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Royal Botanical Gardens. Hamilton and Burlington ON. August 17 2020. I have been following the fortunes of a Barn Swallow nest over the past couple of weeks, it is located under a pond-side viewing platform . The platform is a good birding place to linger, it has a long commanding view of the pond to a far, dark forested bank. The pond itself is a sure place to find Wood Ducks, Mallards, Great Blue Herons and Belted Kingfishers and its edges are thick with Cattails (aka Bullrush or Reedmace in other parts of the world) and more recently Wild Rice has become established. A week ago, I photographed this young Wood Duck just a few feet out from the platform.

I saw it again today together with its mother and siblings and most of that immature pin-feather growth and fluffiness had grown out.

Back to the Barn Swallows. A pair has nested under the platform for several years, always in the same spot. The presence of the nest only becomes evident with the endless coming and goings of the food-carrying adults. Two weeks ago, I noticed they were delivering food again so probably to their second brood of the year. It takes about five or six weeks to complete the full nest-preparation to fledging cycle so they could have started on today’s brood in early July.   So, it’s possible that they had already raised (or at least tried to raise) an earlier brood here starting in mid-late May, shortly after arrival. Anyway today, the latest brood were lined up on a bare branch above the platform, waiting for food.

This was not my first encounter with hungry swallow kids today. Shortly after sunrise, along a lakeside path where Northern Rough-winged Swallows are often to be found, I watched two fledglings sitting on an overhead wire, patiently waiting for breakfast.  As a parent approached with food, the young started the anxious, feed-me feed-me twittering. At the masthead above, a youngster sits waiting and below we see the parental duty fulfilled.

I’ll close by noting that I got a glimpse of fall migration today, passerine migration that is, the little birds. Some shorebirds have been conspicuously on the move for a month, not so the passerines. But today as I walked a creek-side trail I glimpsed a Least Flycatcher, it was nervous and kept its distance but I took it as an early migrant and I expect and hope there will be lots more to come. 

Grimsby Wetlands, Grimsby, ON , August 16, 2020.  I saw a Buff-breasted Sandpiper this morning – through my telescope, some 350 metres distant (according to Google Maps), and hard to make out against the background clutter. Well, but I saw it and it is a helpful and unexpected addition to my 5-mile-radius bird list. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable birding moment, unlike my last Buff-breasted Sandpipers. That was May 2013 in Suchitoto, El Salvador. There, I saw a field of them, still a long way off but rather charming as they sought food among longish grass, their heads popped up in turns to check for trouble. It is a vivid memory for the setting as much as for the bird. I mean, why would anybody be birding in distinctly unsafe El Salvador of all places? Well, you can find out more by following this link.

But before the Buff-breasted Sandpiper stop, I revisited the wetland that has been so productive of shorebirds in the past couple of weeks. The soggy mudflats had largely dried up and where some water remained, I found four Pectoral Sandpipers picking for food. They provoked another vivid memory, this time of Pectoral Sandpipers in late July nine years ago when I watched several at quite close quarters and witnessed a lengthy posturing squabble between two of them. What purpose the elaborate aggression served I can only guess at, perhaps a lingering testosterone-driven bit of oneupmanship. Here’s a photo of those two combatants.

Found on a raft of old weeds in a nearby pond, my Bird of the Day this morning was a streaked-necked, and therefore young, Green Heron prowling the water’s edge for a meal. It reminded me (another flashback) of a Striated Heron seen and photographed in Oman earlier this year. It had really baffled me because it is a melanistic Striated Heron, a colour aberration not illustrated in my field guide. The Striated Heron and the Green Heron are very closely related, in fact a debate rages as to whether they are both sub-species of a superspecies. I’ll leave that with the hairsplitters.

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Grimsby Wetlands, Grimsby, ON , August 7, 2020.  I was fairly sure I’d run into a Common Gallinule today, a family of adults and young have been much discussed and celebrated among birder circles lately. Although this part of Canada is considered well within Common Gallinules’ range they are nevertheless a little uncommon and noteworthy when found. 

Where I grew up in the south of England, their very close lookalike cousin the Eurasian Moorhen was reliably common and could be found on almost any reed-edged water by almost any band of wandering boys. For a while the gallinule and moorhen were considered to be the same species but closer study put paid to that belief. I did a bit of research and found the gallinule family to to be globally widespread with some member-species found solely on some very lonely mid-South Atlantic islands; and they all look much the same.

Today’s Common Gallinule was easily seen and watched from a screened viewing platform so it was hardly an exercise in birding skill, but satisfying nonetheless.  My fieldcraft skills had been tested a little earlier sorting through a number of shorebirds, mostly Lesser Yellowlegs, although a lone Semi-palmated Plover was rewarding particularly as it was a lifer-triumph for a youngish birder-friend who happened to be there at the same time.

We watched the gallinule for quite a while, both of us with our cameras working overtime, I came home with around 350 photos to sort through. It was very photogenic, preening and occasionally dipping for something edible, note the little Painted Turtle sharing the platform.

As I was preparing to leave, I made a passing comment on a couple of Chimney Swifts wheeling around. My youngish birder-friend was somewhere between startled and impressed, “I’ve never seen a swift.” She said. They were her second lifer for the day and as I left she was following the swifts with her long-lens camera. Here’s a couple of her photos, an accomplishment because swifts in flight are hard enough to follow visually and surely that much harder to photograph.

Grimsby Wetlands, Grimsby, ON , August 4, 2020.  This may end up being more of a photo-essay than a day-in-the-life-of-a-birder because todays birds, Short-billed Dowitchers are so photogenic, in the right light anyway. It was not the right light this morning, a day’s rain had sent the sun packing, it was soft, misty and things squelched, the laundry had not yet dried.

I wanted to see if there had been any change in the cast of characters at this wetland; there had. A Semi-palmated Plover and a Pectoral Sandpiper were both new arrivals and two Short-billed Dowitchers too. Numbers had thinned a bit but I enjoyed sorting through and identifying Spotted, Solitary and Least Sandpipers, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, a scattering of Killdeers and a few Virginia Rails too.

I tried to honour the Dowitchers (above) with suitable photos befitting them as My Birds of the Day, but fell short. These gloomy shots were the best I could do, my mistake was in overreaching in low light conditions.

Good light does justice to the delightful wash of chestnut on a dowitcher’s breast and the spangling of warm browns, ochre and creams that overlay their wings and back. They carry an overall sense of balance, achieving a happy medium of shorebird proportions unlike their leggy, high-stepping, needle-nosed, yellowlegs cousins or fussy, thigh-deep-in-mud, peep sandpipers.

Five years ago I found a small group of Short-billed Dowitchers resting for the day in a shallow pond at an abandoned quarry. I was able to approach quite easily and eventually sat within a few yards of them. These and the masthead photo are from that day.

Grimsby Wetlands, Grimsby, ON , July 31, 2020.  On a tip-off I made a pre-breakfast run to an obligingly convenient wetland in hopes of seeing Virginia Rails. It was time well spent. The wetland was once a sewage settlement pond, then a decade or two ago the municipality upgraded its sewage treatment facilities and was persuaded to allow this noisome site to be turned back into a natural(ish) state. The alternative might have been 100 acres of lakeside housing but, inasmuch as new residential developments often feature street names celebrating the land’s previous use then maybe Wastewater Way or Aeration Avenue didn’t quite cut it. Anyway, now we have a big, shallow pond turned mudflats and a good birding destination.  At my early hour it was quite delightful.

I had no trouble spotting Virginia Rails: first an adult with six or seven black-fluffball young, then another two adults with one and two young respectively. And there were a few single adults working their way along the cattail border; I think I saw fifteen at least. Virginia Rails and their lookalike kin, Soras, are notoriously difficult to see. I sometimes hear them and occasionally get a momentary glimpse, but more often than not I’ll stare long and hard at a patch of barely moving vegetation and see nothing at all. But when I do get a sighting, a decent one, it can be well, My Bird of the Day.

Just as engaging this early morn were several Spotted, Least and Semi–palmated Sandpipers, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, and a scattering of Killdeers. Maybe the Killdeers were locals but the others were certainly early southbound migrants, perhaps failed breeders.