Category: Uncategorized

May 4 2019. Point Pelee, ON. This is the second of a two-man, two-day flying visit to Ontario’s Rondeau Provincial Park and Point Pelee National Park. Pelee takes the honours as the hottest birding destination of the two, but to temper that, it is also most heavily visited. Unlike 24 hours earlier, the birds were relatively fewer, but still lots to see and many really exciting discoveries. For the sake of illustrating the richness I’ll note that my single page of sightings numbered 74 including: Wood Thrushes, Veerys, and Hermit Thrushes, Baltimore Orioles, Northern Waterthrushes, Least and Great-crested Flycatchers, Common Loons, Barn Swallows and on and on.

We subsequently debated Bird of the Day, Barry favoured a solitary Yellow-breasted Chat but my money is on a Whip-poor-will. Without wishing to sound spoiled, I’ve seen several Y-B Chats over the years, mostly in and around Cape May N.J where they are plentiful – and spectacular territorial songsters.  But Whip-poor-wills are rarely seen, though often and repetitively heard in the forested areas they favour. I have seen a few at night along remote country roads where their eyes shine like cats’ eyes, once I stopped the car and approached a Whip-poor-will as it sat spellbound on the road in the headlights’ glare.

Today’s Whip-poor-will was a quite different encounter. We had stopped to look at a small group of Ruby-crowned Kinglets and an Orange-crowned Warbler, they were hanging around and oddly hyper-active beside a straggly Red Cedar. As we watched they seemed to attract more small birds and we wondered if an owl was nearby. It took a long time but eventually we were able to spot a Whip-poor-will sitting quietly, minding its own business on a horizontal branch at the back of the cedar.  Their cryptic forest-floor plumage makes them easy to overlook but we were lucky enough to have the mobbing activity of the kinglets and Co. to lead us to it. Bird of the Day for me. Had we been dedicated enough we might have returned to the site at dusk to hear it start calling but we weren’t and we faced a three hour drive home on an empty stomach. Enough for one day (or two).

 

May 3 2019. Erieau, ON. Looking back over my day’s notes, a day in which I recorded 89 species, it is just about impossible to pick one species as My Bird of the Day. A quick review of birds that made me think wow! includes Scarlet Tanager (actually two gaudy males almost side by side), a Black-throated Blue Warbler, a Hooded Warbler, a stunningly orange/yellow Yellow Warbler, a bunch of Blue-winged Teal, many Soras and a couple of Virginia Rails.

Where to start? Well, a companion and I had taken two days out of our busy lives to visit two of Canada’s birding hotspots, Rondeau Provincial Park and Point Pelee National Park. Both are  on the north shore of Lake Erie and are landing points for migrants. This morning started out gloomy and very damp, it had rained heavily overnight and misty damp hung in the air; perfect it seems for birding. Hundreds of thousands of migrants must have dropped in overnight.

To start I was happy to see White-throated Sparrows and a few White-crowned Sparrows along the roadside; the novelty soon wore off, wherever we paused there were more whitethroats and the deep litter on the forest was jumping with them, I had to look away.  But in the forest above us, almost anywhere, I could see a year’s supply of Yellow-rumped Warblers and the odd Black-throated Green Warbler to relieve the tedium. The roads through the park were wet and large numbers of thrushes, both Veerys, and Hermit Thrushes were scratching for food along the edges.

A page of my notebook has 23 lines and a morning of sightings at Rondeau filled three columns.

Later, on a tip, we headed along the shore to the small fishing community of Erieau, where we were directed to look for Soras and Virginia Rails. Apparently, those same overnight conditions had swept many in. We found both species quite easily, which in itself is astonishing because they are usually secretive birds and far more often heard than seen. Here though, the winter had substantially flattened the cattail marshes so there were many exposed areas connected by patchy rafts of aquatic vegetation, the birds were hungry and more interested in refuelling than staying out of sight. Perhaps because of their usual elusiveness they were jointly my Birds of the Day.

The Erieau (all those vowels!) area held other delights and surprises: Pied-billed Grebes, 23 Willets, half a dozen Black-bellied Plovers, Great Egrets and a small group of Blue-winged Teal included. They all added to a day overloaded with top-layer sightings as noted above. I’ll spare readers the full list of 89, but to balance the account I’ll add a few FOYs (firsts of the year): Warbling Vireo, eye-popping Magnolia and Blackburnian Warblers, a couple of Orchard Orioles, and both Blue-headed and Yellow-throated Vireos.

April 30 2019. Beach strip, Hamilton, ON. Gulls get little respect. Their behaviour doesn’t always align with what we see as cultured, respectful or cute, not like that of of gift shop or backyard birds. They are raucous (by our measure), opportunistic scavengers (of picnic tables) and inclined to hang out where we’d prefer they didn’t. (garbage dumps). But looked at objectively they are supremely efficient fliers and quite beautiful.

I stood at a bleak shoreline looking, without luck, for a small flock of recently reported American Avocets and noticed these two adult Herring Gulls. As I watched, they engaged in an exchange of long ‘yooow’ calls coordinated with elaborate head-thrown-back stretching, bowing, strutting and deliberate pacing. Apparently, this behaviour is typically shown by a bird on its breeding or feeding territory (there was a nice, fresh, fish corpse at hand) when another bird approaches.

I was struck by the brilliance of their snow white plumage, perhaps because it shows to best advantage against the grim flotsam of the shoreline.

April 28 2019. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, ON. Friends doing a woodland transect a couple of days ago were surprised and thrilled to encounter two Pileated Woodpecker nest sites. At each, a female was excavating a nest hole. We always knew pileateds were present, they need large tracts of mature, intact forest and I would have thought we had just one pair, but it seems that’s not the case.

I know Pileated Woodpeckers to be unusually trustful at times, certainly not tame, that would be a wrong word choice, but you’ll sometimes find one so engrossed bashing away in search of food that it seems oblivious to your presence. Other times they behave coyly and, with a couple of hops, move around to the other side of the tree trunk to stay out of sight.

It was a pleasant enough spring day with some new migrants around. I had completed a transect and was especially satisfied to have found a pair of Blue-winged Teal, an Eastern Screech Owl and a Blue-headed Vireo. Then with the transect complete I approached one of the Pileated Woodpeckers’ construction sites; both the male and the female were present, taking turns to dig out the nest hole. From what I could see, I’d judge the hole to be nearly the size of a football. Here are a few photos, from today at the nest cavity and from earlier times and places.

April 27 2019. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, ON. Regular readers will know I have a weakness for vireos; to me they’re birds with attitude. We see five vireo species around here, three stay all summer the other two head a bit further north to breed. After a seven-month vireo-drought, their reappearance is always something to celebrate. The first to return is usually the Blue-headed Vireo, it’s a prize, and I saw my first-of-the-year today.

Before our encounter with the vireo, my companion and I had completed one of our regular transects.  The temperature barely climbed above late March conditions all day and, if anything good that came of it, it was that birds were forced down from treetops to find shelter and food. We spotted two Blue-gray Gnatcatchers in a calm pocket of woodland, sheltered from a cold, howling westerly wind; they could have been My Birds of the Day had it not been for the vireo later on. The gnatcatchers distracted us from studying a couple of low, singing Pine Warblers who were unusual because it’s a species that hangs around and breeds in the upper reaches of pines and is far more often heard than seen. Around us a House Wren sang and a few Yellow-rumped Warblers, the first of thousands to come, kept company with Ruby-crowned Kinglets. It was all very entertaining – if cold.

The vireo came at a second stop when we joined a friend who was leading a beginner birding group. They were in another sheltered valley and had already seen all but one of possible woodpecker species.  As we arrived to join them I heard the characteristic heart-lifting, three or four-syllable song of a vireo and knew it almost right away as the Blue-headed Vireo. Our Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, who would otherwise have been Birds of the Day had to step aside.