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18 October 2013.  Cayuga ON.  It’s a mad scramble to get out now that the weather has turned.  The past couple of weeks following four solid days of cold and rain, have been two weeks of urgency.  More dirty weather is coming and the skies are full of birds on the move.  It’s as if someone yelled Fire!

I did the daily census at the bird observatory this morning and found myself staring helplessly at a wall of trees full of European Starlings, Cedar Waxwings and Red-winged Blackbirds, quite unable to count them.  There’s no better word than cacophony to describe the unending din from the flocks.  Small groups of American Robins were flapping around clucking and singing little snatches of song, White-throated Sparrows stayed low but maintaining contact with their metallic ‘pink’ and even a few Golden Crowned Kinglets fluttered for insects in the lower grape bunches and tangles of weeds. My census counts gave only order of magnitude at best.

Moving on from that hotspot, I ended up in a quieter wooded valley and enjoyed watching and comparing Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers.  The calls of the two species are so alike that I frequently have some misgivings about adding either to the census without a confirmatory sighting. In the back of my mind is a little mental recording of the Hairy Woodpecker’s clatter of indignation remembered from when once I got too close to a nest full of fledglings.  The coarse, rapid-fire, metallic quality of the notes sets the Hairy apart from the almost pretty staccato of the Downy; but if I make it sound easy, it’s not, the differences between them is easily blurred by time and circumstances.

As I watched the two look-alike, sound-alike cousins I was drawn to another woodpecker, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, immediately it became my Bird of the Day.  We don’t see many of them around here, they pass through in spring and fall and they’re fairly undemonstrative.  The field mark that always catches my eye is the long stripe of white down the wing; otherwise they look superficially like a Downy or Hairy Woodpecker.  Six months ago I watched (and wrote about – click here)  one drilling for sap in the tender bark of a Sugar Maple.

Yellow-rumped Warblers swarmed in some warm corners, working hard to glean insects for the journey and days ahead. Perhaps my bird of the day should have been the Hermit Thrush, I saw two but they’re so elusive that it’s hard to get quality time with them.  Still, they’re an elegant, if shy, bird subtly dressed in warm browns and with a boldly spotted breast.

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17 October 2013.  Hamilton ON. With an hour or so to fill before a rather formal ‘Through you Mister Chairman’ meeting I wandered slowly through the quiet marble and yew avenues at our local graveyard.  It’s a good place for birds, quite apart from being as quiet as a graveyard should be, its on a migratory fly-way, there’s plenty of tree cover and some commanding look-out pinnacles.  A large tiered headstone makes a good place to get comfortable and wait quietly.  It was an afternoon of little birds, mostly Golden-crowned Kinglets, Black-capped Chickadees, White-breated Nuthatches and Brown Creepers. Brown Creepers always seem to take me by surprise, not in a startled way, more of an’ Oh that’s neat’ surprise.  Just when you think you know what’s around suddenly this little brown mouse of a bird drops to the base of a tree in front of you and starts its rapid climb up the trunk picking and prying for insect food.  They move quickly, rarely showing long enough or moving straight enough for me to get a good photograph, however either this one was obliging or I’m getting better at ambush photography.

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14 October 2013. Cayuga ON. The Yellow-rumped, formerly Myrtle, Warbler is a hardy soul.  Unlike its delicate, early to leave, tropical class-mates, (the Blackburnian Warbler comes to mind) the Yellow-rumped doesn’t need to go so very far south; they can live, subsist anyway, on the berries of winter. A precious few even hang around here well into the winter and with occasional sightings in March, it’s probable that they make it out the other side.  But most of them leave, turning off the lights as they go.

I spent most of the morning at the bird observatory.  The property was also the site of a classic car show and by 11.30 I gave up, the combination of the Beachboys at full volume and BBQ starter fluid was more than I needed.  But I completed the daily census and with the help of a young birder with eyes and ears one-fifth the age of mine, we turned up 27 species – a good haul.

Red-winged Blackbirds predominated with well over 150 counted, plenty of Cedar Waxwings too – about 60, White-throated Sparrows (11) and Yellow–rumped Warblers (45 – although really we lost count), all signs of the progress of fall.

This Yellow-rumped Warbler (Bird of the Day) was one of many flitting and dodging around us.  Most of them were impossible to follow but this pretty little thing decided to sit long enough for a photo-shoot. It’s probably a female hatched this year so there’s little you can point to as a clear field mark, it’s perhaps a good example of how unremarkable Yellow-rumps can appear.  For me it’s a combination of one or more clues: The time of year: their liquid contact note – ‘plip’; the sometimes streaky breast with yellow patches towards the shoulders or; the rather bulky size.  All help, but always diagnostic (provided it’s visible) is the yellow rump.

The following four shots of a male in spring show the classic Yellow-rumped field marks well.  Apart from the splashes of yellow, the back and wings are a much more intense grey/black.

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13 October 2013.  Valley Inn, Hamilton ON.  A week or so ago I wrote about the Black-crowned Night Heron, an interesting encounter.  Today I went back to that same location because it can be so fruitful with all kinds of oddities, most of them drawn by the shallow waters and deep silt.

My mental list for the couple of hours spent there include: two singing Carolina Wrens, three Green-winged Teal, large flocks of Cedar Waxwings, a fast-moving cover-seeking Winter Wren and a small group of young Hooded Mergansers.

I watched a similar group of young Hooded Mergansers at this time last year.  Then, as now, they employed a curious way of fishing in shallow waters by sinking almost imperceptibly rather than diving.  Whether this is a seasonal technique I don’t know, neither of my best reference books make mention of it.

Herons stole the show today.  First a young Green Heron stalking up and down a waterside branch, its long toes placed slowly and deliberately as it moved towards a possible catch.  I saw it dart at and catch a small fish only once, but it had endless patience, sometimes holding motionless for 10 or 20 minutes waiting for something it thought was worth going after.

A Great Egret flew in, pushed the Green Heron aside and perched conveniently a few feet from me.  The brilliant white of these birds make them very difficult photography targets, the detail of the various tracts of feathers usually vanishes in a glare of over-exposure.  This close I felt I might do better and enjoyed some success.

A young Great Blue Heron paced slowly around the edges of the pond, stepping with almost delicate precision and eventually capturing several meals.  My best photo is almost grotesque, capturing head-on a portrait of a bird perfectly adapted for its waters-edge life.

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10 October 2013.  Burlington ON. There is a valley not far from home where families take their children, grandparents and visitors for a breath of nature.  It’s a well-worn area with many environmental issues but really wonderful despite them.  The terrain is varied, there’s a long easy boardwalk along the wide valley-bottom, a meandering river and oak forested flanks.  Best of all the bird life is usually diverse and, for the families, tame enough that they’ll feed from your hand.

We have been hosting two visitors from Apeldoorn, Holland as part of this city’s cultural twinning arrangements. You would not by any stretch of the imagination describe our guests as birders, but they certainly appreciated the ‘nature’ around here, the ready access to plenty of open and more or less unspoiled spaces.  I took them down to the valley where I knew I could turn them into birders if only for an hour or two.  And sure enough, once I put birdseed in their hands and showed them how to make the offering, the Black-capped Chickadees and White-breasted Nuthatches moved in.

It’s interesting to compare the Dutch to English names of birds.  Many of our birds are familiar to them, chickadees and nuthatches included.  Nuthatches have quite an eponymous name in Dutch – Boomklever; roughly translated as Tree-chopper I’m told.

While today’s bird selection was hardly sensational: Mallards, Great Blue Heron, Red-bellied and Downy Woodpecker, the best of the walk were those tame enough to steal the hearts of our visitors the Black-capped Chickadees and White-breasted Nuthatches.