canada Geese all picking at the rutted mud of the parking area in hopes of sorting out something edible.  I managed to get a number of photos of the wigeon before it hastened back to the water, but feeling sorry for it and hoping that maybe I’d help it get through the winter, I fetched a small bag of bird seed from my car.  Well, by the time I scattered the seed about, the wigeon was nowhere to be seen; instead my generosity was appreciated by dozens of Canada Geese.  They came in from every direction, many of them flying across the road causing several near misses with passing trucks.  I could imagine the swearing and eye-rolling and was rather embarrassed at having unwittingly caused such havoc and ; so I left to buy some cheese.

On my return the chaos had passed and I was able to take more time appreciating what it means to spend your winter days on or near ice.  I found a pair of Hooded Mergansers and thought for a while that the male for all his colour and splendour would look pretty good as Christmas ornament; he’d be no more preposterous than much of contemporary  iconography.

Leaving this rather sordid neck of the woods I went to the edge of our industrial harbour to where I’d been told that a preserved WWII destroyer had been kept ice-free by a submerged bubble system and where consequently birds were hanging around.  It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped but I was able to get a good look at this rather handsome Greater Scaup.  Scaup, Lesser and Greater, are infernally difficult to tell apart, but I think the overall roundness of this bird’s head and the gleaming white flanks point to a Greater Scaup; the Lesser’s head profile has a bit of a peak at its forehead and is often (but not always) rather muddier in its flank colour.

I was of half a mind to view the scaup as my bird of the day; it is certainly rather eye catching, but it was seeing the American Wigeon surviving in its hard-scrabble existence among all those pugilistic Mallards and heavyweight Canada Geese, that stole my heart.

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