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20 December 2013. Burlington ON. In my admittedly distorted view of the seasons, spring starts right after Christmas, right after the winter solstice really; so any day now.  Call it a self-deception if you like, but my arguments for my viewpoint have merit: starting two days from now daylight length starts to increase; with increasing daylight comes more sunshine; with sunshine comes warmth; and with warmth comes spring.  What more convincing do you need?

The forgoing is a digression whose only relevance is to support the observation that today could hardly have been gloomier.  It’s as good as the shortest, lowest-light day of the year, we are under a heavy overcast and a very fine drizzle makes visibility about as poor as it can be.  But notwithstanding the many reasons to bury my head under a cushion, I took a detour along a quiet road looking for birds, and to my delight, came across a frenzied abundance of American Robins feeding on honeysuckle berries. The pleasure of so many robins, some half-heartedly whispering songs, busily feeding among in the colourful branches of the honeysuckle was a delight, almost a Christmas card moment; certainly a Bird of the Day moment.

While it is generally held that Robins leave us for the winter, it’s not quite true.  I’m sure many do make their way into the gentler climes of southern states, but hundreds remain around here.  They retreat into our many sheltered valleys, places where food is relatively plentiful and winter storms merely roar overhead, rather than sweep, scour and glaze the land. And here was a flock of robins, perhaps a hundred strong, they’d found Tartarian Honeysuckle bushes that were covered with masses of scarlet berries.

Conventional wisdom has it that our frugivorous bird species (robins, waxwings and mockingbirds for example) avoid the berries of Tartarian Honeysuckle and European Buckthorn as distasteful and view them as last-resort food. Maybe… or maybe since both are invasive plant species they’re not immediately and instinctively recognized for their food value, especially amid the fruitful abundance of late summer and fall.

Coming back to the matter of the gloom of the day, I took dozens of pictures but in such low light the camera was hard pressed to produce crisp images.  Here’s a couple.

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After the robins I stopped at our nearby waterfowl-rich marina, admired a number of Tundra Swans, Mallards, American Coots, Common Goldeneye, a winter-plumage Horned Grebe and several White-winged Scoters who had ventured too close to shore for their comfort.  Their panic is evident in the photo below.

16 December 2013. Burlington ON. A few months ago I met a young exchange student from Switzerland who, in the course of a wide-ranging conversation, happened to mention her strong interest in birds.  Of course that’s bound to catch my attention, I’m ever eager to share, and as a consequence, we’ve made a couple of trips to the bird observatory.  That was back in September when it was still T-shirt weather, but she made a comment then that has stayed with me, owls, she said, hold a special place in her heart.

With all the Snowy Owl activity around here lately I felt that it would be negligent of me if I allowed her to miss what might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one.  I offered, she accepted, and so today we went owling after school. I did a quick check around beforehand and was a little dismayed, I could only find one, either many of them have moved on, or (more likely) now that we have wide expanses of snow and ice everywhere, they’re harder to find. Still, we had one to look at, it was one on the roof of an industrial building, so our after-school trip was a success even though the setting was pretty gritty and access a bit challenging.

Pleased with progress, and to be frank, very much enjoying her evident pleasure at seeing these remarkable birds, I suggested we get back on the highway and make for a distant cemetery, (the dead centre of town) and try for one more species, an Eastern Screech Owl.  I gave us a scant twenty percent chance of success but she was quite happy to give it a try, better than doing homework I’m sure.  I wrote about this target Screech Owl a month ago, it’s a reliable (well 20% reliable) habitué of a Silver Maple knot-hole, it likes to pop out of his hideaway and take the sun if it can, soaking up whatever warmth there may be.

When we arrived the sun was fading and the owl’s knot-hole was in deep shadow so not surprisingly there was no sign of it. We shrugged and drove away, meandering slowly among avenues of snow-topped granite monuments, looking at promising knot-holes as we went; and in no time we found one. A very obliging red-phase Eastern Screech Owl catching the last drops of sunshine. A wow bird for sure and Bird of the Day; here it is.

14 December 2013. Burlington ON. We don’t get a lot of snow around here, not compared to some parts of Ontario, but last night about six inches of really light and fluffy snow settled quietly upon us; apparently there’s more to come.  It makes a change, and I suppose a change is as good as a rest. For birds it can make life tough, which is why so many of them head south like the sensible creatures they are.

I cleared an area in our back yard and scattered some mixed bird seed around; I know the squirrels will find it and make short work of the sunflower seeds, but the rest of it, mostly millet, will go down well with chickadees, juncos, sparrows and maybe the odd goldfinch.

It didn’t take very long for a Slate-colored Junco to spot the opportunity, although it spent a long time in our old clematis-draped pear tree assessing the risks of dropping down to ground level, the possibility of a predator: a cat or maybe a Sharp-shinned Hawk, is real.  I had only cleared a narrow swath, effectively a trench, through the snow. Perhaps it didn’t care much for the limits a trench places on its ability to spot trouble.  Then, once I had cleared a larger area a few more juncos arrived.

The Slate-colored Junco is one of twelve sub-species of the Dark-eyed Junco, a member of the sparrow family.  To complicate things these twelve subspecies fall into five major groups: White-winged, Slate-colored, Oregon, Pink-sided and Gray-headed.  Our happy little Slate-Colored Junco is the most widespread and the only one found regularly east of the Rockies.  We generally consider them a winter visitor (refugee) but you don’t have to travel very far north or to higher elevations to find them during the breeding season.

11 December 2013. Burlington ON. On my way to pick up a book at the library a swirl of light snow blew around in the watery light and it got me thinking how how monochromatic is the urban world at this time of year. It’s like an array of paint chips, you know the ones with improbable names like fieldstone or granite or even smokestack. Then to liven things up (thankfully) a Red-tailed Hawk swept low overhead, it banked left and dived between two Silver Maples, perhaps with a squirrel in its sights; as it passed I caught the foxy red of its tail.

A summer day’s Red-tailed Hawk seen overhead, wheeling and sunlit has a certain fundamental geometric balance to its wide, no-nonsense wings and broad triangular tail, but when watched, as this one was today, on a low level hunting mission you’re looking at a solid uncluttered bird with fluidly pointed wings. Watching it disappear I mentally tagged it as my Bird of the Day, in fact quite possibly the only bird of interest I was likely to see.

I later found that I had time to take a detour and see if one of the Snowy Owls of two days ago was still where I’d last seen it. It was, at least probably, whether I saw the same bird or not, I’ve no idea.  But where there had been one, there were now two Snowy Owls; and here, just because they are such neat birds, are a couple of photos in an appropriately bleak landscape of rocks and ice.

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9 December 2013. Hamilton ON. This posting has to be about Snowy Owls, after all I saw four of them this morning. Seeing one is always a thrill: they’re owls, and everyone loves owls, they’re Arctic birds that star in really good wildlife documentaries, and they’re so, so ghostly beautiful dressed in white. So you’d think that seeing four in one morning would be a quadruple thrill, but I find seeing that many to be rather disquieting; what’s going on?

Snowy Owls breed on the tundra and we know they head south as winter closes in.  We also know that sometimes, when their usual supply of voles and lemmings is scarce, irruptions of Snowy Owls descend to the Great Lakes provinces and northern states. It is my feeling that these irruptions used to be occasional events, once every ten or fifteen years, but that they have become more frequent.  What’s going on?

Two winters ago Snowy Owls invaded the Lake Ontario shores in large numbers. Anyone wanting to see one was more or less assured of success; this one even ventured onto the window ledge of a local office building allowing me this photograph.

My reference books note that Snowy Owls are expected winter residents.  Robert Curry, in his excellent book Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Areas, says, “We see it annually along the shores of Lake Ontario’s shores or in the open fields south of Hamilton.” and “..we have a long history of large numbers of Snowy Owls occurring during various southward irruptions.  These flights are generally believed to be the result of a crash in lemming populations after several years of increase and concomitant high owl breeding success.”

Whether I’m right in sensing there’s something wrong about too many owls too often, or whether I just don’t know enough about their biology gives me something more to think about.

Anyway, back to today.  I decided to take a look at a few of the easier to access windows to our large industrial harbour.  Even though the temperature was above freezing, it was cold birding with a strong southwest wind driving surf-topped waves across the harbour. Wherever there was shelter there were ducks and gulls (notably Northern Shovelers looking quite strikingly colourful and many Great Black-backed Gulls) taking refuge.

Other birders had I think, already reported two of the owls I saw, but the other two may be new discoveries.  Had it not been for the owls I might be writing about the large groups of Canvasbacks, Ruddy Ducks and Ring-necked Ducks bouncing around on very cold and choppy waters.  Perhaps they’ll star another day.  Here are my four Snowy Owls of today.