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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.

Querétaro State, Mexico.  November 10 & 11,  2021.For many birders nothing comes close to the appeal of our spring and summer warblers. By warblers I don’t mean the rather drab, look-alike warblers of the old world, I speak of our North-American, neo-tropical warblers. Around here, most years, we’ll see about one quarter of the hundred-plus warbler species from the Parulidae family. Most of the family never stray from their tropical homeland so, on my recent trip to Mexico I was happily not surprised to see several new-to-me species. After our trip, our Travelian Tours leader, Rodrigo, prepared a complete list of birds seen, it included about twenty warbler species some of which were familiar summer visitors: Black-throated Green, Wilson’s and Nashville Warblers for example. But there was more and three really caught my imagination: Crescent–chested Warbler, Golden–browed Warbler and Painted Redstart.

A picture of the Crescent-chested Warbler featured prominently on our itinerary website, it looked so impossible and so exotic that I needed to see one to believe it. I asked Rodrigo what our chances were, he nodded casually, yes, he thought we probably would. Our third morning was the payoff, we were struggling up a vague path through thick forest when one appeared right in front of us. Everyone took many photos, it seemed as interested in us as we were in it. Taking many photos doesn’t guarantee good ones though and I was disappointed with my efforts. Above is my best while a great one from Rodrigo is on the masthead.

Late the same day, we wandered down an uneven rural road into a valley. There was forest on our uphill side and farmland turning to a moist thicket on the other.  It was late afternoon and birding was patchy, until we saw a little movement in the moist thicket. There was a Golden–browed Warbler, and then another until we realised we were watching a scattered group of maybe a dozen. They offered many photo ops but rarely held a position for more than a second or two so we all took many ‘oh it moved’ photos. Here, once again are a couple of Rodrigo’s photos(above and below); I’m indebted to him for his skills.

Finally – but really far from final, the Painted Redstart. We know American Redstarts in Ontario, they’re not the most colourful warbler but always worth stopping to admire. But the quite unrelated Painted Redstart is almost unbelievable in splashes of red, white and black. My first reaction was of disbelief, a bird that you would think only exists in coffee-table books. It too found us as interesting, perhaps we were intruders. Here it is, once again courtesy of Rodrigo.

 

Sotano De Las Huahuas, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. November 17 2021. I’ve enjoyed many heart-stopping birding experiences over the years but today’s was without doubt one of my most extraordinary. It was in Central Mexico, a tropical place, and started with a pre-dawn hike through a rain forest:  First down a knee-jarring series of solid but uneven stone steps, our way led by pools of light from the lanterns and flashlights ahead. Downhill for perhaps fifty, maybe a hundred, steps to a brief flatness and then back uphill, hard work up. I don’t know if anyone was counting but perhaps three-hundred, six-hundred, maybe more of those same uneven steps. The altitude here was in the 2,000 metres range and my heart pounded as my lungs tightened, squeezing for more oxygen.

We took a few rests as daylight grew and I savoured the privilege of being here, of being allowed and able to be here, at dawn, at my age, and giddy with the exhilaration.  Another few hundred steps and now, just about daylight, we stood at our goal, the edge of a vast sótano, a sinkhole or pit cave, a  deep hole opening into the dark basement of a mountain.

A sótano is one of the many creations of rainwater dissolving limestone, a drip by drip process that creates cracks and clefts and makes underground streams and caves.  If and when the roof of a deep cave collapses, a massive hole may open to the sky, like the one we were staring down. 

This sótano, a blemish on the side of a several thousand-metre-high mountain, was huge. It could have been almost any dimension, length, breadth and depth, it was impossible to tell without determinable references, but an interpretive sign explained “It has one of the largest underground halls in the world (184 metres wide and 290 metres wide) …fits a soccer stadium and accessed by a 90 metres high and 30 metres wide opening.” The spectacle was literally awesome; the word chosen and written in the sense of emotionally overpowering, not in the debased sense to describe anything one step above trivial.

But our purpose here was not head-spinning thrills, it was to watch the early morning flights of night-roosting White-collared Swifts and Green Parakeets.  Now under beams of sunlight, the swifts swept and wheeled in large, tight flocks circling around the bowl, gaining height with each spiral until released to the green forest and sunlight. The bright green parakeets were happy to see the day too, they were screeching and chattering among themselves in social gatherings. We watched as small groups criss-crossed just below us in the depths, parties of bright green against the dark.   They had places to go and things to do but seemed unconcerned about a Peregrine Falcon that circled within the deep shadows.  Much of parakeet life seems to be about visiting neighbours and gathering to preen and socialize.

We couldn’t move, it was almost too much to absorb, the bright sky above, criss-crossed by parties of Military  Macaws, a frame of forest wrapped by circling swifts, and the dark and irrational pull of the emptiness below alive with parakeets.