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Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington. ON. March 6, 2022.  This tipping point, the moment when the key turns in winter’s padlock, prompts a mini-surge of returning birds. They confirm that warmer days are on their way, it may be a bit stop and go, but it’s going to happen.

Today the sun shone like it meant it and temperatures spiked far above anything we’ve seen for three months, so I went birding to one of my favourite valleys.  Hardly was I out of my car when I heard a Song Sparrow singing – that’s a good sign.  It might have been in the valley all winter and managed to scrape by, but song is a sign of it having made it and it might have been my Bird of the Day except that…..

Down on the flood-plain, still dotted with pans of thick ice, a few male Red–winged Blackbirds were around, new arrivals, some of them taking a moment to perch on a cattail head and try out a bit of territorial song. I don’t think they were very committed though, they are very much the advance guard. In a week or two, thousands more will arrive and then staking out home turf will be a serious matter. But these few were definitely tipping point birds.

At a bend in the river, a handful of Hooded Mergansers were diving for fish, at least I assume fish but the waters were so silty-thick and murky with all the meltwater that I don’t know how they could possibly see to catch them. But they were surfacing with something edible, so fish – presumably? Alongside the mergansers was a sole male Wood Duck. He was a tipping point bird, like the Song Sparrow and Red-wings.

The valley bottom looks exhausted, flattened by the repeated battering by snow-turned-to-ice and from ice-dam flooding. Our familiar trails were either still thickly layered with ice from foot traffic compacting snow or, if clear of ice, were slippery and muddy. I questioned my wisdom in going there in the first place.

My Bird of the Day came around lunchtime. Back home, I had taken a moment to tidy a few of the uglier winter eyesores in my back yard when I heard a Killdeer calling overhead. The first Killdeer is always a heard-Killdeer, it’s as if they leave a contrail of di-deeee calls in their wake. They leave Ontario for the winter, today’s may have spent the last four months just a few latitude degrees south of us, somewhere where food can be reliably found along shorelines or open fields. I didn’t see it –  and it doesn’t matter, I was glad to hear it back.

Lake Erie. March 2, 2022.  It occurred to me yesterday that we should be seeing the first flights of Tundra Swans any day now. With that in mind, and since today started bright, warmer by a hair and with no threat of snow, I decided to head towards Lake Erie where the first swans sometimes gather and where other open-country, wintering specialties might be found.

I stopped for a break halfway and noted that the large river was thronged with anxious and vocal Canada Geese, Mallards, Goldeneyes and even a few Northern Pintail. Although the river was rimmed and sometimes blanketed with broken ice, I think the birds could all feel a change in the air. Wandering back to my car, I felt more than heard a chorus of faint calls, it sounded like Tundra Swans somewhere overhead. I spun around searching, almost losing my balance while staring up at the bright clouds and looking for a string of birds; and then found them, about twelve in a small V, twinkling white against the blue sky. They were talking amongst themselves in their soft and sighing ‘whoo – whoo – whoo’.

Every year I celebrate the moment when the first overhead Tundra Swans stop me dead in my tracks, they are always My Birds of the Day. Looking back, I see Tundra Swans posts in February or March of every year, try this link , this or this one for more on these celebratory days.

That first group of a dozen was soon followed by a much larger flock of about forty, they were all heading in the same direction as me, towards the lake.

An hour or so later I was gazing across the lake, the first lookout was a wildlife desert, nothing but an expanse of fractured ice in bands of blues, greys and whites, spectacular but forbidding. I followed the lakeshore west and eventually caught up with Tundra Swans congregating in groups with Canada Geese, at first a dozen or so, then twenty or more and finally scatterings of swans on the water. They were greeting long skeins of new arrivals, flying in low, and still strong after their non-stop night and day flight from the Atlantic coast.

The swans made my day but I was also happy to witness a low-flying adult Bald Eagle, a Rough–legged Hawk hovering the same way a Eurasian Kestrel (the ‘windhover’) would, and a scattering of Horned Larks.

It was a fairly full day with almost too much driving. The beauty of the Tundra Swans prompted me to start writing this post. But then, with the afternoon fading into evening, I took a short break and, sprawling on a small couch, I looked over my shoulder and outdoors to see yet another flight of Tundra Swans heading west. We ran outside as they passed over us, a long lop-sided V of perhaps seventy birds.

Every now and then I feel I need to explain my approach to birding, how, what and why it fires my interest. There are all sorts of ways to enjoy birding and I invariably say something like; For me it’s as much about the bird, the time and the place as anything else It doesn’t have to be a rarity.  And that’s how it was today: those bringers of spring, an early March morning, and right overhead.

Burlington Canal, Hamilton & Burlington, ON. February 14, 2022.  I spent less than an hour birding today, it was just too cold. Not cold on a scale that makes news, but minus-8 C. which is okay-ish in the sun, but not in shade.  Cold enough that my camera protested, not that it’s a particularly highly-strung piece of equipment, but it just stopped doing things it usually manages without complaint. With fingers hurting, or maybe numb – it was hard to tell,  I came home reassuring myself that it was okay to quit.

I had hoped to capture more duck-diving photos like those of my last post but the canal was pretty empty. I turned my attention instead to Peregrine Falcons, to a pair that has nested on the superstructure of one of the bridges for a few years.  They seem happy to stay around all winter, apparently the pigeon population is more than enough to keep them well fed.

It didn’t take long to find both male and female falcons. One, the male I suspect, was sitting quietly on the shelf they have always preferred as the nest site, while the other was a few steel girders below. Neither was particularly close to me so it meant coaxing my reluctant camera to do its icy best under the circumstances.

Here they are. The male (above) had turned to watch a low-flying plane and the female (below) was having thoughts about taking a flight of her own, but in the end decided against.

Not so long ago Peregrine Falcons were a rarity and on the edge of extinction in North America. But mankind sometimes does the right thing and banning DDT was one of them, it led to a rebound in their population; they’re much commoner now. I still love to see them, particularly on a purposeful chase as they make light work of the closest thing to avian sub-sonic flight. Peregrine Falcons make My Bird of the Day almost any day, but especially on this cold one.

Burlington Canal, Hamilton & Burlington, ON. February 1 2022.  I’ve often promised myself not to waste any more winter days birding the canal. The selection of likely ducks is just too limited, or so it seems from a distance.   But then, along comes a day like this, we get a break in the weather and I can’t resist the urge to get out and see what’s there. So, I ended up at the canal as I vowed I wouldn’t and well, it was fascinating.

The canal is a kilometre-long waterway connecting the St. Lawrence Seaway waters of Lake Ontario with our large natural harbour. It’s a serious deep-water canal, crossed by towering road bridges and deep enough for ocean-going ships.  In winter months, when the harbour ices over, the waters of the canal stay more or less open thanks to the surging ebb and flow of the lake.

The canal, for all of its no-nonsense, industrial feel, is a safe, food-rich refuge for diving ducks: Long-tailed Ducks principally (by the thousand), but also scores of White–winged Scoters, Goldeneyes, Greater and Lesser Scaup, Red–breasted Mergansers and more. They’re just getting by, waiting out the winter on a diet of fish (presumably), mussels, and whatever else lurks along the hard, concrete edges.

I became absorbed watching them dive and trying to understand how they dive. Someone should do a study. No, I bet someone already has.

Here are a few of my own superficial observations from watching Long-tailed Ducks, White-winged Scoters, Lesser Scaup and Hooded Mergansers making dives. The mechanics seemed to be the same in every case. There is no declarative pose, no build up or acrobatic plunge. Rather, the only apparent hint of an imminent dive is an almost imperceptible stiffening of the neck, so imperceptible that in one smooth arching thrust it’s all over and the duck’s head is under pulling its body behind. Like this…

Out of hundreds of photos of dives, I was only able to get this lucky series above. It’s a female Lesser Scaup and it’s apparent that her body momentarily comes clear out of the water as she arches over.  Not a dive you’d see on Coca Cola’s Olympics, but a dive that has served this species for thousands, if not millions, of years.

I’m certain (because my camera records times) that less than one second elapses while: The bird stiffens, My brain says go, My finger does as it’s told and, the camera takes the first photo; and nine times out of ten that’s not fast enough.  My usual results are more like this.

Haldimand County, ON. January 30 2011.  This is a bird story from before the days of this site. Curiosity got me started, I was looking back at late-January photos from years past and inevitably reliving memories from much warmer places including Panama, Arabia and Uganda. But this is a cold weather Canada story that still sticks vividly with me. It happened on this date, eleven years ago, 2011.

It was on a real January day in Ontario, cold of course and everything under a carpet of snow. I don’t like driving winter roads anymore than anyone else but I make allowances for birding and on this day I had criss-crossed the same sort of open, snow-swept farmland described in my post of two days ago. I had watched a female Northern Harrier scare the living daylights out of Snow Buntings, and noted an American Kestrel on the peak of an old barn roof: there were cattle in the barnyard below so probably mice too, enough to keep the kestrel well fed.

Far to my right at the back of a big white field, I could see movement beneath a large, bare oak, I pulled over and stopped the car. The activity was an erratic wing-flapping and tumbling, hawks of some kind.  It took a while before I was able to make out that it really was birds and that there were two of them, but when I did, I saw that they were Rough-legged Hawks; a good winter sighting any time. Fortunately, I had my camera ready to go and took several reasonably good, but very long-shot photos. What the interaction was about I have no idea, it was some kind of squabbling competition, the birds seemed to tussle, skip and pull at each other’s flapping wings. Rough-legs are known to play aerial-tag in small groups, perhaps this was the mid-winter version. Eventually one broke off the play and flew up to the branches above, game over.

Rough-legged Hawks breed in the tundra of arctic and subarctic Alaska and Canada and cross the boreal forest to spend a few winter months in our open country. We don’t see many of them but when we do it’s special.  To see two at once and to witness this kind of interaction, was new to me, I’ve never seen anything like it since.

But the intrigue and of that play, or whatever it was, was topped by a surprise discovery later at home. When I looked closely at my photos, I was at first astonished and then laughed loudly to see that two barn cats had watched this show from the comfort of a sheltered doorway behind. Look closely.