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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.

Haldimand County, ON. January 27 2022.  I don’t care much for January birding. Others do and I respect their choices, up to them. But standing on the Lake Ontario shore scanning the ice-cluttered waters for wintering Arctic ducks is not for me. I know it can be productive and perhaps is best done in the company of a car-full of friends. My most satisfying winter birding entails a warm-car drive to snow-blown fields south of here looking for a few specific birds, Snow Buntings being the most sought-after.

I hit it perfectly this morning, my first real getaway after a couple of weeks of indoor living enforced by repeated snowfalls and ice-encrusted everything.  I was in farmland of wide-open sweeps. On days like today, with the temperature around -6 C, the buffeting wind drives snow squalls that lay thick tongues of drift across the road; I was glad of all-wheel drive.

I was hoping for Snow Buntings but had to wait a while. I quartered a neighbourhood, watched a swaying American Kestrel on an overhead wire, looking down attentively. Once or twice I caught sight of Rough-legged Hawks and Northern Harriers, riding the roller-coaster winds and searching the fields for rodent meals. At the junction of two minor roads, a large and busy flock of American Tree Sparrows had gathered and was picking through the left-overs of a roadside grain spill.

Eventually I found my way to my Snow Bunting site. The only difference between this anonymous stop along a wind-blown road and hundreds of others like it, is that a friend, Nancy,  is there daily to band buntings. She’s been doing it for years and I post about it almost every winter. She attracts them with a reliable scattering of grain, she gently traps, weighs and measures them, places an aluminum band on their right leg and lets them go.  The data she and others gather is building a picture of the life cycle of this engaging species.

There’s lots about Snow Buntings that make it a privilege to see them: They’re mid-winter visitors who nest in the high Arctic and make their way down here for the winter. They gather in nomadic flocks that favour wide open, weedy fields and seeing a flock on the move is to think you’re watching a rolling snow squall; They are unquestionably cute – and that from someone who tries not to get overly sentimental about birds, preferring adjectives like spectacular, instructive or fascinating.

Getting out of the car would have only made them take flight but I was able to get a few photos of buntings on the road ahead. Nancy explained that there had been quite a bit of spillage of harvested grain on the road last summer. While no longer apparent to us, I imagine road traffic had crushed and scattered the corn and the buntings had no trouble finding it; also accounting for the large flock of American Tree Sparrows a little earlier.

Royal Botanical Gardens. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. January 4 2022.  I took advantage of this, the second of two bright and sun-filled days, to do some birding. Days that followed a string of low-slung grey ones and there was a weather forecast of rain, snow, wind and cloud to come.

Sun had pushed aside much of the latest snow and a high, south-facing forest bank must have been a bit of a warm spot, for it was busy with Black-capped Chickadees, Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, White-breasted Nuthatches and a couple of Carolina Wrens.  As is typical of the species, the wrens were drawn to dark recesses to hunt, in this case the underside of a fallen log, turning and tossing leaves,  a place likely to be harbouring food.

Winter still held firmly to the rest of the valley and I was surprised to hear, and get a short glimpse of a Belted Kingfisher patrolling the length of the creek. You’d think it would have flown south a few weeks ago.  All ponds, puddles and backwaters were sheeted with smooth and flawless ice, not the sort you could punch a stick through; I tried. The creek will probably stay open, unless it gets really cold, but if I could give advice to the kingfisher it would be to leave now.

This group of Mallards had gathered on the riverside ice, they were just quietly whiling away the day apparently disinclined to do much and were an attractive sight, eye-catching as much for the pattern of orange feet as for the males’ iridescent bottle-green heads.

I had pretty much concluded that the Carolina Wrens were the best of the day. But I met a young birder photographer and asked whether she’d seen much that was camera-worthy. Not a lot, she said, but there’s a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker just up there. And as if to deflect any probable skepticism on my part she showed me some photos of it that she’d taken.

Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers are infrequent sightings, just-passing-through birds around here; they nest a little bit north of us as a rule and winter quite a bit south. A few off-season strays always show up and a friend has a young sapsucker visiting his bird-feeder this winter, it’s surprising and yet unsurprising. Of all of our woodpecker species it is perhaps the drabbest, and the young ones, which this was, are almost shabby. But setting aside any prejudices based on appearance, it was a delight, partly because of the Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers’ winter scarcity and partly because spotting it was the work of much younger ears and eyes than mine. I am grateful to her for telling me about it. It made my day, My Bird of the Day.

RBG. Arboretum, Hamilton ON. December 27 2021.  This, the day after the-day-after-Christmas and I needed exercise and, more particularly, wanted a bird of the day. Looking outside it wasn’t very encouraging: a gloomy grey overcast, snow in the air and a posted weather warning of “Snow early… continuing for a few hours…up to 5 cm ….  transition to freezing rain or freezing drizzle late in the morning or the afternoon.” We went anyway.

On the road to our destination I noted the strong easterly wind, meaning: it had already swept the length of Lake Ontario; was certainly cold and; as forecasted, full of moisture. I pointed to a Red-tailed Hawk riding circles above the highway and wondered aloud if that just might be My Bird of the Day. Maybe the only bird of the day.

Wrapped warmly we followed a lightly snow-covered lakeside trail. The lake was open although it had been ice-covered a week or two ago. A few hardy waterfowl dotted its surface, most notably a handsome male Hooded Merganser and small flotillas of Canada Geese. I suspected three of those geese of being Cackling Geese but couldn’t be sure; behaviourally they set themselves apart and seemed a little short necked.

Not long ago there was only the Canada Goose, but ornithology recognised therein a dozen or more subspecies based on: size, largest to smallest; plumage-shading; bill-size and behaviour. Then the arbiters of species-differentiation took a closer look and decided that the three smallest subspecies could make their own way in the world as a distinct-species, so now we have the somewhat smaller and shorter-necked Cackling Goose. They can be head-scratchingly tricky to separate and identify at a distance and the trio that started this digression were on the borderline somewhere.

Perhaps fortunately, my absorption with the geese was broken when Ruth pointed out a Pileated Woodpecker almost overhead. As I’ve written many times (I’m sure), a Pileated Woodpecker is always a bird worth dropping what you’re doing for.  This one was opening up the interior of a long-dead aspen in its search for fat larvae; it had carved out a large hole, enough that I think the tree will break off at this point in the next strong blow. Pileated Woodpeckers can be either secretive and elusive or disarmingly bold, today’s was bold: it was noisily hammering out chunks of tree trunk and totally disinterested in us below. It was the bird that made our walk special, My Bird of the Day.

But it was not alone in catching my attention. I called the Hooded Merganser handsome, but so too was a solitary Great Black-backed Gull out on the water; either could have been birds of the day. But it’s hard to steal the thunder of a Pileated Woodpecker.