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Royal Botanical Gardens. Arboretum, Hamilton. ON. August 16 2022. This morning I was reminded of a recent radio discussion about collective nouns; you know: a charm of goldfinches or a murder of crows, that sort of thing. The reminder came from seeing this carpet of Double-crested Cormorants over and all around a small island at the end of Lake Ontario.

As far as I know carpet is not anyone’s collective noun for cormorants but it seemed appropriate.

Collective nouns are a far more ancient part of English language than I knew. I’d always assumed they were the products of harmless Victorian parlour games but no, the earliest known written source of collective nouns is the Book of St. Albans, compiled in 1486 by Juliana Bernes, the Benedictine prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell, Hertfordshire. To me, it seems like an odd conjunction that a superior in an order of nuns, should be the compiler of a compendium of terms for hawking, hunting and heraldry, I thought they were supposed to spend their day in devotions. Whatever the origins, it must have been important to many, for the work soon sold out and was reprinted several times.  Perhaps collective nouns somehow served to discriminate between the hunter, the hunted or just an onlooker, though I must say I can’t think how. Or more prosaically, possibly they were just winter, fireside entertainment, early (not Victorian) parlour games. I suppose it was important to some to know whether you had encountered an unkindness of Ravens, a cast of falcons or a flight of Goshawks.

The cormorants, who started this contemplation, were a little unsightly through no fault of their own. Their huge population here is demonstrably tied to human-induced changes to the ecology of the Great Lakes.

Far more appealing to the eye was a siege of Great Egrets (‘A siege of Herons’ according to the Book of St. Albans) who stilled the morning with their slow delicate pacing and occasional stab at fish.  Bright white they were eye-catching and rated as my Birds of the Day despite pretty stiff competition from a couple of flings of Lesser Yellowlegs (ibid. Fling of Dunlin. The closest I could find.).

A vocal and busy flock of forty Caspian Terns (ibid), young and adults, gathered on a mud bank for a teaching event. The parents were showing the kids how to spot and dive for fish, and the kids would have been wise to pay attention, which I think they understood, they were certainly staying close.

Writing this required quite a bit of research along the way, and I found that ‘gulp’ is the accepted collective noun for cormorants. A gulp of Double-crested Cormorants then.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. August 5 2022. These are often days of steamy weather but after a night of cleansing thunderstorms it was measurably cooler today, so, I visited the valley again.  Well, it’s close, not too heavily peopled and always delivers something interesting bird-wise.

It was warmer and moister in the shelter of the valley, I was soon sweating but still enjoying the green closeness of it all. No-one else around, and no birds either until I came upon this Song Sparrow cooling off at the creek-edge.

The Green Heron of my last post was back in the same pond and I found a shady spot from which to photograph it. It seemed to be enjoying a well fed, low stress day in the sun, mostly preening, sometimes watching other birds overhead and every now and then inspecting odds and ends on the Duckweed.

 

Before leaving to head back to my car (in the shade), I stopped at a favourite lookout platform and was wowed by a female Baltimore Oriole picking seeds from the inflorescence, or panicle, of Wild Rice. She just made a great picture framed by a starburst of rice stalks. Her easy beauty and proportions, especially without the gaudy distractions of a male’s plumage, makes her naturally graceful; for that reason she was My Bird of the Day.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. July 28 2022. This evening, with two hours of daylight in hand, we walked the valley for no better reason than its stroll value.

There was no choice but to go single-file along the first half of the trail, it was thickly overgrown, head-high and smelled heavily of mid-summer. Over my shoulder, I commented that last March I’d wondered whether anything could ever possibly regrow here, the flood-scoured ground, frozen with drifts of pan-ice seemed so impossible. But now, as is inevitably the case, countless millions of plants clambered over and through each other in their crush for light and space to reseed.

We reached our turnaround point on a small boardwalk that cut across a shallow pond, green with Common Duckweed. It is a favourite stopping place and often the place to see our familiar Eastern Screech Owl (but not today). A female Wood Duck was quietly sifting the waters, but other than that there was little bird life to see. With close listening I could pick out a mewing Gray Catbird, a couple of Blue Jays, Black-capped Chickadees and the occasional far off croak of a Great Blue Heron.

A Green Heron flew quickly across a patch of sky uttering its short, metallic shriek to announce its descent into ponds a couple of corners away from us.

Then quietly another Green Heron drifted over, turned and wheeled down towards our pond and settled not five meters from us.  Funny how hard it is sometimes to see a Green Heron, but they’re not big like a Great Blue, they are crow-size, often inconspicuous and they just mind their own business stalking fish along the edges of quiet ponds and waterways. Sometimes they will hold a pose in ambush, motionless for many minutes at a time. I watched this one make its careful way, along a zigzag log, each step taken slowly, almost daintily, allowing its long toes to wrap a secure grip each time.

It made several rapid stabs for small fry and then one particularly satisfying lunge for a small Brown Bullhead (catfish). A quick down-the-hatch swallow for the catfish, followed by dipping its bill like a cleansing ritual, and it turned, retraced its steps and hopped over to another log to start again. I managed to record about four minutes of video and this is taken from the catfish moment.  A quiet evening and the Green Heron was an easy Bird of the Day.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. July 19 2022. I walked the length of my favourite valley early this morning and it was nice. I use that word with some hesitance for I remember teacherly admonitions to avoid ‘nice’ the adjective.  I was instructed that nice is bland and limp, and a weak choice, but it was nice in the valley. Now with the reproduction frenzy of May and June behind us, everything in the bird world seemed to be at peace, a place for everything and everything in its place.

It was a time of simple sightings and no drama. A few Eastern Kingbirds flycatching and a Great Blue Heron fishing for breakfast. Tree Swallows gossiping on open branches, a Green Heron passing overhead and Warbling Vireos singing among the high layers of American Sycamores.

As I ambled a path that runs parallel to the creek I heard the thin I’m-watching-you ‘pip’ note of a Northern Cardinal.  I soon found him just above me and saw one of birding’s curiosities, a bare-headed cardinal.  He’s molting.

Molt is the pre-programmed shedding of worn feathers and their replacement with new. At its simplest it’s just that birds change their clothes too, but the variables and complications are many. It is a complex area of study: males of many species have an eye-catching breeding plumage but some molt into glory in the weeks or months just before spring, while others do so a full six to nine months ahead of spring.  Why the difference?  Some large birds don’t do a complete molt every year at all, because growing feathers demands too much energy. Some species go through several intermediate molts before reaching full adulthood, and many ducks, geese and swans molt out their long flight feathers and are unable to fly for a period.

Curiously, some individual Northern Cardinals and Blue Jays have a way of molting into a bald-headed state for a short while. Such baldness is uncommon and usually prompts a flurry of alarms and queries among local birding groups. Naked like that they’re strikingly ugly, I’m sure I see their dinosaur lineage, and who would have imagined that cardinals have grey/black skin under their brilliant red plumage.  I wonder (and I have no idea) whether it’s a coincidence that the heads of both cardinals and jays have prominent feathered crests. He was my un-feathered Dinosaur of the Day.

Port Perry, ON. July 8 2022. While a car full of adults might ignore hunger pangs for a while, a nursing 8-month old is almost certain to call for immediate satisfaction. It was exactly that set of circumstances that broke our longish journey into several parts today, happily we made each stop somewhere green, shady and mosquito-free.

We stopped for a while at a lakeside park popular with people of all ages and interests: young, old, ice cream and play. I might have been the only one paying attention to bird life, gulls mostly, but especially a steady patrol of terns along the waterfront. From where we sat, I thought they looked like Black Terns, and if so, I wanted a better look. Excusing myself, I returned to our heavily packed car to retrieve my binoculars and camera.

Black Terns as a species are considered to be of ‘Least Concern’ across the Americas, they thrive in the centre of the continent breeding in small colonies on freshwater marshes, At the edges of their range however, Black Terns have declined sharply and are now much less common around the Lower Great Lakes. It’s been a while since I last saw Black Terns and I was keen to get closer.

A small flock, perhaps a dozen, had found good pickings in the matts of vegetation accumulating along the shallow shoreline and quiet backwaters. They formed a constant parade, passing parallel and close to a waterfront path, wheeling suddenly for shallow plunges or picking daintily from the weedy surface. Where open water gave way to a busy marina they veered out and away to circle back to the starting point, and repeat.

I think that in all my years that I have never enjoyed such a privileged opportunity to watch and study Black Terns, they are usually more solitary and too far away. It might be hard to write enthusiastically about a bird that is generally black, sooty black and pale black but their bouncing acrobatic flight and delicate swallow-like lines make up for it. They were difficult to photograph but nevertheless a happy distraction from our journey.