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26 February 2014. Niagara River, Ontario. A year ago I drove the length of the Niagara River to see what species of waterfowl  (ducks, geese and swans) were spending the winter there.  It was a rewarding trip, so I repeated it today, partly just to get out birding and partly for the sake of comparison (and a re-read of last year’s post shows how much alike the two expeditions were).

The Niagara River is some river, more like a fast-running sluiceway connecting Lake Erie with Lake Ontario.  The latter is about 300 feet lower than the former and the spectacular drop over Niagara Falls needs no introduction.  It gives me the chills to think about the risks associated with venturing into or onto the river, it rushes rather than flows from one lake to the other. Today, as if to emphasize its malevolent potential, it carried bright, white ice floes along with it.

My Bird of the Day, a Glaucous Gull, came right at the start. I was looking at the expanse of river right in front of me and mentally checking off: Red-breasted Merganser, Greater Scaup and Great Black-backed Gull, when one of the shoreline gulls took off and flew lazily away, circling in a wide arc.  I noted its pink feet, thinking how much they look like those of a Great Black-backed Gull, when I suddenly realized that I was looking at a gull with pure white wings; a bird that could only be a Glaucous or an Iceland Gull.  Both are winter visitors to the Great Lakes but the Glaucous is somewhat commoner, quite large and, if anything, purer white.  The bird I watched was larger than a Herring Gull and close to the size of a Great Black-backed.  I know I’ve seen Glaucous Gulls before but not often, being a bit of a fair weather birder.  Anyway it was a nice surprise, a bit of a treat really, and I immediately put an asterisk beside it in my notebook.

The rest of my drive was as expected: where the river flowed fastest, Greater Scaup and Red-breasted Mergansers dominated. In quieter stretches, particularly hugging the shore, were hundreds of Canvasbacks, Common Goldeneyes and Common Mergansers. And scattered here and there: Redheads, Mute Swans, Long-tailed Ducks and one, just one, Hooded Merganser.  Along one short stretch of the shore was a straggling flotilla of perhaps two hundred Tundra Swans. And everywhere: Great Black-backed, Herring and a few Ring-billed Gulls, just loafing on ice whiling away the winter.

Here are a couple of galleries of some of today’s birds, click to enlarge.

As I drove close to the falls I could see massive curtains of ice obscuring the face of the cascading water; it really is a spectacle at any time of year.

This post contains photos in galleries visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.

28 February 2011. Vineland, Ontario. I try to stay on topic with these postings but somehow the weather finds its way into the picture quite often. This winter, weather is THE topic; those of us who are immigrants are quite stunned by winter’s ferocity while native-born Canadians (with pre-1970 memories) say it’s just a good old-fashioned Ontario winter, the way they always used to be.  That’s as may be, but it’s not so good for fair weather birders like me.

As an idle indoor quest I started looking back through my photos to see what sorts of outdoor experiences I’d had on or about this date in years past.  I came upon photos of a Great Gray Owl that I’d had the privilege of meeting in February three years ago.  Her name is Granny and she is the companion of one of Ontario’s greatest philanthropist personalities, Kay McKeever.

Kay and her late husband Larry started rescuing orphaned and wounded owls many decades ago.  They became the de facto experts in owl rehabilitation and, while it’s a long story,  the upshot of it all is that today The Owl Foundation (TOF) remains just about the only place in Canada where an injured owl has a chance of treatment, recovery and eventual release. (Learn more about TOF by following this link) TOF employs a small group of young avian biologists who care for the owls, and a cadre of volunteers clean cages, prepare food, transport birds and raise operating funds.  Theirs is an almost endless job that deserves our support; new patients are always arriving.

When birders or bird-watchers celebrate the occasional winter irruption of Snowy Owls, as has occurred this winter, or Great Gray Owls, as happened some ten years ago, the unreported half of the story is that these birds don’t do well away from their home turf.  Unfamiliar with urban ways, many of them collide with cars and trucks.  Of course most such collisions are fatal to the bird but a few find their way to TOF where some, the not too mortally wounded, are treated and eventually returned to their native habitat; those are the good stories.

Granny is a not-so-good-but-not-totally-bad story.  She was involved in a collision with a truck and while apparently restored to good health, she’s blind in one eye. Deemed unfit to survive in the boreal forests of northern Manitoba from whence she probably came, she is now the constant companion of Kay McKeever.  It’s an oddly heartwarming juxtaposition; a large impassive bird that shows no sign of either accepting or rejecting its fate, spending days on the forearm arm of a gentlewoman.  Granny is as alert as any owl should be, she’s constantly checking out her world, swivelling her head to left and right through 270 degrees without any evident sign that what she observes is in the slightest bit incongruous.

That large facial disk of feathers serves to direct sound to Granny’s ears which are offset, one slightly higher than the other, to further fine-tune her stereophonic hearing and hence ability to pounce precisely on a vole moving inches below the surface of the snow.

Great Gray Owls stand tall and look heavy, yet they are mostly feathers.  An adult Great Gray Owl weighs about 2.5 lbs, half the weight of the comparably sized Snowy Owl and about the same as a Mallard.

The photo below is of a Great Gray Owl seen along the margins of a large lake last May and which I eventually decided was my Bird of the Year in 2013.  Even though Granny is a disabled captive bird, she is every bit as magnificent and just as much a privilege to have met.

18 February 2014. RBG Hamilton, Ontario. For this tale of Birds That Have Amazed Me, I must first set the scene. I spend a goodly number of winter mornings in a greenhouse as part of a happy team preparing plants for a fund-raising plant sale in early May.  We’re all volunteers and at the end of the day we make a decent pile of money, even if our net profit probably works out to about three dollars an hour.  We’re not a particularly sophisticated operation; it’s mostly about the love of plants.   But of course while we toil inside in the relative warmth, our hands in the soil and plants in various stages of tentative growth, it is still winter outside; never more so than this morning when an overnight snowfall was still flinging its last squalls about.

Our coffee break is a relaxed affair held in a neighbouring greenhouse, so for a while we abandon our benches and leave our work gloves and pruning shears to rest awhile.  This morning, for no particular reason, I happened to be the first to return from coffee and when I entered the greenhouse something small and brown flitted from me, moving fast and zipping away just above ground level.

My immediate thought was mouse, but that idea lasted less that a millisecond, mice don’t fly.  It had to be a bird.  But in here? Well why not: it’s warm, it’s sheltered and there’s plenty of food. What better reasons can there be?  If a bird, then what kind of bird?  A sparrow? Hmmm, maybe a Song Sparrow – they flit around at ground level.  All of the above reasoning took seconds only, and then I started to suspect a wren.  A Winter Wren maybe, but unlikely; a Carolina Wren was more likely.  I crouched down below the tables of plants and soon caught sight of not one, but two Carolina Wrens.

This is so typical; wrens have attitude.  They really couldn’t care less about convention.  So what if this is a greenhouse: people territory with locked doors, stuff in orderly rows, and labels on things?  So what if people are wandering around?  You can always stay out of the way and besides, half of them can’t see beyond the end of their iPhone anyway (my greenhouse friends excluded from this generalization).

Later when the morning’s work was done and most people had left, I crept around with my camera trying for a winner of a Carolina Wren shot.  They disdainfully kept their distance, they have attitude remember; but still I was able to get a few, mostly for the record, shots.  Here they are.

This post contains photos in galleries visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.

17 February 2014. Burlington Ontario. This winter is so complete that even the birds have gone.  Not all of them of course, it just seems like it.  I’m aware that there are ducks out on Lake Ontario, on fast-flowing rivers, around sewer outlets or anywhere there’s open water, and chickadees, nuthatches and other winter-hardy birds are still around; although not so many.  Whether their friends and relatives have moved on or perished I just don’t know; I suppose when winter does finally hand over to spring we’ll get some idea of the damage done.

Today I ventured out to see if last year’s pair of Bald Eagles had reinstated their nest as Bald Eagles do from year to year.  They were very successful in 2013 and we were pretty sure their two eggs must have been laid sometime around St. Valentine’s Day, that is to say  right about now.  So if they’re going to nest here again, well they’ll likely get started pretty soon.  On this bright, not too cold, sunshine-filled day, hiking out to the site seemed like a good idea, but skiing there seemed like an even better idea.  It’s a decade or more since I last cross-country skied and a four years ago, in a fit of ambition, I even bought new skis and boots to replace my early 1970s equipment, but my ambition exceeded my implementation and the new stuff has stayed unused until today.  This is not a skiing blog, but I’ll just say that I was quite pleased to have only one minor mishap (on a slope) and that I managed to re-find the rhythmic stride that makes cross-country skiing so enjoyable, and besides it was a glorious sky-blue and snow-white day.

Well there was absolutely no sign of activity in or near the eagles’ nest.  I could hear a woodpecker pounding away somewhere nearby but otherwise nothing.  On my return home I swung by my two favourite Screech Owl trees and grabbed a couple of nice pictures.  Then went down the harbour’s edge just in case there was a patch of open water with waterfowl; but where last year I saw Redheads, Trumpeter Swans and American Coots, today six young hockey players skated furiously, slapping the puck with sharp cracks.  I swept my binoculars across the wide all-white expanse of the harbour hoping for a sentinel Bald Eagle but the only sign of life was a distant Coyote wandering around looking, like me, for ducks, or geese, or its case, anything to fill its belly.

So Screech Owls it is as Birds of the Day, not that I’m complaining, just a commentary on the complete winter.  Here they are.

8 February 2014.  Haldimand ON. An overwhelming gender imbalance in my house and conversations that seemed to revolve largely around topics like knitting, toilet training and fashion editorials reminded me that I really wanted to get some good Snow Bunting pictures.  I bundled up, gathered my camera and binoculars and left saying I’d be back in about three hours; I’m still not sure if anyone heard me.

At the site where we’d been banding a week or so ago there were clouds of Snow Buntings, many of them on the road surface picking grit which is essential for digestion of their seed diet.  I pulled over to the roadside and saw that among the many buntings that were tucking in to the refreshed piles of corn, were several Horned Larks.

The object of the trip was to get some photographs and after the best part of half an hour trying to get decent shots from within the car I decided on a colder but better technique.

I rarely compromise my personal comfort for bird pictures. My camera is versatile and perfect for my kind of bird photography which is to say opportunistic rather than Audubon Magazine quality. But this morning demanded compromise.  With coat zipped and buttoned up tight, ear-muffs, wool hat and warm boots on, I slogged through the snow, placed a pad on the ground and sat with my back to the wind, about ten feet from the scattering of corn.  I’d tried this approach before and knew that Snow Buntings and Horned Larks are generally unconcerned by what other species would consider an imminent and mortal threat.  Within a few minutes they flew in, apprehensive certainly, but the food meant a lot to them and I enjoyed several minutes taking photos at close range.  Here are a couple of galleries of photos. You can click on any photo to enlarge it.

First the Horned Larks.  On some of them you can make out the little tufts of feathers that suggest horns (hence the name).  There are 21 subspecies of Horned Lark in North America, ours have the bright yellow throat that distinguishes them as being of the sub-species ‘alpestris’. (Probably the handsomest of the 21).

Snow Buntings are invariably described as cute.  I can’t argue, they could be the model for every dickie-bird that Walt Disney ever drew.  Most birds in the flock were females, but where you notice the wing is markedly blacker and whiter, starkly so in some cases, it’s a male.

This post contains lots of photos in galleries visible only on the website, not if you’re reading this as an email.