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RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. December 13^th. 2020. This birding game y’know – it never fails. There’s always something worth stopping for, something surprising, something new, unlikely, unexpected, unexplainable or maybe just plain delightful. On this cool and blustery winter day this female Red-bellied Woodpecker was to blame.

It wasn’t that she was doing something hugely improbable, she just seemed to be looking for somewhere to cache an acorn, digging and tapping at a soft tree cavity, picking up the acorn, setting it aside, exploring; generally very busy. I watched and photographed her, and it set me thinking: do Red-bellied Woodpeckers routinely cache food, or is this slightly unusual behaviour? It’s not so improbable after all, there’s a lot of food value in an acorn and winter is long and has hardly started. Standing there, watching, I knew that a not too distant relative, the Acorn Woodpecker, is famous for tucking acorns away for another day, in fact that’s how it got its name. But Red-bellied Woodpeckers too?

It was this provocative minute or two of watching and wondering that made her my Bird of the Day. The answers are not too hard to find. Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of the World website has plenty to say about it.   “May store food throughout the year, but this behaviour is most prevalent in fall. Small items are stored whole, larger items are usually broken into pieces before storage. Usually uses storage sites that are readily available and require no excavation, such as existing cracks or crevices in trees or posts, or in vine rootlets on tree trunks…..Reported to store nuts, acorns, corn, grapes, various seeds and berries, and insects. A Red-bellied Woodpecker in Kansas was reported to store cow dung, and captive birds have been observed to cache miscellaneous objects: nails, toothpicks, wood slivers, paper clips, and paper.” [1] A bit more digging and I found that none of our other resident woodpeckers are known to habitually cache food.

So now, much wiser, I know she was just doing what Red-bellied Woodpeckers do. But those moments of observation made an otherwise quiet morning’s birding a little bit richer, which is how she gets to be My Bird of the Day.

1. Miller, K. E., D. L. Leonard Jr., C. E. Shackelford, R. E. Brown, and R. N. Conner (2020). Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.rebwoo.01

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Sedgewick Park, Oakville, ON. December 11^th. 2020. A few avian rewards came my way on this bright and warm December day. I had no birding plans but a couple of while-I’m-at-it side trips worked their way into domestic errands.

I made what was supposed to be a quick stop at a pocket-forest adjacent to a sewage treatment plant. The treatment plant with its constant in-flow of domestic left-overs creates a warm and insecty microclimate and is a well known hot-spot (no pun intended) for lingering birds of summer.  I went to follow up on talk of a couple of Northern Parulas reputedly hanging around.  It should be exciting news but it’s happened before:  every December, for six years at least, one or two show up here when they really should be in Central America. I can’t account for why Northern Parulas in particular, sometimes a Yellow-rumped, Orange-crowned or Palm Warbler has lingered here too, but not every year.  Of all the bright spark warblers of our spring and summer, Northern Parulas seem the least likely to brighten a December forest edge. But here is today’s – a bit blurry, but you get the idea of what a splash of colour she makes.

And here’s another, from 2014.

The parula was elusive and I stood for ages hoping to confirm its presence. My knees protested the uneven slope, but as my only complaint it was a small price, because as I waited I watched a Ruby–crowned Kinglet move quietly through the tangles of Riverbank Grape and Virginia Creeper across a tiny rivulet. Kinglets to us, are birds of incessant motion, hard to follow and impossible to photograph.  To see one resting quietly between short bursts of activity illustrated how expensive it is for a bird to use energy when food is scarce and urgent migration is not the order of the day. Winter is for surviving not for the extravagant use of resources.   Its long spells of inactivity made it possible to take many photos, but it was deep in the brush so I ended up deleting most once I got home. Here is one of just three keepers.

My Bird of the Day was a Hermit Thrush skulking around in the same small, wet gully as the parula and kinglet. It was hard to see and almost impossible to follow as it crept around seeking food on the ground deep under the tangles and winter debris. In a sense, I ambushed it for this photo, I made a guess as to where it might make its next brief appearance. And it did as I hoped, just long enough to get two quick shots and then it was gone again.

Hamilton Harbour, Hamilton, ON. December 8^th. 2020. It’s only mid-December and the bitter winds of winter are yet to come. But a brisk north-wester that has swept across a lake to reach you can easily make your eyes water and nose drip. It was in the face of that wind that I met a probable lifer-bird today: Ross’s Goose (actually two of them). I use the word ‘probable’ because there’s a slim chance I have met the species before and not known it, but the more likely reason, the fly in the ointment, is that these may not be thoroughbred Ross’s Geese. They sure look like them, but those who pass judgement on rare bird sightings hesitate to pronounce them as such lest they be tainted with a touch of Snow Goose. The two are sister species that are just about identical except for size, the Ross’s is about two-thirds the size and there are some facial subtleties.  They seem to have diverged from a common ancestor some 2.1 million years back.  Today’s pair were associating with a mass of Canada Geese where, to heighten the day’s intrigue, there was a solitary Cackling Goose.

More excitement, a near-lifer, it might just be the second or third of the species I’ve ever seen. Cackling Goose? Well, like the Ross’s, the Cackling Goose just appears to be a junior version of its familiar Canada Goose cousin. The story is a little more complex than that, but Cacklings do exhibit several behavioural and morphological differences from Canadas. I wrote about some of those complexities in a post two years ago; maybe worth a read if you are gripped with curiosity.

My Bird of the Day, to the surprise of companions, was a beautiful, male American Kestrel that appeared from nowhere, swept low overhead and landed on a nearby flag pole. Uncharacteristically it was quite unmoved by our approach. This is a species that I have always found hard to photograph: no sooner do I stop and venture to look at them than they take flight but going just far enough away to make it appear worthwhile to try again – and repeat – and repeat – but always fruitlessly. No so today, and although my photos vary little in composition I’m smuggly happy with them, they only reinforce the status of the individual as My Bird of the Day.

RBG Arboretum, Hamilton. ON. December 2^nd 2020. Goodness knows I’m not a winter enthusiast, but you wouldn’t know it after these last two days. It’s as if I took one look at the snow and was layered up and ready to go. Yesterday was one of the best ever and today, although not quite as magical, was time well spent too. Birds or not, it was easy to love places like this woodland path with blown snow dusting the way ahead.

There weren’t many birds for a while. I had expected more in the ornamental pines, spruces and firs but nothing showed until I came to a quiet and sheltered dip in the trail where some kind soul had left a  small cache of sunflower seed. Here was a busy group of Dark-eyed Juncos, Black-capped Chickadees, Northern Cardinals and American Tree Sparrows. I watched and waited quietly, they weren’t at all sure about me at first. Eventually we all relaxed and a Blue Jay or two arrived and then came this gorgeous male Red–bellied Woodpecker. The spell was broken by the approach of birder friend. We swapped stories and sightings (such as they were), wished each other well and went on our way.

It was much later with the temperature then soaring to 6.C, that I came across what must be My Bird of the Day, a sole Common Redpoll. It was with a small group of American Goldfinches, White-throated Sparrows and American Tree Sparrows who had found a good source of food, berries mostly, in a large pile of shrubby debris. I might not have seen the redpoll had I not been alerted by a sound: unfamiliar, faint, slightly raspy and definitely finch-like. I was lucky to get a fleeting look at the redpoll and even luckier perhaps to get a photo. Not great, but here it is.

Common Redpolls are irregular winter visitors here. They are common birds of the boreal forests and taiga of North America, Scandinavia and Russia and only make their way south to these latitudes when there is a widespread failure of seed production among high-latitude conifers. So, it is a bit of a treat in those years when they show up – this being one of them. I count myself lucky.

Although my redpoll photo is barely more than a for-the-record shot I was patiently tolerated by this American Tree Sparrow.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. December 1^st. 2020. Maybe twice a winter we get such an overnight snowfall, one that alights quietly without disturbing the equilibrium of the early hours. Snow that rests gently on each branch, twig and stem so that when daylight comes there are no adequate words to describe it.  I looked out this morning, shivered and my first reaction was, “Well I’m not going out in that!” But on second thoughts I pictured how sensational the valley would be while it lies so still. I dressed for a snow day, swept aside three inches of snow and went.

I was not the first to make tracks along the trails but it was so quiet the only sound was the faint hiss of snowflakes touching down. Birds of all the familiar species scattered ahead of me: Mourning Doves, Northern Cardinals, Dark-eyed Juncos, White-throated and American Tree Sparrows, Blue Jays, White-breasted and Red-breasted Nuthatches. They were picking for left-over hand-outs, plentiful along this very popular destination for families with baggies of bird seed (despite the objections of management).

Slipping and sliding along a very wet path I surprised a small flock of House Finches, was followed for a while by a Red–bellied Woodpecker and pleased by the steady approach of an adult Bald Eagle making its way down the valley’s length.  

Birds that most of the year get little attention because they seem to be just background noise suddenly became winter studies, this Black-capped Chickadee, for example, was one of many that looked as though it had been made for winter days. For that, chickadees were my Birds of the Day.

The face of the landscape we’d grown used to had changed overnight from stripped and careworn to apparently at ease. But tomorrow’s forecast for is slightly warmer airs so today’s taste of winter may end up as just a full-dress rehearsal.