Category: Uncategorized

March 31 2019. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, ON. When March delivers a dollop of hard weather, like last night’s wet snow and today’s cold winds, it’s not a betrayal; March, after all, wears winter’s colours with pride. It was with that cold comfort that a companion and I completed an early-season transect this morning.

The first half was into-the-teeth-of-the-wind cold, the sort of outing where you need to remind yourself that what you are doing is virtuous. Shoulders hunched, knuckles raw, we recorded about twenty species, all falling into the expected-at-this-time-of-year category. A  hurried flypast by a Cooper’s Hawk, a newly returned Brown Cowbird and a single Tree Swallow were noteworthy on the good side of the ledger. On the other side, Double–crested Cormorants, twenty-four of them, were the forerunners of what by summer’s end might well be twenty-four hundred.

Any ambivalence about the day ended when we spotted an Eastern Phoebe, it was instantly My Bird of the Day, first one and then its partner.  They had found something a flycatcher might like to eat in a relatively warm and sheltered corner where snow cover was patchy. It was evidently a very productive spot on such a raw day and they were not the only ones taking advantage of it. A bright Eastern Bluebird impressed us with its vibrant blue as it too sought food and occasionally perched close to us,  a Winter Wren showed itself briefly, and pairs of White-breasted Nuthatches and Black-capped Chickadees hung around. I think they were hoping that we were there with hand-outs; we weren’t.

The swallow, cowbird and phoebes were all recent arrivals, perhaps from a day or two ago when the weather was warmer and more even-handed. Although swallows and phoebes are both insectivores and risk starvation in a prolonged cold spell, both species have always been early arrivals and continue to thrive – survive anyway.

It was the Eastern Phoebes that caught my imagination, enough to be My Birds of the Day, and although cutely picturesque they can’t hold a candle to the Eastern Bluebird.

Virgil, Ontario. March 19 2019. One crow and one stick was all I needed.  We are in that early cascade of harbingers of spring. A week ago, came the first reports of Red-winged Blackbirds, then American Robins, and shortly afterwards Killdeers in ones and twos.  As temperatures improve each day, cancelling out the drifts of snow and ice, the surge of spring becomes unstoppable; well maybe not completely unstoppable but at least spring now has a foothold.

As I drove a long, straight, country road today I could see Turkey Vultures drifting north and coming our way, just dots here and there in a blue sky. An American Crow flew across the road in front of me, it was carrying a single stick in its smiling (I’m sure of it) beak. A stick for a nest in the old evergreens, a nest for eggs and for fledglings to be reared in the much warmer days ahead.

American Crows don’t get much attention, evidence of this is that I don’t have a single photograph of an American Crow. This Hooded Crow, photographed in Sweden, is the best I can do. We know the crow family to be intelligent, but they’re not pretty, they don’t sing and they can be quite ill-mannered in their approach to fresh food. But, all of that aside, today’s American Crow carrying proof of spring was my Bird of the Day.

March 7 2019. Lake Erie at Selkirk, ON. Mid-morning I canvassed four birder companions to see if anyone would be up for an afternoon drive seeking interesting sightings from an all-white winter landscape.  On-road birding is not my favourite but I really needed a change of scenery and winter birds are few and far between.

Two of us made our way towards the north shore of Lake Erie making stops at a few favoured spots. It turned out to be a quite rewarding few hours and our tally included a large flock of Snow Buntings coming to a baited area where banders were at work trapping, banding and assessing them before release. From years of banding at this site, the evidence is that Snow Buntings wintering in Southern Ontario probably breed in Labrador and/or Greenland.

Along with the Snow Buntings were many Horned Larks and, to my companion’s particular delight, we found a single Lapland Longspur feeding with one of many roadside flocks of Horned Larks.

As hoped for and expected there were several Rough-legged Hawks hunting the wide fields although most were very far away and we watched one first-year Northern Harrier quartering some roadside fields.

Most exciting though, and Birds of the Day, were a couple of sightings of Bald Eagles. First an adult eagle sitting, apparently incubating eggs, in a large tree-top nest on the edge of a small woodlot close to the Lake Erie shore. It may only be early March (and still cold and snowy) but Bald Eagles in Ontario start egg-laying in mid-February.

Second, and dramatically, a little later we spotted a large bird flying low and purposefully about a kilometer away over frozen Lake Erie. Through binoculars we could see it was a Bald Eagle giving chase to a duck which it had chosen for lunch. Skimming just above the ice, the duck managed to stay ahead of the eagle until they vanished from our line of sight around a headland. Then they apparently reversed direction and we were able to continue following the low-level chase back in the opposite direction. But now a second Bald Eagle came onto the scene following the chase from a polite distance. The flying-for-its-life duck maintained a lead for quite while but eventually flagged and the eagle grabbed it, swooped up and handily passed it to the second eagle who had moved in ready to assist, they then both settled down on the ice out of our line of sight.

Since they evidently shared the catch, it seems probable that either the eagles followed a practiced, cooperative hunting strategy and/or we had watched an adult continuing to support and teach a young eagle how to survive on winter duck.

January 26 2019.  Newmarket, ON. My occasional volunteering for the Owl Foundation took a new turn today; I was asked to take and release a Barred Owl.  It had been found in an urban area north and east of Toronto, grounded and suffering some relatively minor head and eye damage; I don’t know all the details except that with some treatment it had recovered and was ready to go back to where it belonged.

We were asked to make the release around dusk and to stay well away from the intensive urbanisation where it was found.  I asked a couple of birder-friends to join me, it meant a lot of driving: 60 kilometres one way to get the owl; 130 in almost the opposite direction to its release point, and then home.

It was all very simple; the owl was placed gently into a cat carrier which was covered with a light sheet. With the help of Google Maps I selected a roadside release spot close to thick woodland with few houses anywhere around. We made the long drive arriving, appropriately, around 4.30, pulled off the road, set down the carrier and opened it.  The owl walked out hesitantly, liked what it saw and flew to a nearby tree.  It looked at us for a several minutes, then turned and flew further into the forest.

It was a very quiet road but a car passed us as we were doing the release. It stopped, turned around and the family of three sat mesmerized just looking at our Barred owl, something few people get to enjoy. I think they became converts to owl rescue, thanking us over and over.

All of that was straightforward enough. Our biggest surprise though came a few minutes and a couple of kilometers earlier, before arriving at the release spot, when another Barred Owl flew across the road in front of us. It landed on a roadside tree to our left where, despite our travelling speed, we were able to see it clearly.

Two Barred Owls – two Birds of the Day.

January 20 2019.  LaSalle Park, Burlington, ON. A decent snowfall yesterday really changed things. Days of dire warnings kept most people at home but we emerged today to a new world, six inches or so of clean light snow under a bright blue sky and temperatures down at -15° C (5° F). It was tempting to stay indoors but there was snow shovelling to do and I wondered how our resident birds were coping.

I walked along a shoreline trail of a small lakeside park, it’s a pleasant and well-used path enjoyed by many dog walkers and casual bird-photographers.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, you never know what a radical change in weather conditions might produce. Two surprises in the end: first a Brown Creeper making its close way up and around trunks of several trees. The snow made no apparent difference to its day, there must be little invertebrates and eggs to be found in the cracks and crevices at any time of year. But Brown Creepers exploring tree-trunks in an upward spiral and are inclined to switch trees without warning, they’re always a photography challenge. Here it is.

The second surprise was to find what I am pretty sure are Cackling Geese mingling with a large aggregation of Canada Geese, Trumpeter Swans and Mallards. A Cackling Goose looks for all the world like a Canada Goose, indeed until recently it was considered a Canada Goose subspecies. It is a, perhaps needlessly, complicated story, but essentially, the Canada Goose varies considerably in size and plumage tone across its North American range and science once recognized fifteen subspecies. But there were enough differences identified within the smaller statured birds that the Cackling Goose was split out and accorded its own species status. Now, as if life wasn’t complicated enough, ornithologists recognize eleven subspecies of Canada Goose and four subspecies of the breakaway Cackling Goose. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of North America website puts it so succinctly, “Complex morphological and genetic variation.” Okay, enough.  The Cackling Goose is for all the world just like a small, rather cute Canada Goose, with a relatively shorter and thicker neck and a rather petite bill. I believe this is one.

It’s possible this is the first time I have knowingly seen or studied a Cackling Goose, and it’s also quite possible I’ve got it wrong, but I’ll go with it as Bird of the Day today.