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Double-crested Cormorant

I have sometimes wondered what it takes for some of our more ho-hum birds to make the kind of impression that would qualify it as Bird of the Day status.  I did feature the European Starling one day last fall, it really stood out in its classy newly moulted plumage.  But take the Double-crested Cormorant for example; maybe if they weren’t dressed so somberly they’d be more appreciated, maybe if their guano didn’t destroy their nesting trees they’d find a place in our hearts, and just because they’re generally reviled by fishermen, boaters and lakeside property owners it doesn’t mean their mothers don’t love them. But they are what they are, and no-one seems to care for them very much.

Today on a distinctly urban errand I stopped to see if there was anything interesting out on the lake. Most of the ‘interesting’ waterfowl, things like Common Goldeneye, Bufflehead and Long-tailed Ducks have flown north to nest somewhere more secluded and traditional, somewhere that’s been a part of their genetic makeup for eons.  I wasn’t expecting much , but about half a kilometer offshore a mass of Double-crested Cormorants, about 500 by my best estimate, had gathered in a feeding frenzy, diving excitedly on a large school of small fish.  The whole gorging flock (which also included a few Ring-billed Gulls) moved quickly across the surface in a rolling wave.  I managed to get a couple of decent photographs, in the one below you can also make out a flight of new birds coming in to share the wealth.

On a different note and in appreciation of Victorian nonsense poets I’m including this oddball piece of cormorant verse.

The common cormorant or shag

Lays eggs in a paper bag.

The reason you will see, no doubt,

Is to keep the lightning out,

But what these observant birds

Have never noticed is herds

Of wandering bears may come with buns

And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.Double-crested Cormorants

Canada Warbler

 June 24 2012. Back to the Lake Erie shores today, to the same darkened forest preserve where we’ve been doing point counts.  I went with three goals: to be alone, to see if I could confirm a suspected Canada Warbler, and to study the many species of ferns that grow there.

Alone I move at my own pace and suffer or surrender to the mosquitoes as it suits me.  They were certainly active and unpleasant, especially when I crawled low for photographs  to capture the undersides of fern fronds.  I dislike insect repellants with the active ingredient DEET, but they work and I use them, though sparingly. Quite apart from DEET’s apparent toxicity I know that it will melt plastic; I’ve seen it happen, I spilled some in my car.

The putative Canada Warblerhas been singing from deep within a roadside tangle of cedar, grape and willow for a month or so.  On every visit I have tried without success to draw him out, today I was prepared to spend all morning at it if I had to.  Worse, the suspect was one of three or four more all singing the same song in the same general area, a tease that only heightened my desire to clinch it.  The Canada Warbler always starts his song with a single tiny ‘chip’ just ahead of a fast scramble of clear notes, I could hear a ‘chip’, a compelling clue, but not good enough for confirmation. A blow-by-blow description of my search would be tedious so it’s enough to report that he put up a good fight but in the end I found him, flitting low in the dark cedars. Here are two shots of a Canada Warbler, one to show what a handsome creature it is, the other exemplifies how elusive they can be.

Canada Warbler just banded and about to go free

Canada Warbler – a lucky shot

Now all that was left was to enjoy the ferns.  I know almost nothing about ferns except that I can identify a handful of the more unusual or conspicuous ones such as Christmas Fern, Maidenhair Fern and Royal Fern.  But the rest all seem to merge into a blur of mix and match adjectives like graceful, delicate, and arching.

As I spent several hours feeding mosquitoes, flipping through two reference books examining stalks, leafs and leaflets, I stayed in tune with the bird life above.  While most birds were not visible, I did manage to see an Eastern Towhee, a nervous Veery, and a pair of Northern Flickers high in a towering maple.  And songs and calls heard albeit without a supporting appearance, included: Acadian Flycatcher, Black-throated Green Warbler, Red-eyed Vireo, Carolina Wren and Winter Wren.

Later while trying to locate an unknown bird in a bright and overgrown clearing, a male Scarlet Tanagercame in to view and spent several minutes gathering food for his children.  In the riot of green around us he was red-hot and quite breathtaking. This photo was taken at a bird observatory is of a male and a female Scarlet Tanager, what a contrast!

Male and female Scarlet Tanagers

A mystery remains however.  In three quite separate locations, all deep in the deciduous forest I heard a repetitive song: “Chawee chawee chaweechoo”.  It had the distinct feel and resonance of a warbler, it came from a bird that moved from post to post and it didn’t respond to any of my attempts to call it in closer.  One day I’ll close the loop but it may not be this year, the woods will go quiet any day now.

Veery

June 23 2012. We went out early this morning to continue with one of my volunteer monitoring efforts, this time visiting a marsh.  It was a little disappointing; I had high expectations of this site because last year when the water level was high I’d had little difficulty finding Sora and Marsh Wrens.  Things change, this year the water is two or three feet lower, almost dried out in places and the formerly luxuriant expanse of cattail seems sparse.  We heard as many as four Sora this morning, saw families of Barn Swallows skimming for insects but there were no Marsh Wrens anywhere.

Our fieldwork done we left for a country walk along a dry trail past farmland, a pond or two and into a swampy wood.  It was in the woods that I heard the calls of several Veerys, not their winding, fluty exhalations but simple contact notes: “Swerp”, all around us.  Then, almost out of hearing range, one started to sing:  “Veer Veer veerr ver vr vr”  repeated two or three times.  Others picked up the theme and around us four or five, maybe more, all singing.  We watched one, a smallish thrush with a warm brown back and faded cream breast, come out in the open and briefly sing his part with nervous intensity.

The last time I wrote about the Veery’s song a reader commented that almost all descriptions of it include the word ethereal; and it’s true – few other adjectives fit. Not many people can listen to the Veery without stopping still in their tracks, try this recording on this Music of Nature website and see what you think.  The Veery chorus gave the morning its the wow moment, and earned them Bird of the Day.

I used to think warblers were not for mere mortals, that we’d get a glimpse or two during spring migration, lose them all summer and then be confounded by them in their different fall plumage.  Well I’ve become persuaded otherwise now that I have the time in my life to get out more, go further and look closer.  It’s still the case that many of these spectacular little birds vault right over us in May to breed much further north: Northern Parula, Blackpoll and Palm Warblers for example.  But even this morning’s gentle three-hour outing turned up six warbler species: Northern Waterthrushes singing alongside the Veerys, a trilling Pine Warbler in the tops of a plantation of Austrian Pines, a Common Yellowthroat at the edge of a pond, Yellow warblers popping in and out of low shrubs everywhere, a distant Ovenbird and a Blue–winged Warbler in the scrubby margins of a power line corridor.

We spent a while picking strawberries and then went looking for Butterfly Weed, a close relative of Milkweed, and found a nice patch of it among some scrubby hawthorns and dogwoods, it gave us this brilliant splash of colour to end our morning with.Butterfly Weed

Black-throated Green Warbler

June 20 2012.  We went back to the same old-growth forest this morning to continue with our study and point counts.  It was very warm at the start and the mosquitoes were happy to see us.  For a while I felt as though I was conducting a one-man study on mosquito attraction.  I know they’re are drawn to carbon dioxide, so for a while I tried not to exhale, but couldn’t keep it up.  Body heat, lactic acid and octenol are also appealing to them and to quote from an on-line source:  “ When people and animals breathe, they exhale a mixture of carbon dioxide and octenol, which is actually a type ofalcohol. Octenol is sometimes described as ‘cow’s breath in a can’, and is a remarkable lure for mosquitoes…. I’m not sure how I feel about that; but comforted that we’re all in it together.

Evidently different mosquito species find different cues more compelling and I was intrigued that a few seemed to believe that my auditory canal was the choicest place to find a meal. Perhaps for them it’s the most obvious point source of body heat; but whatever the reason it’s one thing to swat a mosquito on your jaw-line but banging away on your ear does little except aggravate tinnitus.

Mosquitoes aside, today’s Birds of the Day were Black-throated Green Warblers. Although I couldn’t see any of several territorial males in the forest canopy above, I solved a piece of the endless birding jigsaw puzzle by experiencing how the dense forest affects their song.  In spring migration we listen for the Black-throated Green’s deliberate and buzzy signature song: “Zee zee zee zee Zoo Zee”- with the emphasis on the last two notes.  Today I could quite distinctly make out this song in its entirety – but only when the bird was fairly close.  With distance the softer notes vanished until all I could pick out were the last two, which when isolated from the introduction notes, came out as “doo deet” repeated over and over. This was something of a breakthrough for me as I know I’ve heard that repetitive two-note song many times before, but could never figure out whose it was.  So a minor achievement today.  Here’s a shot of a Black-throated Green Warbler taken just six weeks ago.

Black -throated Green Warbler

Winter Wren

June 18 2012. I spent the early daylight hours of today in an old-growth forest preserve near Lake Erie helping a university undergraduate with a research project.  My job was to do point counts which are a widely used technique for research into bird populations.  The point counter’s task is to identify and record all birds seen or heard within a 100M radius and within a limited time period (usually ten minutes).  It can be quite a mental workout to listen, focus, separate one call from another and identify the species. While few birds are visible now that the trees are fully leafed, out many are actively singing to mark the limits of their breeding territories.  Different species’ territories overlap without conflict so there can easily be several different birds close at hand and all singing at once.    Interestingly when I step away from the point count site some songs are quickly absorbed by the forest while others ring loud and clear and carry a long way.

I had four different point counts to do, two at each station.  The list of birds at the first station included the clear songs of: Black-throated Green Warbler, Wood Thrush, Veery, Scarlet Tanager and Ovenbird. But there were many distant fragments, many part songs, clucks and chips.  I was able to clinch a Pine Warbler after a while but could not be sure whether a few soft ‘pips’ belonged to an Acadian Flycatcher; then far off I caught the tight tangle of high pitched trills of a Winter Wren.  I strained, blocking out everything else until I heard it again and then yet again, a little louder each time.

Winter Wrens are among my favourite birds. As simply the Wren they were familiar to me in my English childhood, I admired them as small busybodies who would appear and disappear like a mouse. The male builds compact domed nests which we would occaisionally find, sometimes in a crevice among the mass of roots of an upturned tree, in a stream bank or perhaps the corner of an old shed.  The male Winter Wren builds several nests, each tucked carefully and tidily into a compact hiding space and when complete the female is offered her pick from a range of desirable residences.

Until fairly recently Europe’s Wren was considered to be the same species as America’s Winter Wren, both Troglodytes troglodytes; an amusingly Tolkienesque name.  But recent study has led to some splitting of the species; so from T. troglodytes has come T. hiemalis (Winter Wren) and T.pacificus (Pacific Wren); and perhaps more to follow.

At our second station, where we also found a Common Yellowthroat and a pair of Hairy Woodpeckers, a Winter Wren, probably the same bird, came close to us and singing at intervals as he checked his fences lines. I caught sight of him eyeing us cautiously, evidently our point-count site intruded into his territory and with his assertive songs he made sure we knew it.  Winter Wrens are usually considered to nest farther north spreading well into the boreal forest zone, so seeing and hearing one today was both notable and welcome.