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September 30, 2021. Home. It was just about a year ago that I wrote about a backyard bird, a lingering Tennessee Warbler. Today I had a similar experience with a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.

In these mid-fall days, migrating birds sometimes show up in unlikely places, to them it’s just where they happen to be, just a pause along the way.  Some days, as I step outside, I’ll catch a fleeting glimpse of a mystery bird making a dash for cover. Occasionally I have some idea what it was, Winter Wrens, for example, are distinctive, they move fast and very low, you could almost mistake them for a mouse. Today’s Ruby-crowned Kinglet was easy to watch and enjoy though.

It spent much of the morning in our backyard which I keep deliberately chaotic and colourful , apparently it makes it a decent place to top up on insect protein.  This bird had found our exuberant Gaura lindheimeri plant to be a good source of food and was hovering and picking meals from the flower-heads. I examined the flowers later and found that some had pinhead-size green aphids on them, almost too small to see, unless you’re a kinglet.

 This is a little mite of a bird, weighs six grams (almost nothing) and is always on the move making it very difficult to photograph.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. September 23 ^.2021. It was quiet in the valley this morning. It had rained steadily for 24 hours, sometimes heavily, so everything looked and smelled freshly washed. We completed one of our regular transects, hopeful of finding a couple of semi-rarities (but didn’t), and just generally happy to be out at a time when the fall migration can deliver surprises among the expected.

Falling into the expected were a loose flock, perhaps a family group, of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, a dozen or so Gray Catbirds and three Swainson’s Thrushes. In the drama category were four Bald Eagles, two young ones far off in the distance and two adults (white head and white tail) sailing around not far overhead. Other than that it was bits and pieces, the way birding so often is.

There were some notables, which is to say birds that your companion might get grumpy about if you failed to draw their attention to it. These were singles of Blue–headed Vireo, Common Yellowthroat and a female Black–throated Blue Warbler, and two each of Philadelphia Vireo, Red–eyed Vireo and Ruby–crowned Kinglet.

The female Black throated Blue Warbler (above) was an interesting study in the differences in plumage between females and males (below). That little white patch on its wing is diagnostic for making the identification, just as well because otherwise she’s a pretty nondescript bird.

My Birds of the Day were the Philadelphia Vireos. Frequent readers will know I have a soft spot for all vireos and the Philly is perhaps the prettiest of them. They have a lemon-yellow breast, quite pale in some and quite bright in others. Today I think we saw one of each, I managed to get this photo of the brighter yellow of the two.

Cap de bon Desire, Quebec. September 16 2021. The Canadian Government has spared no expense in creating a spectacular whale watching opportunity at Cap de bon Desire, about ten kilometres east of Tadoussac on the north shore of the St Lawrence River.  I had imagined the cape as a commanding headland and place of shipwrecks but it’s not quite that.  It does have a lighthouse to mark a minor turning point along the north shore of the St Lawrence River but the final approach to water’s edge is a gently sloping apron of granite leading from forest to sea; maybe that’s just a landlubber’s perspective.

It is a good and comfortable place, to watch for whales, perhaps just a happy coincidence that whales, principally Minke and Belugas find good reason to cruise by so close to shore.  We sat and watched them come and go for an hour or two and what with Grey Seals and Common Loons to add to the fun, there was always something intriguing out there, just offshore.

It was one of these extras, albeit not in the water, a Canada Jay, that was an instant Bird of the Day. I noticed its arrival on the bare top of a spruce and while all eyes were properly on the water, I followed the jay’s progress.  It didn’t pause anywhere for long, I expect the forest was its preferred and safer place to be, but I was able and pleased to get a few photos.

This is a magical bird. It is capable of showing up quietly and unexpectedly. As Pete Dunne in his excellent Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion, so cleverly puts it, “Ghostlike in its ability to appear suddenly and silently on a limb just above your head….Unusually silent, especially for a jay.”  That spectral quality he suggests is written in the bird’s beautifully subtle white, grey and almost black plumage.

Like the American Pipit of a few days earlier, this is another species that has been subject to some name changes, (not that it cares in the slightest). It was only five or six years ago that the name Canada Jay replaced Gray Jay, but ‘Gray’ was relatively short-lived having been adopted sometime in the early fifties, pushing ‘Canada’ aside for a while.  The reinstatement of Canada Jay was a point of triumphant, nationalist pride to many vocal Canadian ornithologists.

Bonaventure, Quebec. September 11 2021. The first time I drove around the Gaspé Peninsula was a couple of decades ago. I had taken my son back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and decided to take the very long way home to Ontario, circling the Gaspé Peninsula. I have very few memories of it, I think I must have crammed too much driving into too little time. But what scraps I do have include the impression that the south shore of the Gaspé is much less scenic than the north. And so it is, as we found out this week. It is typical of maritime Canada, lots of open space, small towns and villages with indeterminate edges but tied together with a scattering of modest, white with red trim, roadside homes.

Needing a mid-day leg-stretch and hoping that our travelling snacks were at least as tasty and nutritious as the packaging promised, we pulled into a tidy waterside parking lot beside the Quebec Acadian Museum in Bonaventure. Bonaventure is nice looking place, and I fantasised that it would suit me well if, by some kind of sorcery, I were to be transported here and told to make a go of it. It would, of course,  all be contingent on me grappling with day to day life in French.

Congenial as it was, I don’t think we did Bonaventure justice.  For one thing we opted not to check out the museum, we weren’t in a museum frame of mind. Instead we headed out to sightsee the harbour and lighthouse, they’re always worth the visit although when I think about it, once you’ve seen one lighthouse you’ve seen them all. But, from the lighthouse, we found a good walk, a few hundred metres on an elevated path along a breakwater out to its tip. The harbour entrance was to our left and a long seaweed lined beach off to our right. There were fragments of nautical stuff, logs, floats and boat bits, lodged among the huge, black, angular rocks that comprised the breakwater, it made me feel small and fragile imagining of the sort of brutal stormy nights that had tossed them this way.  A brisk wind buffeted and tugged at our clothes raising little offshore whitecaps, a fair wind for a mariner I suppose.

It was as we walked out to the light at the end that I noticed a handful of rather anonymous streaky buff, brown and grey birds picking for food, flitting in and among those large rocks. They rarely stayed still but scampered and bobbed in a rather charming way, reminiscent of Eurasia’s wagtails. They were American Pipits, a bird I rarely see in Ontario. We only encounter them as birds of passage, they spend their summers in the Arctic and winters far to the south of us. That’s what these birds were, on their way south, and perfectly comfortable seeking food in this windswept and debris entangled, shoreline rockpile.

The reference to wagtails is deliberate because pipits and wagtails are of the same family, although wagtails, it must be said are, in general, prettier and perhaps even daintier. Like this Grey Wagtail photographed in England three years ago.

There has been some name-changing going on with this species, too complicated to get into here but suffice to say that it was once called Water Pipit, is now American Pipit and may yet become Buff-bellied Pipit.  Anyway, American Pipit was my Bird of the Day for decorating a rather grim stretch of shoreline and for having that enchanting wagtail air about them.

Île Bonaventure, Quebec. September 11 2021. I think if you want to see Northern Gannets and see them well, you’ll have to find a way to visit one of a handful of oceanic islands, stacks or rocks in the North Atlantic. Bonaventure Island is probably the most accessible to North Americans, and maybe it was a bit of a pilgrimage on my part to go. An easy pilgrimage because we boarded a well packed tour boat that made its purposeful way across a short stretch of open water, churning and wallowing comfortably to allow plenty of camera-worthy views of Rocher-Percé, a tourist landmark.  We got brief glimpses of a Minke Whale, its black back arcing slowly and saw colonies of Grey Seals hauled up on emergent rocks. But for me it was about seeing thousands of Gannets and their colony.

Northern Gannets’ breeding range is limited to the continental shelf waters around Quebec, Newfoundland, Iceland, Scotland and Norway, they wander far and wide from there feeding from the North Atlantic. They are a good-looking bird by any measure made for flight and fishing: larger than any gull, snow white overall with black wingtips and an apricot coloured head. They have the proportions of a glider, long of wing and slender of body, built for riding the steady winds of open waters and for managing steep cliff-faces. As far as I could tell they stick to open waters and either don’t, or wont, fly over the slightest scrap of dry land.

We watched them soar and search, circling watchfully for fish below.  With food in sight they make a side-slip turn to line up a vertical power dive, draw their wings back in a tight W and plunge headlong for the capture.  Sometimes a lucky wave-top sighting brings them in from much lower and they slice to the water at an acute angle. Whichever approach they take, it is only in the last half second, the last metre, that they pull in their wings, tight to body, plunging below a tidy splash.