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Today’s Bird of the Day, an adult Black-crowned Night Heron, was perched on a branch not 50 feet from me,  I think it was waiting for me to leave.  It was mid-day, well past bed-time for a nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, hunter of frogs, small fish and the like.  Night herons can be hard to find during the day, but if you check carefully in the inner branches of pond-side trees you’ll sometimes spot them hunkered down at rest and anywhere up to about 50 feet above water level.

I was standing on the edge of a wide and shallow pond not far from a large well-leaved willow tree, just the sort of place a night herons would choose for a nap, when it flew low over the water towards me from the other side of the pond.  I think someone or something had flushed it from a secure perch forcing it over to ‘my’ willow, which it really saw as ‘its’ willow if only I’d move out of the way. So it alighted on a branch not far from me and after a short while moved in a little closer; all the better for getting loads of photos.

Two days ago I’d stopped at this little corner of the pond and found a Green Heron barely six inches above the water, motionless on a branch and holding a pose as if ready to strike and spear should a witless fish drift by.  I was amazed at the heron’s apparent indifference to the presence of an intent group of bird photographers that had clustered around it. I didn’t have my camera so missed some priceless pictures, oh well, there’s more to birding than photography – to me anyway.

Leaving the Black-crowned Night Heron I made my way back to my car and noticed a couple of Ruddy Ducks sifting through gloopy pond-sludge.  This particular pond is not too bad as ponds near large cities go, but what those ducks can possibly sift out of the sludge that’s edible is beyond me, and then to think that people like to shoot and eat the ducks afterwards leaves me quite baffled. 

Lots of pictures here, click on any to enlarge  it.

1 October 2013. Cayuga ON. Fog hung low over the bird observatory this morning. We always record the current conditions In our observatory records, these include cloud cover, wind, and visibility.  As long as you can clearly see for a kilometer or so, visibility is noted as ‘Excellent’ and, tempting as it may sometimes be to enter it as ‘Indifferent’ or ‘Bleak’, the record is supposed to show atmospheric conditions and not the consequent ability or failure of observers to find birds.  Today’s fog prompted the unimaginative yet appropriate adjective ‘Limited’.

As if to reinforce the point that the quality of visibility doesn’t necessarily equate to birding success it was quite a busy day.  I completed the daily census and quite surprised myself with a tally of 29 species including some 500 or so European Starlings swirling in one of those great big rolling flocks, a gathering which the Victorians colourfully dubbed ‘a murmuration’; two long V-flocks of Canada Geese following the course of the river; and a small group of Killdeers also tracing the river’s path – perhaps a reliable navigation cue in the absence of better sight-lines.

There were several warblers around, apart from the Magnolia, Blackpoll and Nashville Warblers banded in the lab, I encountered a couple of Yellow-rumped and Western Palm Warblers making their way through the dense grape tangles and dogwoods.

This little sparrow popped up to see what I was up to and I was somewhat puzzled by it.  What challenged me was the clear breast with something of a central spot, a field mark that usually suggests American Tree Sparrow, but nothing else about it was right. Its back and wings showed quite a bright rusty brown, the facial pattern and light line over the eye suggested a tan morph White-throated Sparrow, yet other critical White-throat details were absent.  Understand that on these census walks, one tends as a first response to focus on the expected, and with sparrows it’s an easy but treacherous prop; the unexpected happens all the time. I was half expecting White-throated Sparrows and Song Sparrows, I’d already seen plenty of both along the way.  I should have paid more attention to the rusty-red wings.

Seizing my camera and praying the bird wouldn’t fly away, as most do once I get them in focus, I was able to get several decent shots, enough to ensure a good post-walk identification.  A group discussion led us to Swamp Sparrow and darn it, I should have known that, they’re one of my favourite summer songsters.

Here’s a series of shots of this Bird of the Day Swamp Sparrow, the rich brown of the back and wings is clear in one of this series.  Apart from the exercise in bird i.d. the photos are nicely evocative of the damp and foggy conditions on this otherwise warm and gentle fall day.

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24 September 2013. Hamilton ON. There’s a now little used saying along the lines of, “Guests, like fish, begin to stink after three days.”  Much as we all understand its context, such aphorisms are fading fast in our digitally abbreviated and celebrity-drenched world which adopts and almost just as quickly dumps, new pithy and useful phrases, discarded just like candy wrappers.

All of this has little to do with today’s birding excursion except that when I saw an American White Pelican where pelicans don’t belong, my reaction was just as much, Wow! as it was, Oh are you still here?

I had walked out to one of my favourite birding lookouts, actually the same place that prompted my previous posting on the Orange-crowned Warbler and Peregrine Falcon.  And for sake of continuity from that story, some shorebirds, a dozen or so Lesser Yellowlegs, had shown up today, otherwise it was much the same mix: Great Egrets, Green-winged Teal, a bunch of Northern Shovelers and some Great Blue Herons.  But in sweeping the vista to count the Great Egrets (seven) I found myself looking through my binoculars at a White Pelican swimming along quite happily.

A White Pelican was first spotted here about a month ago, it excited a lot of comment and the list compilers were quick to respond.  But as time wore on and it lingered, so its celebrity status dwindled. Having heard nothing about it for weeks I’d assumed it had moved on, completing its migration from Northern Ontario or Manitoba to the Atlantic coast.

We see one or two American White Pelicans here every year and I can never quite get over how odd it is to see pelicans here at all, and not in tropical or semi-tropical waters in the company of fanciful literary beasts.  That’s probably a hang-over from my childhood when Pelican was the children’s book trademark equivalent of Penguin; either that, or maybe also because they belonged in the whimsical works of authors like Edward Lear.

Despite all of my hesitancy and even ingrained prejudices I do accept that seeing an American White Pelican today was really quite special; standing head and shoulders above everything else and deservedly Bird of the Day.

24 September 2013.  Talk about a study in contrasts!  Book-ending the day were the warbler that no-one ever knowingly sees and the falcon that is the avian standard bearer for everything swift and powerful.

Orange-crowned Warbler: It was with only a little tongue-in-cheek that I called it the warbler that no-one ever knowingly sees.  The thing is, this bird is the quintessential “I’ve no idea what that is” warbler.  I think when the Creator fashioned the prototype warbler, it was the Orange-crowned.  Seeing it, the Creator thought, “Well, we’ll have to do better than that if we’re to avoid repeating the Old World Warbler debacle.  We need to add marks and decorations, some flamboyance, some details that separate and distinguish the dozens of species on the drawing board, one from the other.”  So with a splash of blue/grey here, a wash of yellow there, some bold black eye-liner and liberal use of white wing-bars, such splendors as the Canada, Magnolia and Black-throated Blue Warblers and a host of others came about.  Unfortunately the Orange-crowned Warbler was already out of the bag so to speak and although they rightly own a part of warblerdom; they are a reminder of the Old World Warbler mistakes.

We encountered an Orange-crowned Warbler at the bird observatory today.  I took first look at it and pursed my lips in that sideways manner that suggests the interrogative Hmmm.  I passed it to my colleague who did much the same thing but at least offered up some ideas: Tennessee Warbler? – No, Nashville Warbler?- No, female Black-throated Blue? – No, too small.  Could it be an Orange Crowned?  We checked the books, inspected the undertail coverts, agreed on eye-ring details and thought maybe that’s what it was.  Still we referred it to the man in charge who initially and tentatively proclaimed Tennessee Warbler. We begged to differ, and in the bright light of day we were at last able to find some, just a couple, of little orange feathers on its crown.  So Orange-crowned Warbler it was, and to do it justice, it is a cute little bird.  Here’s a couple of pictures of it.

Then much later in the day, I decided to see if there were any shorebirds to be found on the shores of a lake where the water level is falling and exposing mudflats.  There weren’t any, but I and another idler enjoyed telescope views of Great Egrets pacing delicately and deliberately along the reedy margins looking closely for something cold, wet and slippery to spear.  Without warning there was an abrupt explosion of anxiety and we turned to see a young Peregrine Falcon take a close pass at a Green-winged Teal that moments earlier had been sitting quietly minding its own puddle-duck business.  The falcon failed to make contact but soared up in a wide arc in front of us, turning to show its brown streaked body and the classic long and wide pointed wings that could only say Peregrine.  In a roller coaster move it stooped for the second time taking a swipe at another small group of ducks, again without making contact. It swerved away behind a small island and I thought it had left us but moments later it streaked past for the second and last time before vanishing behind a bend in the river.

You’d have to be pretty jaded not to be stopped in your tracks by a Peregrine Falcon, they are, to use a hopelessly overdone word, an icon.  If icons are touchstones, symbols, points of reference and reverence and all of that, then Peregrines qualify.  Hard not, then, to make it Bird of the Day. But on the sublime to the ridiculous scale, so too must the Orange-crowned warbler qualify.  They were both really cool birds.

18 September 2013. Cabot Head ON.  My diary notes for today start, “Another golden day just like yesterday.  Sunny, light winds, mares’ tails clouds and not hot – and not cool.”  As birds go, it too was neither hot nor cool. Screaming troops of Blue Jays sallied back and forth making keeping a count quite tricky; it’s funny to watch them when sometimes they fall out of the sky in tumbling unison to the tree-tops then flit around screeching at each other.

The slow laugh of a Pileated Woodpecker made us search the trees until finally it flapped away mechanically to somewhere across the waters looking for better things .

Late in the day as we were returning from an interesting hike that included finding a nervous looking Masassauga Rattlesnake, and driving along the shore road I noticed a group of about ten Red-breasted Mergansers engaged in a most curious feeding behaviour.  They were close to the shore in crystal clear water no more than two or three feet deep. They could obviously see something tasty and digestible for without any apparent warning they took off scampering across the water surface and then shallow-diving to skim just below the surface creating a small bow-wave and chasing whatever it was, sometimes up to the very edge of the beach, it was almost as if they were surfing upside-down.  It must have been worthwhile for them because a couple of Ring-billed Gulls stayed close enough to harass them for an occaisional snatched free meal.

I watched the mergansers from my car for a few minutes, and then realizing how important it would be to record this scene I readied my camera for a video of this unusual activity.  I was sure it would be a ground-breaking recording of hitherto unreported bird behaviour.  And with that they promptly stopped the chase as if they were embarrassed to have been caught in the act of something unseemly.  So all we’re left with is this, my brief account, my memory and for what it’s worth the knowledge that they were my Birds of the Day.