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December 5 2018. Sedgewick Park, and Bronte Harbour, Oakville, ON.  An odd pairing of My Birds of the Day to be sure: Snowy Owl, a symbol of the bleakest winter landscape, and Hooded Warbler, a neotropical insectivore that breeds here but should be in Central America right now. Certainly a stark contrast that requires some explanation.

It was a lightly overcast day, cold, hovering around zero Celsius, just at the point where should-be-soggy underfoot is crunchy dry. I spent an hour or two at my favourite sewage treatment plant (see November 7^th) watching a female Hooded Warbler, an Orange-crowned Warbler, a handful of Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Hermit Thrush.  These were winter delights involving no field-craft or birding skill of my own, they were all widely known to be lingering in this little haven of relative warmth. It was perhaps the avian equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

Satisfied with warbler time, I drove a short distance to a mostly man-made harbour on the shore of Lake Ontario. In a somewhat sheltered corner, plates of thin ice clicked and clinked as they jostled on the surging waters and not many yards away a trio of Hooded Mergansers was diving for dinner.

Like the neo-tropical warblers of earlier, I’d been told exactly where to look for the Snowy Owl, out near the lighthouse.  Again, no birding skill needed just the willingness to stand where directed exposed to a cool northwest breeze and look across the water. I said a cool breeze because, although my hands soon objected, in a month or two such a breeze will more likely be bitterly cold, the sort that deadens fingers and penetrates to your core.

Snowy Owl was a youngster, the dense dark barring across its belly was a giveaway. According to the Cornel Lab of Ornithology’s excellent Birds of North America website, it will take three to four years for a female to attain adult plumage but eight to ten years for a male to reach the breathtaking almost pure snowy white state.

Back to the warblers for a minute. As discussed in my Northern Parula post of a month ago, they definitely don’t belong here in December; however, the owl does – but with some explanation. They are an arctic bird, circumpolar in distribution, and many spend long dark winters above the Arctic Circle. Others move south to tundra country and farther into Canada’s provinces. Lake Ontario is quite far south but we have been seeing Snowy Owls around here almost every winter for a few years, they’ve almost become reliable.  The winter of 2011-12 resulted in snowies being seen in every province and 31 states, (including Hawaii, albeit with much head-scratching as to how it got there, did it hitch a ride on a ship?). More recently the winter of 2013-14 saw a big irruption and it happened again in 2016-17. There are more of them and more often.  Much research has been done but logical suggestions that periodic large irruptions are tied to the boom-bust cycles of arctic lemming populations are not borne out. So what’s going on.? Can we point to climate change as a factor?  Or could it be that there are more and better dressed birders, spending more time with sophisticated optical equipment and instantly connected?

 

November 29^th. 2018, Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON.  Well here we go again, Winter Wren, Bird of the Day. How can I possibly say that I don’t have a favourite bird when Winter Wrens pop up here so frequently. I did a quick archive check and, since 2011, I have Winter Wren’d in Bird-of-the-Day-Winter at least ten times. My first one was actually a Pacific Wren, but it still counts. It probably hatched as a Winter Wren but shortly became a Pacific Wren thanks to a decision by the arbiters of nomenclature to split one species (Winter Wren) into three.  Now, what was just Winter Wren, (Troglodytes troglodytes, a deliciously descriptive name by the way, say it to yourself a few times), became:  The Wren (in Europe) and Winter Wren and Pacific Wren in North America.  ( T. troglodytes , T. hiemalis and T. pacificus respectively.)

Well it’s not my favourite bird, although whenever I see or hear one it’ll usually stop me in my tracks. It’s a tough, golf-ball size creature with an outsized personality and a sibilant, thread-like song that carries far through its woodland home.

Today’s Winter Wren came as I walked a soggy path that lay between a small but fast-flowing creek and a wide and shallow ox-bow lake. The two bodies of water were linked by a muddy trail and slide used nightly by beavers, the wren was keeping watch over it I think. It’s usually hard to follow a wren for more than a few seconds as they make their way down and around the tightest forest-floor tangles, almost as if wings are redundant. But this one seemed to take sentry duty seriously. Here it is.

This walk on an early winter day along familiar trails (it’s where we have been doing regular transect counts in September and October) was quite rewarding. I was curious to see what was left after the great autumnal exodus. The large ponds were partly covered with ice but there was more than enough open water for a couple of Belted Kingfishers and a Great Blue Heron to be staying around, at least for a while. I was delighted to see two Swamp Sparrows, my presence agitated them for a while and I was able to add to my list of not-quite-good-enough photos, like this.

Since September we had been keeping an eye on a family of Trumpeter Swans, two adults and three cygnets, and I found them quite easily. For now, they are still dependent on their parents for learning the ways of the world and with the exception of one trailing cygnet the family stayed together as a tight group. The young are full grown and in a stage of plumage change that will lead into snowy white by next summer.

As a sort of postscript, I found this picture on my camera of a Northern Mockingbird. I remember taking the shot almost three weeks ago but hadn’t expected it to be quite as pleasing as it is.

November 24 2018 Cootes Paradise, Hamilton, ON.  I committed myself (and a couple of friends) to do a count of birds in a large lakeside area today.  I knew when I signed on that the weather could be a challenge, meaning probably cold, maybe wet and possibly snowy. I had reasoned that making the commitment would compel me to get out of the house when otherwise I might prefer to hunker down.

I was right about the weather, it was a little on the grim side: Three little Celsius degrees and a steady, collar-soaking rain, but fortunately no wind. We spent three hours and walked seven kilometres kicking through fallen leaves much of the way. Our route took us through broadleaf woodland, along the shore of a shallow lake and across some open fields.

It was pretty decent birding much of the time. The lake had a thin skim of wet ice and from our first, looking-down-from-on-high, vantage point every duck and gull had a mirrored double making counting tricky. But we made our way down to an altogether better viewing spot and came up with an astonishing count of 360 Mallards. There were Herring Gulls and Ring-billed Gulls scattered around and one conspicuous Lesser Black-backed Gull.  At day’s end I think it was the Bird of the Day although a singing Winter Wren and a Pileated Woodpecker might just as easily have taken the title for any spurious reason.

The two Black-backed Gull species, Lesser Black-backed Gull and Great Black-backed Gull are both handsome birds. The Lesser is a comment-worthy bird of the winter months and quite uncommon in our area, particularly away from Lake Ontario. The global distribution of the Lesser Black-backed Gull as a species is centred on the north-western reaches of the Old World and most breed around Scandinavian shores (including Iceland) and northern Russia.  Another name for it is Baltic Gull (actually one of its sub-species) and on a trip to Sweden in 2014 I noted that they were almost the default gull.  One of the problems (we have) with widely distributed birds, like gulls, is their propensity to fall into sub-species, many of which are indistinguishable to all but fanatic birders.

The Great Black-backed Gull is quite a different creature. It is the world’s largest gull.  Majestic yes, but tends to be brutish in its sociology. Around here it’s a common winter resident and inclined to linger well into spring. One of the notable features of a Great Black-backed Gull is its head profile, low and sort of brainless looking.; brutishness beats brains. An earlier post of mine (click here) dwelt at some length on their scavenging-killer habits.

I mentioned above that we saw and heard one Winter Wren and glimpsed a Pileated Woodpecker. There was more, we did well on woodpeckers: Pileated, Downy, Red-bellied and Hairy Woodpeckers and a couple of Northern Flickers. Among sparrows, ones, twos and threes of Song Sparrows, American Tree Sparrows, White-throated Sparrows, and Dark-eyed Juncos.  A Ruby-crowned Kinglet, two, perhaps three, Brown Creepers and a Purple Finch, all good birds (as if there are bad ones?)  And then bits and bobs of generally to-be-expected species, all for a total of thirty-two species, pretty good for a wet and rather unpromising day.

November 7 2018. Sedgewick Park Oakville, ON  Today taking a break from some mundane mid-week chores, I visited a pocket of woodland in a neighbouring city and there found a Northern Parula, plain as day. It’s very late for a parula to still be around but not unheard of as I’ll discuss later.

This woodland wraps around three sides of a large municipal sewage treatment plant which, in the normal run of things, would be unremarkable, if distasteful. The plant with its frothing ponds, digesters and settling tanks creates its own micro climate because all that waste from thousands of homes enters the plant as warmish water. Understandably, as the days grow cold, this little island of warm humidity supports a population of various insects that would normally have perished and, taking advantage of this source of protein-rich food, insectivorous birds too.

The woodlands surrounding the plant are dense with undergrowth, thick tangles and some boggy hollows. In the same immediate area as the parula were Ruby–crowned Kinglets, Yellow–rumped Warblers, a Blue–headed Vireo and White–throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos. The sparrows and juncos were no surprise but the other three were an unexpected pleasure and probably there for the insects still to be found.

I don’t visit this place very often, perhaps once or twice a year, although, because it’s a good place to find seriously out of season birds, many avid listers drop by regularly.  Without unduly dwelling on the point, I’ll just observe that there are worse places to hang around than along the margins of a sewage treatment plant, but not many.  Looking back, I see that I was there in early December 2014 and late October 2016.  On both occasions I saw (as anticipated) some nice lingering warblers. It’s reasonable to conclude that the micro-climate and abundance of food is why these late birds are there (fatal though it may turn out to be).

But here’s the funny thing about it, on all of these late dates I saw a Northern Parula (and managed some really nice photos at times); not the same bird I’m sure of that. But to add to the coincidence of these repeated encounters, on both of the most recent occasions (today and October 2016) the parulas exhibited unusual behavior, with their lower mandibles oddly open. The 2016 bird’s bill was exaggeratedly agape and rarely closed, it seemed to be possessed with the urge to yawn. Something is awry; but what? I have no explanation.

Anomalies aside, Northern Parulas are stunningly pretty birds and for that and the surprise element it was my Bird of the Day.

November 2^nd 2018, Valley Inn, RBG, Burlington, ON We found a Winter Wren on our transect this morning, it promptly became my Bird of the Day despite three or four other notable head-turners.  Head-turners like a magnificent Bald Eagle in full adult, white-head-white-tail, plumage, that we watched fly the length of a long pond. Despite a richly coloured Fox Sparrow scratching for seed along with a couple of White–throated  Sparrows. Despite a Brown Creeper mousing its way up the trunk of a now-bare White Oak. And despite another fifteen species on this overcast morning drying out after a day of steady rain.

We are at the end of two months’ worth of observations for our Long Watch project . Two months that have taken us from plus 16 degrees Celsius on August 31, touched September days at 28 degrees and recently sliding into storms and a scant 2 degrees at daybreak. Days that started out at summer’s end with trailside vegetation still rank and thick with flowers, but after 60 and a bit days and a few frosty nights it’s all starting to collapse.

This valley is known for its over-wintering population of (aptly named) Winter Wrens, Until the temperatures plummet and things freeze hard, which they will in January, there must be tons of food around for them and the other few species that stay. For the bold and the omnivorous life is made a bit easier by families who visit the valley to feed birds and squirrels, although management is unimpressed and concerned about the impact of tons (perhaps literally) of sunflower, cracked corn and peanuts finding its way into the ecosystem.

I don’t think these hand-outs are of any use to Winter Wrens though but somehow they survive, small but tough, and worthy Birds of the Day any day.