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January 20 2020. Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR).  Our day started in spine tingling fashion with the pre-dawn calls of an Eagle Owl coming from a high dune beside our campsite. Its call, a deep, hollow, far-carrying hooo at 10-second intervals, was responded to by a female, higher pitched and slightly hoarse, on the other side of our settlement. But that was before light, before breakfast and before we got our tasks for the day.

It hardly needs saying that working is a desert can be quite taxing. I’d never experienced it before, it is everything you might imagine: slogging up a dune face, sand carried on the wind and the radiant heat of the sun making wide brim hats and long-sleeves essential cover-ups (even though it’s only January).

As we paused for lunch, I spotted a couple of large birds airborne and far from us and above the horizon. They drifted rather than flew and had the profile of large planks, wings slightly downward tilted from the horizontal. Lappet-faced Vultures! I called out with fingers crossed, although that was just about all they could be based on the species list we had received; and they were! They came closer, drifting in large circles until one passed almost overhead. Unmistakably vultures with heavy flesh-tearing beaks, wrinkled bare heads and wings made for effortless soaring. They circled the valley to our left where the white skeletal remains of Oryx dotted the sand floor. There is no mammal top predator left in the Arabian Desert to cull and devour the weak and infirm, Lions and Leopards are long gone so, I suppose Oryx and gazelles must just fade away.  Wherever possible, their carcasses are transported to the nearby valley in an effort to attract the vultures;  apparently it works.

January 19 2020. Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR). I am in the the Arabian Desert this week as one of a team of volunteers here to update the DDCR’s animal population estimates; simple really – counting animals in the sand. The team, about a dozen strong, is drawn from various countries and our common bond is an interest in wildlife and doing something useful with our time. Biosphere Expeditions makes it all possible.

Of course there’s more to it than casually wandering around with an “I see one!” approach to counting. In small groups we have been assigned a handful of 2km x 2km squares to survey. Point counts are part of it and Oryx, Arabian Gazelles and Sand Gazelles are the easy part, we also record other animals of interest including, to my delight, interesting birds.

Unsurprisingly, the desert is not a very birdy place but those that are here hold my attention. Today we recorded several Crested Larks, two Grey Francolins ( rather like a partridges), a fly-by Brown-winged Raven and best of all, two Macqueen’s Bustards.

Macqueen’s Bustards are tall birds, somewhere between a turkey and an ostrich and were, until recently, called Houbara Bustards. But those whose job it is to split hairs determined that Macqueen’s is a distinct species and now Houbaras are birds of North Africa only while Macqueen’s are Asian. Bustards of all stripes are one of those birds who, when I was a child, I knew only as pictures in a book, almost mythical and something I’d likely never see in my life. (The same goes for Citrine Wagtail, Bee-eaters, Hoopoe and Secretary Bird by the way, and that I have since met all of them is a comment on the ease of travel today, first world wealth and advancing years.)

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Today’s Macqueen’s Bustards were a minor sensation to me. They just paced past us, in no particular hurry, both had identifying leg bands and one sported a ten-centimetre long antenna on its back because it had been fitted with a satellite tracking device; the species has been reintroduced in the DDCR and is the subject of close study.

Like many of the animals we saw in the DDCR they are the colour of their habitat and vanish quickly if you blink.

January 4 2020. Grimsby ON. I cobbled together a team to participate in the Peachtree Bird Count today, the Peachtree is a nod to the tender-fruit-growing tradition of the count area. Such counts have a long history: Christmas Bird Counts have been a regular fixture across North America for 120 years. The Peachtree Count is a new event to compliment a neighbouring Boxing Day (Dec. 26) count, today’s was Peachtree’s third or fourth year I think . Local naturalists have participated in the nearby Boxing Day Bird Count for nearly 100 years.
We were assigned an interesting territory that includes a tract of lake shoreline, a thickly wooded escarpment face, some scattered housing and farmland. The waters of Lake Ontario hold hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of over-wintering waterfowl so there’s always the chance we could spend all day trying to identify and count ducks: Long-tailed Ducks, Buffleheads, scaup, merganser and scoter species. Today it went quite smoothly but still, counting 400 scattered Long-tailed Ducks took a bit of time.
It was a relatively mild day, gloomy overcast but above freezing anyway, and always damp and sometimes wet underfoot. We tallied 33 species in our defined area and added one more, a Northern Shrike, on our way home.
Two birds, the Northern Shrike and a couple of posing Northern Mockingbirds made the day for me. The two species can be confused, they’re about the same size, both are predominantly pearl-grey with darker wings and tails (almost black in the case of the shrike) and both show in-flight flashes of white on their wings and outer tail feathers. Where we found them, under leaden skies among bare-twigged winter hawthorns, they both might have been best-man at a posh wedding. The shrikes are winter visitors subsisting on a diet of small birds and mammals while our mockingbirds get through winter on a diet of left-over summer fruit including rose-hips and crab apples.
There were other good birds on our count. A couple of Chipping Sparrows and a female Red-winged Blackbird were notable for being here rather that further south. We half expected to see a small group of Turkeys but they are famously shy and evasive so we missed them, but a small flock of Eastern Bluebirds brightened up a wet trudge around a playing field.
My only photographs of a Northern Shrike are dismal and not worth sharing but here are a couple of Northern Mockingbirds from other times.

December 25 2019.  Snake Road, Burlington, ON.  I’ve been watching follow-up reports of the bluebirds and a shrike that my companions and I saw two weeks ago. Thinking that a few minutes spent with Eastern Bluebirds whose cerulean blue and chestnut would be a refreshing contrast to the reds and greens of Christmas, we went out under a low overcast in hope of re-finding them.  It didn’t take long to locate some, presumably the same flock, mixed in with a sprinkling of American Goldfinches; about twenty birds in all flitting restlessly between Hawthorns and Multiflora Rose thickets.

Overseeing the grassy scrubland was probably the same Northern Shrike as previously, sitting stolidly, perhaps its presence was what kept the bluebirds and goldfinches on edge. Our short trip achieved its goal and Eastern Bluebirds were My Birds of Christmas Day. But since they were not nearly as approachable or photogenic as others at other times I’ve added a few shots from those other times.

December 12 2019.  Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. I wrapped up the previous post with a footnote about a flagging Trumpeter Swan, noting it was a longer story than suited the post. Well the swan story is still unfolding but it’s not clear yet if it will have a happy ending.

To set the stage a bit, Trumpeter Swans used to be well established in Ontario but over-hunting eliminated them sometime since the arrival of Europeans.  However, since the mid-1980s the swan has responded well to reintroduction efforts and is now a common winter bird found in flocks and small groups along sheltered stretches of western Lake Ontario. In April most leave for somewhat more northern breeding grounds while a few pairs remain to breed in quiet backwaters not far from here. Unlike its lookalike cousin, the Tundra Swan which heads to sub-Arctic tundra margins to breed, Trumpeter Swans find nesting sites in the marshy margins of lakes and rivers.

Each year, as part of the reintroduction programme, as many young as possible are captured and fitted with leg bands and yellow wing-tags about the size of the palm of your hand, I assume the tags make it easy for researchers to track who’s who and where. I find this wing-tagging offensive for several reasons but know that those who do it will eloquently claim and explain that it causes no harm and plays a role in efforts to save the species. Perhaps so.

Our story started as my companions and I walked along a river-side trail and noticed a Trumpeter Swan walking purposefully towards us on the frozen surface of the river; how incongruous! It surely should be swimming with others in open water not walking alone on ice. Moments later it was on the trail beside us having walked up a steep-ish bank, clearly unafraid of us and pointedly with a purpose.  It bore wing tags identifying it as K18. We could only think it was expecting that we had food for it, many people walk these trails feeding the chickadees, nuthatches, squirrels and other wildlife along the way. We had nothing suitable to offer it although one of my companions offered fragments of her granola bar which K18 took willingly.

Sweetly engaging though it may have seemed, everything about this meeting with K18 was wrong: it was not on open water with other swans, it was evidently hungry, if not starving, and apparently habituated to humans. And especially disturbingly, those plastic wing-tags were encrusted with inch-thick wedges of ice. What does it serve to encumber a wild bird this way?

Puzzled and feeling anxious for K18, we continued on our way but called a friend at the Royal Botanical Gardens and asked him to help if he could. He mused that K18 may be suffering lead poisoning, ‘there’s been a lot of it” and effectively put in motion a rescue of this bird a little later that the day.

A couple of subsequent and self-explanatory emails and text messages will move this story along.  Word came back, “… K18 has lead poisoning. We are going to try treatment. It is a good bet that he picked it up in the spring because he usually goes north, but didn’t this year. He was seen in (a local lake) during the summer.”

A follow-up check with the veterinarian brother of one of us disclosed the following. “Oral ingestion of lead pellets is often fatal since so much is absorbed into the bloodstream, and continues to be absorbed as long as the pellet is in the GI tract.  If they can remove the pellet(s) the bird might be OK, but you’d have to take radiographs to know if they were in the stomach or intestine, and removal from the intestine would require surgery, and even passing a stomach tube to try to get anything from the stomach would require general anesthesia, which is likely prohibitively expensive for wildlife.  The most humane thing to do is likely euthanasia.  Birds that get shotgun pellets in their soft tissues often do well because absorption is so much slower.  It’s sad that it continues to happen, and only because gun lobbies prefer lead which is soft, compared to steel pellets which damage gun barrels.”

There is so much that is disquieting in that brief, brotherly analysis. Where do you suppose K18 ingested lead shot? It could be any marshy hunting area. Whenever you see a swan (duck or goose for that matter) foraging below the water surface or on soggy wetlands, there’s a chance it’s ingesting lead pellets.  Cornell Labs’ excellent on-line reference site, Birds of North America, notes, “Lead shot and sinkers are ingested directly from bottom sediments while feeding, or when searching for grit. Lead shot (and possibly fishing sinkers) continues to be a serious local problem despite being banned for waterfowl hunting for decades … Lead poisoning may kill Trumpeter Swans as young as 3 wks. old. Blus et al. … suggested that the Trumpeter Swan is unusually sensitive to lead poisoning. Treatment of some lead-poisoned individuals is possible.”

A little bit more research showed that lead shot has been banned for hunting in Canada and the US, but that does not take yesterday’s lead out of the environment. Those old lead pellets all fell to ground. The Canadian Veterinary Medicine Association’s web site provides more and disturbing information about lead contamination and its effect on wildlife.

K18’s fate remains to be seen.