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October 19 2012. Ruthven Park Cayuga ON.  A nearly-wow moment came today at the bird observatory when I caught a glimpse of a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.  Memorable because I don’t see them very often, they tend to be rather quiet loners (unlike flickers), they breed somewhat north and west of here and most of them (but certainly not all) pass through over a brief three week period in April and again later over two weeks at the end of September and early October.  They are the Cinderella among our woodpeckers, a bit on the dowdy side and apparently they don’t get invited to parties.

There were other more-or-less wow moments too: flocks of Eastern Bluebirds flying around aimlessly and calling quietly; A couple of Eastern Phoebes, one of them on my census round; An Osprey sitting quietly watching over the river looking contented and presumably well fed; Several Purple Finches and maybe best of all, a midday flight of Red-tailed Hawks.  This one was photographed silhouetted against the sun as it circled  and cast its shadow on us.

October 17 2012. Cootes Paradise, Hamilton, ON.  Some days are just average, even a bit mundane. But the basic tenet of this blog remains intact: there’s always one bird, no matter how ordinary the day, that stands out as the Bird of the Day.  Yesterday I went out to check a small stand of Pawpaw trees that grow not far from here, I wanted to see if they’d borne fruit this year and maybe collect just a few seeds; they had and I did. But it would have been negligent of me if I’d left my binoculars and camera behind so my forestry expedition soon became another birding walk.

It was pretty good, I flushed a family of White-tailed Deer hunkered down in some long grass just before coming across a Winter Wren popping around low in some alders, then found that the trails were alive with White-throated Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers, and Red-bellied, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers were just flitting around chattering among themselves.

And so it went for an hour or so, the page of my notebook filled up, there were Northern Shovelers and Green-winged Teal a few hundred yards offshore and a Carolina Wren started purring from deep in the overgrown honeysuckles.

My original tree-centric purpose of the walk was brought back into focus by the glowing reds and oranges in the Sassafras trees. Arguably they were more noteworthy, more attention-grabbing than any of the birds I’d seen along the way.  It was an average day, so far.

On my way home I stopped to see if some bridge construction that had temporarily blocked access to a great birding spot, had been completed; it had. And there just a hundred yards away, standing stoically in a shallow pond, were four Great Egrets, just when I thought the egrets had left for the year, so I got that little surge of pleasure that made me say Wow! Here they are, my Birds of the Day.

October 15 2012. Cayuga ON. Two days ago I mentioned that we’d had a hard ‘killing’ frost overnight, the next day the weather turned strangely warm only to turn colder again today with a howling, leaf-stripping, southwesterly wind.  It’s all part of the change of seasons, all part of what makes the study of nature, the natural world, so interesting.

I was at the bird observatory again this morning to play my small part in gathering and gleaning information about birds.  Such information is collected by bird observatories around the world, bit by bit, much of it mundane, some of it surprising and all of it aggregating as part of the huge body of information that enables us see trends, explain changes and, with luck, head off calamity.  So as part of this data gathering I did my hour-and-a-bit-long census circuit to see what birds were around us today.

With the sou-wester blowing unremittingly, bending trees and sending leaves and dust spiraling, I was not very optimistic.  In reality though, it’s not as though birds vanish when the weather turns ugly; they have to be somewhere, and why not right in front of us? In fact adverse weather presents challenges for birds that can result in the unexpected; it’s just up to us to expect the unexpected and to ratchet up our field skills.

The riverbanks are somewhat sheltered and I stood for quite a while at the river’s edge and was rewarded by a Belted Kingfisher (just when we thought they’d all gone south) an Osprey (also not seen for several days) and a fast moving flight of Wood Ducks that zigzagged quickly into the sheltered valley of a tributary creek.  There were Yellow–rumped Warblers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets and White–throated Sparrows staying low in the willows and grapes.  At an open area, which was nevertheless out of the wind, several Eastern Bluebirds and American Robins had gathered, and to my pleasure, a trio of Brown Creepers was working up and down a bare ash tree.  I watched them for quite a while, which is unusual in itself because I usually only find solitary Brown Creepers and in denser woodlands where they quickly vanish around the other side of the tree trunk; like this one. 

October 13 2012. Normandale, ON.  The first real frost of the fall touched down last night, a killing frost I think horticulturists call it, it left many garden plants limp and watery looking. Yesterday’s strong north wind sent thousands of Turkey Vultures packing and today large flocks of Red-winged Blackbirds were on the move too. There seems to be very little of summer to hang on to now; no going back.

I volunteered to help with some trail maintenance at a nature reserve today and spent a morning walking forest trails, and loving it; undemanding work richly rewarded.  A few birds were evident, mostly woodpeckers it seems: we heard from a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a distant Pileated Woodpecker and watched a couple of Downy Woodpeckers at work.  A small group of Yellow–rumped Warblers moved through the treetops, heading southwest I imagine. My best sighting, and bird of the day, was a Winter Wren picking and exploring the mossy fallen logs beside a clean, cold, sand-bottomed creek.  We watched each other closely. Back in the summer I had heard and briefly seen a Winter Wren in this same general location and felt confident that it was a territorial male, notable because it’s quite far south of their usual breeding range.  I’d like to think today’s Winter Wren, a golf-ball sized bird with a little stick up tail, was the same bird.

This one was photographed yesterday at the banding lab.  It had just been banded and had its head examined, hence the ruffled feathers on its crown. A useful technique for aging birds when plumage is inconclusive, is to dampen and part the crown feathers and look for evidence of partial or incomplete fusing of the skull which is just visible through the pale skin.

October 12 2012. Ruthven Park, Cayuga ON.  It was just about a year ago (November 9th. actually) that I wrote about a brief encounter with Pine Siskins in my back yard.  That was about my only sighting of siskins last winter.  They are generally a northern bird that moves south somewhat irregularly and in varying numbers each winter, so it was some hopeful anticipation that I read a day or two ago of a sizeable incursion of Pine Siskins moving down the Atlantic seaboard.

Today I returned my familiar haunts at the bird observatoryand was soon rewarded with the sight of half a dozen Pine Siskins at a feeder just outside the banding lab window.  They are on the delicate side for finches, their bills are slim and pointed and well suited to their preferred food of small seeds.  They have bright yellow flight feathers which are usually visible (although only just in my photo below). Today I was quite taken by a couple of individuals with really broad and quite vividly coloured yellow on both the wing and upper tail, unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of either of them.

Apart from the Pine Siskins it was a busy day at the observatory. It was bright but blustery and masses of White–throated Sparrows and a few White–crowned Sparrows were feeding in sheltered leafy corners.  A beautiful full adult plumage Bald Eagle soared in circles beneath a cumulus ceiling and a Sharp–shinned Hawk, a few Red–tailed Hawks and an Osprey rounded out the raptor collection.

I conducted my customary daily census and was pleased to find a very late Philadelphia Vireo feeding among many Golden–crowned and Ruby–Crowned Kinglets. Either of the Philadelphia Vireo or a single Orange–crowned Warbler might arguably have been my Bird of the Day, but I really got more pleasure from the Pine Siskins.

Finally, a puzzle of physics:  I arrived well before sunrise, the sky was clear and the moon and Venus still shining brightly, there was some dampness on the grass and the air temperature was 4 degrees C., Half an hour or so later as the sun rose the temperature dropped and a light frost formed.  Why would that be?