Category: Uncategorized

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. October 16^th. 2020. Yesterday was another nasty weather day, the third in two weeks, it made me want to get out on a freshly-washed morning with the possibility of interesting birding.

The day was dazzlingly bright and the air full of the taste and scent of ripeness. Maple, ash and oak leaf colours were eye-popping and, while for now, there are more leaves on the trees than off , the next two weeks will likely see a big change.

I trudged some of my familiar trails and came to the realization that the big flush of fall birds is probably behind us.  Any bare branches now rattle on their own with no-one to share them. I saw almost nothing unusual until a tiny movement on the opposite bank of the creek caught my attention, it was a Nashville Warbler picking and searching in the collapsing debris, an eye-catching flash of lemon yellow. It reminded me of another Nashville seen five years ago almost to the day, and not 100 M from this bird. I wrote about it then with an account that could, just as easily, have described today.

Just as that time before, I was inspired by this little Nashville Warbler and started keeping notes for the day. I soon added a Winter Wren, (which may have decided on this sheltered valley as its home for the winter) a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Hermit Thrush or two and a surprise Eastern Towhee. And that was it…

…until before heading home, I paid a quick visit to the nearby cemetery, just in case.  I wandered the forested edges of a small enclave of headstones but it was all was pretty bird-less.  I paused to rest in a sun-warmed spot and a little movement caught my eye. To cut short what could be a needlessly long story, for perhaps half an hour I followed the efforts of an actively feeding Bay–breasted Warbler. It was far more interested in seeking scraps of wriggling food than any threat from my presence. Of course, I hoped for a photo but it moved quickly and restlessly and nine times out of ten was half-a-second jump ahead of me and my camera. I ended up with a small handful of photos to confirm the identification and perhaps to warm a January day.

For me, seeing a Bay-breasted Warblers is a rare treat, particularly in spring when they are late arrivals and can be very difficult to find and follow in the newly opened upper-canopy levels. So, spending time today studying and enjoying this admittedly rather drab, fall-plumaged, bird at such close quarters was something of a privilege.

The bright yellow splash of the Nashville Warbler made it an immediate Bird of the Day but it was nudged aside to give equal billing to the Bay–breasted Warbler for many satisfyingly close (if fleeting) looks.

Home, Burlington ON. October 13^th. 2020. Sitting for a moment, pausing between morning garden chores, I had hardly got comfortable when I spotted twitchy movement low down among some overgrown Oxeye Sunflowers.

Over the years, I have many times spotted an interesting bird and made a fingers-crossed dash indoors to get my binoculars and camera; more than half the time it was wasted effort, the bird left.  Not today though! I had pre-thought the possibility and had everything I needed at hand. I got a quick binocular look at a small, olive-green warbler of some kind searching for food, and I had my camera ready for a record shot too. I needn’t have rushed, this little bird picked and paused its way around the sunflowers paying no attention to me even as I moved to get a little closer, camera clicking all the time.

It moved from the sunflowers to our old pear tree and back, and from there to a clematis tangle. I was enjoying long binocular studies and took many pictures – hoping of course that some would clinch the identification if it came to that.  

I write now, with confidence, that it was a Tennessee Warbler but at the time I was not at all certain; two key field marks, a dusky line through the eye and a pale supercilium (eyebrow) were not quite obvious enough.  If not a Tennessee then the options were limited, Orange-crowned Warbler was the likeliest alternative or perhaps a young female of who-knows-what. And just in case it turned out to be an Orange-crowned, I took a couple of photos of the bird with its crown feathers raised, it sure would be a a coup to get photos of an OC’s rarely-seen orange stripe. But it wasn’t an Orange-crowned and here, for the record (needlessly), is a Tennessee Warbler with its crown feathers raised.

It was a gardening day punctuated by three or four stops for birds: a large flock of Common Grackles, a murder of a dozen American Crows noisy like a crowd after the bars close, a Downy Woodpecker and of course My Bird of the Day, this Tennessee Warbler.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. October 10^th. 2020. I always like seeing Purple Finches. No special reason except that I don’t very often, but I did today and was cheered by them. It’s not that they’re rare but at the same time, neither are they common. Most Purple Finches spend their winters a little bit south of us and their summers a little bit north, making us just somewhere along the way, somewhere to fly over rather than to stop and say hello. 

Today’s Purple Finches were among a small group of American Goldfinches picking seed from the heads of exhausted summer sunflowers. Here is a photo of a female from today.

…and in the masthead a group of males photographed six years ago – a testament perhaps to how infrequently I get the chance.

Interestingly, Cornell Lab of Ornithology notes of Purple Finch that “Although widespread and regularly seen, this bird is one of the least-studied finches in North America because it is neither common enough to be easily studied nor rare enough to be threatened with extinction.” Falling between two stools.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. October 5^th. 2020. Following 24 hours of mixed, sometimes dirty, weather my companion and I sensed a good chance of rewarding birding this morning; and it certainly delivered. We racked up 52 species of birds and it took us three and a half hours to do a transect that usually takes two. 

There were two Birds of the Day today, both special because of their quiet, fleeting scarcity, not because of the one thing they have in common, that neither is particularly engaging to look at.  The second one, a Gray-cheeked Thrush, like all of its thrush cousins, is modest in behaviour and subtly and beautifully dressed in earth tones. I hadn’t seen one for many months, maybe a couple of years, and was pleased when one landed close to us. Here’s a photo of it, not spectacular – but precious in its own way.

My other Bird of the Day was an Orange–crowned Warbler, a bird that stands out for being uncommon, uncommonly plain and somewhat inappropriately named. We see very few of them here, they are much commoner on the west half of the continent, commoner to the point of being a bit tiresome. In some sort of compensation for their commonness, the western birds are much brighter than eastern individuals. (A middling yellow versus a greyish with a wash of yellow on the undersides). Perhaps the easterners are more likely to be overlooked than truly absent.

Seeing one today was sort-of anticipated, it is the right time of year. They are a latish migrant among warblers and we were examining an expanse of seedy herbaceous plants, their sort of place. The bird we found was searching for food, obligingly not too far from us, but made a point of digging deep and staying buried in the thick vegetation. Being a bit of a triumph propelled today’s Orange-crowned Warbler into shared My Bird of the Day status. And as to the orange crown, we didn’t see it, few do, it is rarely visible and said to be more obvious on bathing or scolding birds.

Our morning was as broadly rewarding for many notables as it was for the Gray-cheeked Thrush and the Orange-crowned Warbler. We found a few other late moving warblers: Northern Parula, Common Yellowthroat and Magnolia, Black–throated Green and Yellow–rumped Warblers. A Blue–headed Vireo, some Ruby–crowned Kinglets, two late Least Flycatchers and a few Green–winged Teal and two American Wigeons.

Woodland Cemetery, Burlington ON. September 29, 2020. After a stretch of warm, dry days a cold front swept across the land last night. It really stirred things up. For the many birds who had been hanging around, failing to make hay while the sun shined, last night was a time-to-get-moving wake-up call. 

With no urgent duties of my own, I headed to this quiet , well treed cemetery, eight kilometres from home, hoping for a lively morning of birds on the move. The cemetery commands a peninsula of land overlooking a long stretch of water. It lies squarely on a coastal flyway followed by thousands of fall migrants, it’s almost a bird trap. 

On my way, I noticed a large flock of Blue Jays, flying alongside me and pretty well keeping up at 40 Kmh. Hmmm well, Blue Jays are on the move, I thought and anticipated meeting up with them again as they passed the cemetery. A small group of birder photographers had gathered in their favoured spot among the headstones, but I avoided them.  Instead I found a quieter corner away from the guy-talk and one-upmanship that seems to go with the group.

A flock of jays swept low overhead, coming from the east, heading southwest, I couldn’t count them. I tried for photographs with limited success. Only this one (normally not a keeper) manages to hint at the spectacle of a sky full of Blue Jays.

A few more trickled through and I was distracted for a while by a large group of Dark-eyed Juncos.  New overnight arrivals I’m sure, certainly, the first I’ve seen since the end of April.

But jays kept appearing in loose but purposeful flocks, passing over all morning at little more than treetop height and screeching as they went. Counting them was pointless, small flocks might have been 20 birds-strong, and large flocks five or ten times as large. It went on all morning that way, there were pauses but not for long. Among these hundreds and thousands, I noted a migrating falcon very high overhead, perhaps a Merlin, and a Yellow-billed Cuckoo that seemed a bit baffled by the clamour of jays all around it as it searched for food in a thick mulberry.

It was in the first week of October last year that I celebrated Blue Jays as My Bird of the Day. I remember that day and the clamour of jays feasting on acorns. I remember recalling then how a South African birder had breathlessly said of her first Blue Jay, “What a beautiful bird!” And it surely is. This was one of today’s birds, it was among a small detachment that paused for lunch.