Category: Uncategorized

September 7 2019.  L’Islet-sur-mer, Quebec.  I write this as Hurricane Dorian, one of the most monstrous of tropical storms, is making its way up the east coast of North America. It is hitting Nova Scotia hard tonight and has delayed our progress towards Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy (some way off the storm track but nevertheless likely to suffer considerably from high winds and torrential rain.) We are making our way somewhat slowly along the south shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, Quebec. Here, we will be well clear of Dorian’s track but nature abhors a vacuum so instead we’ve been dealt cold, eye-watering, nose-dripping cold (especially if you choose to stand on an exposed shore looking at birds, that is.)

The day has been marked by spectacular scenery, delicious artisanal cheese, a warm inn, a nearly full-adult Bald Eagle, five Snow Geese, a Northern Harrier, several Least Sandpipers, Semi-palmated Plovers, and Sanderlings. The Bald Eagle was my Bird of the Day, we spotted it sitting on a large rock at the tideline where several ducks were shuffling through reedy margins. As we watched, the eagle spread its wings to lift up into the teeth of the wind and promptly dropped to seize an unwitting (& unidentifiable) duck, plucking it struggling from the water. It settled back on the same rock, just long enough to put an end to the duck’s struggles.  It then took flight again to challenge an approaching second Bald Eagle and to send it packing to find its own meal; then back to the waiting duck dinner.

The Snow Geese were a bit of a surprise, they are almost certainly migrants from the Arctic, and today’s birds would certainly be among the first to head south. In a few weeks the marshes along the Gulf of St. Lawrence will be rotten with Snow Geese. We almost never see any as far west as Lake Ontario, so they were a welcome sight, and a pretty one set against the backdrop of rural Quebec.

September 2 2019.  Royal Botanical Gardens, Cootes Paradise, Hamilton, ON. I took Arnold, a non-birding friend, along with me on a transect of really quiet woodlands today, more my idea than his. I outlined my task and the project we’re involved in, promised little and half-expected he’d be a touch bored, but in that I was quite wrong: it was, he said, Amazing! Fascinating! (his words), and for me, heartwarming to hear him exclaim.

Providing domestic demands don’t get in the way, I really expect him to buy binoculars and a field guide on his return. Arnold lives in San Antonio and when I told him that Texas has some of the best birding in the continent he was astonished and energized further.  A bit of research showed that a couple of San Antonio birding hot spots are within a mile of his house. It may take a bit of explanation with his family-in-law though who generally view the word ‘birding’ as a duck-hunting term.

Our transect was pretty quiet, we saw just 19 species, but a small flock of migrating Common Nighthawks excited me (Arnold too, I think my enthusiasm rubbed off and he was generally excited about almost everything). And that was about it until near the end when we stood gazing over a shallow lake. It was quite warm and generally uninteresting until a twenty-strong flight of Canada Geese circled and settled not far in front of us. They milled around engaged in some sort of low-key social chatter, preening, and bathing by ducking their wings to scoop and shuffle water over their backs and necks.  All birds preen, some bathe in shallow puddles, some bathe in dust, it’s all done to clean and condition flight and body feathers.  Canada Geese have all the water they need and are known to bathe including “…head-dipping, which moves water over head, neck, and back, and during more intense bathing, wing beating and flailing of water and occasionally somersaulting.” (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Birds of North America. From website )

We watched them take somersaulting a stage further, energetically turning turtle and paddling their feet to remain upside down, belly up, for several seconds.  Curious behaviour and obviously tricky for a creature perfectly designed to float just one way, right side up.

The Bird of the Day could easily have been the Common Nighthawks but the Canada Goose behaviour was absolutely new to me.

September 1 2019.  Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. My first transect of the month got off to a dreary start and for quite a while I thought my day’s count might not be much better than a January day. But the species count gradually crept up (as it should) although the numbers of individual birds was low.

It all started to pick up towards the end. I found a group of five juvenile Rose–breasted Grosbeaks who were moving around slowly and often making themselves easy to photograph and, to my pleasure, sometimes singing softly with notes rather like those of an Eastern Bluebird (see previous post).

As I photographed the grosbeaks I could hear a Red-eyed Vireo singing patchily off to my right prompting an inward smile of satisfaction; finally something new. Then birds started popping up to challenge me, different birds, and in rapid succession I was following the flitting of several warbler-sized birds.

Our familiar and often challenging spring warblers, can look anywhere from completely to quite different in late summer and fall. The Peterson Field Guide to the Birds used to dedicate a page to ‘Confusing Fall Warblers’, maybe more recent editions still do; the caution  has taken root in culture and many birders balk at the prospect of sorting them out, – with some justification. The point of this is to note that my fall-warbler identification skills felt a bit rusty and a couple of birds wandered out of sight before I could i.d them. I did manage to clearly identify one of each of American Redstart, Black and White and Black–throated Blue Warblers (they don’t change), a couple of Chestnut–sided Warblers gave me pause for a moment but the bright green of their crowns and backs is distinctive (and memorable). I thought for a while I was watching a Bay-breasted Warbler, I couldn’t be sure, it was plausible, but I set it aside. A brief challenge came with a brightly yellow-fronted bird with faint streaks on its flanks, as my brain sorted through the possibilities, the bird hung head-down for a moment showing a sharply divided underside of its tail, half black, half white – Magnolia Warbler, unmistakable, always charming, and Bird of the Day for making me feel a lot more secure about Confusing Fall Warblers.

August 27 2019.  Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. Thank goodness for lessons learned. Today I learned that what I had hitherto believed were the songs of Eastern Bluebirds were more likely to have been the ‘feed-me feed-me’ pleadings of juvenile Rose-breasted Grosbeaks.

I was walking one of our transect routes through a wide and luxuriantly overgrown valley. The birding was okay, (29 species) not more than that, but I was happy enough with a warm, late summer hike, a tree-full of Ospreys, three anyway, and a brief glimpse of a Green Heron.  I was noting everything as usual and was struck to hear the two or three-note fluting song of an Eastern Bluebird. It made me stop and pay close attention because I’ve heard them at this place in previous years, although was never able to confirm them with a sighting. It wasn’t long before I could pinpoint the songs as coming from an overgrown Manitoba Maple or maybe Tartarian Honeysuckle. I could just make out movement and before long distinguished two, maybe three, young Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. Here’s one.

Note the remnant of the nestling’s gape, a yellow extension of the bill’s margin, visible just in front of and below the eye, this marks this as a very young fledgling and perhaps still dependant on its parents to bring food, hence the soft pleading song.

That I had confused the calls for the song of a bluebird was nothing if not instructive and a welcome reminder that there is no end to the learning in this birding game.

 

August 23 2019.  Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. A non-birder friend asked me long ago if I would take him birding some time. I’m happy to share the pleasure but whether the outing is a success or not is a bit hit and miss; I know there’s always something interesting, but does he? Just curious as to expectations, I asked my companion how many species he thought we might see; he shrugged, no idea. Thirty to thirty-five I suggested, his eyebrows lifted in surprise; in the end we hit thirty-two, not bad.

Our unsurprising (to me anyway) list included Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, noisy chattering groups of Red–winged Blackbirds, a Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, Northern Flickers, Mallards and Wood Ducks. Not so expected and very welcome were two Trumpeter Swans, a Green Heron, Eastern Wood Peewees and a Blue–gray Gnatcatcher. It’s hard to find a compelling way to describe a peewee that’s all but invisible against the forest background or a tiny, endlessly flitting, gnatcatcher, but I managed to convince him they were there even if he couldn’t see them.

The morning had its excitement, even to a non-birder, when a hungry Cooper’s Hawk came onto the scene. The arrival of a predator prompts subtle but discernable reactions among exposed, would-be prey species: someone always utters a long drawn out weeeee alarm whistle and the vulnerable scatter for cover or freeze where they are. We watched the Cooper’s Hawk emerge from a gap between two cedar trees and make a fast and purposeful dive at a Spotted Sandpiper who had been minding its own business on a muddy shoreline. The sandpiper did something I’ve never seen before, it skipped aside and plunged, fully submerged into the waters of the creek, it was under water only momentarily but long enough to evade the Cooper’s Hawk who swept past, climbed and banked away. That evasion of attack can only be an instinctive reaction, Spotted Sandpipers aren’t aquatic, they don’t swim, they don’t dive, they’re not built to be in the water; at least I didn’t think so until today, something new. The Spotted Sandpiper was my hero and My Bird of the Day.

There was more: I pointed out an Eastern Screech Owl roosting in a large cavity in the trunk of a Shagbark Hickory and a little later we saw a bald Blue Jay (another first for me I think). Other than among vultures, ibises and the like, baldness is not something you associate with birds, but adult birds all moult in late summer and every year I hear reports of bald Northern Cardinals.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology says “Blue Jays of all ages have a “bald stage” in which all capital-tract feathers are dropped nearly simultaneously.“ And this Audubon article  explains moult baldness suggesting that it most frequently affects juveniles. Baldness is not flattering to a bird and does complicate field identification of a bird right overhead. This is how it looked to us, I’m sure its mother still loves it.