Category: Uncategorized

Safari Road Marsh, Flamborough. ON. June 5 2022. There is a wide marsh, bisected by a busy road, about 40 minutes drive from home. It’s a good place to look for American and Least Bitterns, Virginia Rails, Sora and Common Gallinules, they’re all there. Given peace and quiet you’ll usually meet with some success.

I’m not sure what ‘they’ were thinking when the road was imposed upon the marsh a hundred years or so ago, it must have had a huge impact on the wildlife at the time,  tons of gravel poured in and laid down to make a road bed. And tarmac too in time. But decades on, we birders value that obscene scar on the landscape. We value it for the birding access it affords despite the speeding traffic, beer-can litter and road-killed frogs, turtles, snakes and birds.

I went there this morning and found that the road had been closed to traffic, it was barricaded and detours set up. High water and a tough winter had deteriorated the road surface to the point that the local roads department had deemed it unsafe for vehicular traffic; but importantly it was okay for walking birders.  I was there a bit after first light and other than bird song, the distant coughs of lions at a safari park, and the crackly trail of small planes high overhead, it was all very peaceful.

I was lucky enough to watch a Virginia Rail pace across the road, but it was nervous and soon ducked into thick cattails and was gone. I could hear Common Gallinules singing in maniacal cackles and maybe best of all Marsh Wrens announcing their hold on a patches of reed-bed.

Around me, Barn and Tree Swallows swept the air for flying insects, a Sandhill Crane and a couple of Great Blue Herons laboured by and two Blue–winged Teal were a colourful surprise as they leapt out of the water showing off the wide blueness of their wings in flight.

Marsh Wrens can be a bit quick to take flight so I count myself lucky that this one, above and below, posed patiently, and steadily enough for me to photograph it. Perhaps it was just determined that I should understand its place in the marsh and mine on the roadside. In any event it was My Bird of the Day.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. June 2 2022. Now for the clamour of reproduction. June is about the next generation: the task ahead is everything from establishing territories, to courtship, from nests to eggs to fledglings and to flight. It’s the May arrivals (and there are plenty of them) who are the ones just getting started, some locals like Ravens and Great Horned Owls got started back in February and their young are out of the nest by now.

Today I completed the last of our spring transects under ideal conditions, clear, bright and sunny, T-shirt weather.

From the start I could hear Great-crested Flycatchers calling, a beautiful self-assured bird of treetops. Walking a riverside trail rich in bird song and activity, I watched a pair getting acquainted, he singing and apparently defining a territory and she staying close. I was so enamoured by them and the many others just like them around the valley, that I thought Great-crested Flycatcher was my Bird of the Day. But not long after, I spotted this line up of young Black-capped Chickadees, just-out-of-the-nest fledglings dependent on their parents for an unfailing supply of food. I have to give them equal billing to the flycatchers.

I counted over forty species this morning. The Great-crested Flycatchers dominated the soundscape but there were others that made me stop and appreciate the morning: I could hear: Rose–breasted Grosbeaks, Swamp Sparrows, Red–eyed and Warbling Vireos, Orchard Orioles, Blue Jays, even a Black-billed Cuckoo calling softly from the forest edges.  Both Willow and Alder Flycatchers were singing their very similar songs, dry emphatic phrases rather like a roadside cricket.

I was a bit dismayed when I passed another birder who, in the exchange of morning pleasantries, commented that it seemed a bit quiet today; I thought it was anything but.

Caledonia. ON. May 30, 2022.  In the normal course of events I wouldn’t drive very far to see a Ring-necked Duck. Small flocks, males and females, show up here on medium-sized ponds shortly after the ice clears, at about the same time the first Red-winged Blackbirds arrive.  They are notable as one of the earliest ducks to make a spring appearance. Then, just as we’re getting used to them, they leave, most have gone by late April continuing their journey to northern nesting grounds. My reading tells me the species nests in a broad band across the continent. As Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts it “… this duck nests at generally low densities in subarctic deltas, taiga, boreal forest, aspen parkland, and to a lesser extent, prairie regions.” Which is to say, mostly in Canada. In Ontario they head to regions on or beyond the Canadian Shield, so well north of us.

But normal courses of events are subject to change and surprises. Lyn, an Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas colleague, contacted me recently to say that she was seeing Ring-necked Ducks, perhaps a bonded pair, on a quiet lake in her atlas square. We exchanged emails agreeing that if indeed Ring-necked Ducks should be breeding there, it would be a significant southerly breeding-range extension.  She invited me to join her to confirm and corroborate her sighting.  It didn’t take long this morning to re-find the pair who are showing every indication of planning on raising a family.

The pond is on private land and a long track took us to it through wide grassy fields alive with Bobolinks and Savannah Sparrows.  The landowner gave Lyn enthusiastic permission to enter his land, hundreds of acres of open, undulating fields and woodlands dotted with ponds.

The photo above of the pair of Ring-necked Ducks is the best I could do at the distance, but it’s okay. For purposes of the atlas this observation rates as ‘Probable Breeding’. Confirmation will require a higher standard of evidence including such obvious things as seeing the nest with eggs or young and perhaps most likely here, observing the birds with a flotilla of young on the water. I’m betting on confirmation in a month or two.

North Shore Trails, Arboretum, Royal Botanical Gardens’, Hamilton. ON. May 25, 2022.  I joined a co-birder friend early this morning to bird one of our transects. (funny how ‘bird’ the noun has become a verb: I bird, you bird, she birds, etc.) It was still and cool, Lyn wore gloves – but then she usually does. An industrial size lawnmower in the arboretum made enough racket that we changed our route, only to be drowned out by the passing of a 100-car-long freight train. But when the air finally cleared it was typical and good late-May birding with lots of activity and song. It was mostly birds determined to stay and breed rather than those on their way heading north.

This little corner of the world is a mix of hardwood forest, the arboretum with its scattered specimen trees, and farm fields all bisected and trisected by railway and power lines. It was the hardwood forests that gave us the best of the morning. Two species: Red-eyed Vireos and Scarlet Tanagers dominated the soundscape, both favour mature forests as summer breeding habitat. Red-eyed Vireos sing incessantly, their soothing, measured song is a recitation of two or three-note phrases often characterized as “Here I am. See me. Way up. Tree top.’  They carry this on all day, from sun up to sun down. Early in the last century naturalist in northern Ontario counted one individual bird’s songs over a full day, from sun up to sun down, and tallied about twenty-two thousand iterations!

The Scarlet Tanager is an almost mythical bird, one which, if glimpsed, seems eye-poppingly improbable. I’ve added a few photos, today’s bird is immediately above. We could hear several singing males in the treetops, we managed to spot one female and after a search found this gaudy male above us. Its preference for the forest canopy makes it difficult to spot but familiarity with its song improves your chances. I have come to like its rather coarse and raspy song if only because it gives the bird away, it led us to today’s and for that it was My Bird of the Day.

Our morning was rich in variety with fifty species including three from the world of flycatchers Eastern Kingbirds, Great–crested Flycatchers and an Eastern Phoebe, countless Brown-headed Cowbirds, a Common Raven, and the sight and sound of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks.

Desjardins canal, Dundas, ON. May 17 2022. A friend, Bob, took me to some of his hot-spots for some warbler catch-up time this morning. It was a perfect morning and he delivered some fine birds, Wood Thrush, Hooded Warbler, Veery and Mourning Warbler included. Any of those might have been my Bird of the Day had it not been for a call from him later to tell me of a Red–throated Loon just found on a nearby canal. I was close any way and headed over. Here it is, with thanks to photographer Doug Ward.

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It should be on its way from the Atlantic coast to its high-Arctic nesting grounds. But something’s amiss. There’s a tale unfolding that yesterday it had crash-landed onto a forest path, was picked up (unable to get airborne) and released into the canal (which gets much of its water from a sewage treatment plant.)

Loons are known to mistakenly put down on ice-covered roads, misjudging ice as water; but it beggars belief that a loon within sight of Lake Ontario and in its right mind would land on a forest path, unless, either it was demented or the path was waterlogged (it did rain yesterday). Once on land though loons can’t take flight, their legs aren’t made for lifting or walking let alone launching it airborne.  Apparently plans are afoot to recapture and remove it from the absurdity of this canal and release it onto nearby Lake Ontario. We can only hope.