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Enonkishu Conservancy, Kenya. February 22. 2019. Strange times.   Looking to fill time constructively this morning, I wondered what bird I’d light on if I were to metaphorically spin the wheel through my photos. So, going to my over-full library, I scrolled down a few pages and then blindly clicked a random image. I landed on this, a Malachite Kingfisher. A very good choice because not only is it a nice-looking bird but I remember it well, the time, the place even the feeling in the air.

It’s from early last year in Kenya, I was on a shady the bank of the Mara River. It was close to noon, the start of the hot midday lull, and I was sitting comfortably, looking for birds, binoculars-and-camera-ready and hoping not to be noticed by the nasty little biting ants whose grassy flat spot I’d chosen.  That’s the Mara River in the background, the same river you’ll see on those videos of stampeding herds of migrating Wildebeests, bounding and plunging across, terrified of the Nile Crocodiles that lie in wait for guaranteed easy pickings.

There was nothing memorable about the arrival of the Malachite Kingfisher, it just showed up on the opposite bank for a spot of fishing (above) and then, thinking better of it crossed to my side and posed clearly in the open. (below) I took several shots, the one above and these two are the best. Bird of the Day in all likelihood.

Turkey Point ON. March 24 2020. I can readily bring to mind four European bird species introduced into North America: House Sparrow, European Starling, Rock Pigeon and Ring-necked Pheasant, there may be 1 or 2 more; the first three are bog-common. The pigeon probably got here as a domestic food source for early farmer settlers, and we’ve probably all heard about the 19^th Century meddler who thought the common people of America would remain intellectually and morally impoverished unless they knew the birds of Shakespeare. So, the story tells how he imported and released European robins, chaffinches, bullfinches and nightingales (among others) into New York’s Central Park; they didn’t all survive, not by a long shot, and what we’re left with are the highly successful ones, starlings and sparrows.  

But the Ring-necked Pheasant is a different story, it is originally a bird of Asia and is probably one of the most semi-domesticated of all bird species. It has been widely introduced across the continent for hunting and is commonly raised in captivity until grown when it is released. Those that escape the shotgun barrage struggle to survive in our climate, it is not common in Ontario and perhaps never was, other than very locally and periodically. Like all birds, pheasants need the right landscape and habitat to thrive, they need scattered mixed open fields punctuated with woodland and scrub, dense winter cover is especially important.  As if hunting wasn’t challenge enough, today’s changes in agriculture, moving towards large monoculture practices, don’t help pheasants.

Well, today my wife and I took time away from Covid 19 and drove to a landscape of extensive marshes on Lake Erie’s north shore. March is when ducks and other waterfowl start heading north and I was keen to see what had blown in from the south. It was time well spent and for a while I wondered if we’d actually encountered every, reasonably possible, duck species in Ontario. But no we hadn’t, we missed Wood Duck, and both Blue-winged and Green-winged Teals, but we did enjoy long studies of glorious, breeding-plumaged Northern Pintails, Gadwalls, Northern Shovelers, American Wigeon, Canvasbacks, Redheads, Lesser Scaup, Ruddy Ducks, Mallards, Ring-necked Ducks and more.

As we were making our way home I was mulling over whether Ducks in General had been my collective Birds of the Day, or was it the handful of Sandhill Cranes, or maybe  the Common Grackles in streams many hundreds strong who, having crossed the lake, were swarming north to find their summer place. We were following a picturesque wooded lakeside road when Ruth exclaimed, “Pheasant!” And there, at the roadside, a rather lovely, male Ring-necked Pheasant, My Bird of the Day.

There’s a little more to this, a bit of history. This is not the first time for a pheasant in these posts. Eight years ago (!) in a bizarre encounter I almost literally ran into a Golden Pheasant. It still makes me shake my head in disbelief. Read about it here.

Saltfleet ON. March 8 2020. There’s a stretch of country road I sometimes visit known by the birding fraternity as a favoured place to look for shrikes and owls in winter, early meadowlarks and Upland Sandpipers in spring and mockingbirds at other odd times.

This bird-lovers’ road crosses from one gentle limestone ridge to another and the lands in between are uncultivated either because they are poorly drained or desperately dry.  The landscape is scarred by the road in question, a single-track railway line, an ugly angular drainage ditch, a deep, active limestone quarry and two disused quarries one filled with water the other now an abandoned garbage dump.  

Oddly, all of this makes for a mix of conditions that favour (but not guarantee) certain birds. I have passed this way a few times in past weeks and noted a pair of American Kestrels hanging around. Perhaps they’ll choose to nest somewhere close by, but so far I think their hanging around is more of a precursor to courtship. They spend a lot of time on prominent perches especially roadside utility lines and are wary of people, particularly it seems, of my slow, camera-ready approach. Every time my car rolls into their I-don’t-like-the-look-of-that zone they take flight dropping down and swooping away to a new perch some distance away. It is not a competition I’m likely to win.

But I’ve enjoyed watching them through binoculars, and have tried for photos although their shyness makes it difficult. However, I was lucky to get two in quick succession of a male hovering and examining the ground below for a meal of vole, snake or mouse.

And the rest are of various males at various other times over the years.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. March 14 2020. I expect (and hope) that some months from now we will look back on this post and remember yesterday’s eyes-suddenly-wide-open Friday 13^th when North America got the idea this Corona Virus thing had really landed. We’ll look back on how schools closed doors, community events were abruptly cancelled and national borders shut to foreigners; the stuff of movies.

Rightly or wrongly though, I concluded that walking country trails looking for birds was unlikely to expose me to the rogue virus or put me in contact with large gatherings of people so decided today to do a trial run spring transect around one of our defined routes. It was well worth the effort with thirty species seen and heard.

It’s been a mild winter running into early spring so I wasn’t particularly surprised, but charmed nevertheless, to find half a dozen White-throated Sparrows, and with them a single American Tree Sparrow.

The four ponds in this valley have unimaginative names: Ponds One, Two, Three and Four and when ice-free all are good places to see waterfowl, mostly Mallards, I counted 30 (all males) today – but also a surprise male Northern Pintail. Pond Four is long and well set back from human presence, each early spring it is a brief staging spot for Ring-necked Ducks (6 today) and Buffleheads (3) – and another surprise a male Wood Duck, the first of many to come.

Bird of the Day was a flight of seven Sandhill Cranes. A group of cranes calling at their gentlest (or least raucous) sounds a little like Tundra Swans, so stepping aside from obscuring tree branches I expected to glimpse another springtime swan flight but made a quick adjustment to Sandhill Crane.  They made their winding way up the valley, gaining height as they went.

The photos above are of Sandhill Cranes on a warm late summer days. They are not generally a difficult bird to photograph but today I knew it would be a challenge to get much more than silhouettes against the evenly grey clouds. But, never mind the camera, the live experience was quite enough, a sight to linger over. Here are some of today’s birds.

Burlington ON. March 11 2020. I bet I’ve written one of these In Praise of Tundra Swans every year. But they got me again this morning, just as they do every early March. My first of the year flight of Tundra Swans always stops me in my tracks and lifts me, gladdens my heart is the right term I think.  And as is usually the case, I was just going about meeting my commitments of the day, when I heard the soft, vaguely overlapping whoo whoo whoo, of a skein of Tundra Swans passing hundreds of feet up. When the day is right, as it was this morning, the straggling V flashes white in the morning sun. 

The first V-flight was perhaps two or three hundred strong and not far behind them another 50 or 60,  then much later this morning, another 70 or so.

I have to stop and contemplate the journey they’ve just made: from somewhere on the Atlantic coast, perhaps Chesapeake Bay, where they’ve been since November.  Then yesterday something, probably daylight length, a west wind or maybe a succession of right-feeling days, told them it’s time to get moving. So, they left, pulling each other off the open waters in whispering ones, twos and family groups until assembled for the first overnight stage, from there to here, around 600 kilometers. Here, at the west end of Lake Ontario or more likely along the edges of Lake Erie, they’ll set down, regroup, refuel and wait for the next cue to say it’s time to press on. Sometime around mid-late May they will arrive on their nesting grounds along the shores of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean in Canada’s Nunavut and North West Territories.  We may not see them again this year, not many of them anyway, their fall migration tends to follow other routes.