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September 15 2018 Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON.  In my rather cryptic covering notes to other birders commenting on today’s observations in the valley I wrote, “Slowish this morning. No birds at all until I got to the old root tip-up at the bottom. Then first surprise a White-throated Sparrow! I think the Warbling Vireos have departed, none heard today. Still Red–eyed and Philadelphia Vireos still around.
Many Rose–breasted Grosbeaks, and Northern Flickers. Swainsons’ Thrush welcome. Yellow–billed Cuckoo and a Black–throated Blue Warbler good sightings.”

And that’s September birding for you. There are some lovely birds in that brief comment and when I look back over my notes for the morning I’m reminded that we also saw two pretty Magnolia Warblers, a female Indigo Bunting which at any time is possibly the most undistinguished and drab brown bird anywhere, and a very vocal Great Blue Heron.

But the bird that made me think Wow! and therefore My Bird of the Day was the Yellow–billed Cuckoo. That morning there were many Blue Jays making their way along the valley and the sight of another mid-sized bird gliding from one tree to another was so averagely jay-like that my thought process went something like this, “Hmm another jay – bit slender – could almost be a cuckoo – better take a look. Wow It IS a cuckoo! Double check, chestnut on the wings? –Yes!  A Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Nice.” All of that in the time it takes a bird to land in a tree and fold its wings. I smiled to myself then because for Lyn, my birding companion of last May, Yellow-billed Cuckoo was a nemesis bird. And it was while we birded a rather average corner of woodland that she finally ticked it off as a lifer.  And it was seen well enough to dance a little jig. I was sure that when she read today’s brief note (above) it would at least make her smile.

Cuckoos tend to be on the slow and deliberate side as they move around in a tree and when you have a clear view you can usually get a long one. Long enough this morning for some decent photos. Here are a couple – for the Lyns in the birder world.

July 26 2018. Arslanbob, Kyrgyzstan. Some months ago I was loaned ‘Wildwood’ a book by British author Roger Deakin. Deakin, who died in 2007, was celebrated as a writer on nature topics and you get the idea that he was always profoundly passionate about his topic, sometimes perhaps to the point of being well, a touch eccentric.  For example, he made it his mission to swim in as many English rivers, canals and castle moats as he could, time of year apparently being of no importance.  ‘Wild swimming’ he called it and of course he wrote a book about it, aptly titled Waterlog.  I don’t think the Brits saw this swimming lark as a particularly odd thing to do. But then England turns out eccentrics at a rate and of a caliber that few countries can match. Still, Deakin’s Wildwood was a good read, it is a collection of stories and essays about trees, their time and place and his involvement with them.

I tell you this because, as I plowed my way towards the end of the book, I was astonished to find four or five chapters dedicated to forests in Kyrgyzstan. At the time I was in that middle-early phase of planning my Snow Leopard journey and actively looking for other interesting places to explore while there. What Deakin wrote about so compellingly was a pocket of alpine valleys in southern Kyrgyzstan in and around the village of Arslanbob.  There the slopes below a towering snowy peak are cloaked in a walnut forest. The trees are the Persian or English Walnut, Juglans regia, the one that we associate with nutcrackers and Christmas, at least in my family.  Whatever their use, the walnuts are highly valued, almost a currency at harvest time (right now, September) and, as far as I could tell, Arslanbob ‘s walnut forest is unique; I wanted to see it.

So I went, I saw the walnut forest and fascinating it was; it’s a story on its own. Some of the ancient and modern natural history of the ‘stans of Central Asia is quite fascinating but it barely touches on our sense of the here and now. There’s much more to Kyrgyzstan than Snow Leopards; it’s fascinating.  The apple, that staple among temperate climate fruits, is known to have originated in the mountains of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I saw many, what I took to be wild (certainly untended), apple trees bearing good sized fruit. And hillside forests include wild cherries, almonds, plums and pistchios all ancestors to our familiar fruits. Overlay on that abundance of free-for-the-taking food the fact that the famous Silk Road passed through these valleys and you can imagine the depth and richness of historical fact and fiction.

Arslanbob was modestly interesting from this birder’s point of view, but it was late July and birds had stopped trying to be noticed. We watched young Common Kestrels diving from a cliff edge and mastering high-speed flight, I got a glimpse of a Yellow-breasted Tit and photographed an obligingly static Spotted Flycatcher.  Best by far though was seeing a couple of Golden Orioles. Like so many of the birds I write about here, Golden Orioles were one of those childhood dream birds, like the European Roller and Citrine Wagtail, birds I’d seen in books but had never thought I’d encounter in real life.  I’d had one or two glimpses, annoyingly fleeting ones, of Golden Orioles on my way down to Arslanbob and had read that they’re quite common. Then one lazy afternoon as I lay dreaming a hot afternoon away (lying because in our Uzbek host’s open verandah there were no chairs, only divans and cushions over thick carpets), I followed a new bird call to a nearby Poplar tree. It was of course this oriole dream bird and I was able to take several pictures.  There was a twist in the plot though, when I turned to the relevant pages of my field guide I found that what I thought was a Golden Oriole was in fact an Indian Golden Oriole; a different species, not markedly different, it has slightly heavier black eyeline and a bit more yellow in its flight feathers, but a distinction that gave me a notional connection to the Indian sub-continent.

September 11 2018 Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON. Yesterday was truly dismal; we were rained on all day as the remnants of a tropical hurricane dragged across the north-east. Today dawned well-washed and overcast. I had no predictions as to what a day of rain might mean for birds.

There were transects to be done and I met up with two companions to well, count birds. It took a while for things to get going, perhaps the day needed to warm up, but in time we were finding new species at almost every turn. It started with a Chestnut-sided Warbler, then Magnolia Warblers, a Ruby–throated Hummingbird, American Redstarts, a breathtaking Black–throated Green Warbler, a puzzling-at-first Orange–crowned Warbler and finally (for this little corner) a Black and White Warbler. But we couldn’t stop there, we had to keep moving, there was much more ground to cover.

There were many highlights to follow: Northern Flickers and Swainson’s Thrushes feasting on the fruits of Virginia Creepers, Warbling, Red–eyed and Philadelphia Vireos, Great–crested and Least Flycatchers; Any one of these could have been my Bird of the Day. It was all about as good as it gets, and then up popped a Wilson’s Warbler, just long enough to make us gasp.

It’s not that Wilson’s Warblers are particularly rare, but we sure don’t see many, they pay us brief visits on their way to and from Ontario’s far north and their Mexico wintering home. The Orange-crowned Warblers are probably less common, certainly easy to overlook. But what Wilson’s have that Orange-crowned don’t is visual impact; a shallow measure I’ll admit but it stopped us dead in out tracks. The Wilson’s Warbler was My Bird of the Day despite some very serious competition.

We had tallied fifty species for the day when I realized that we had been on the trail for over three hours and I was just three minutes and an alarming eight-kilometers way from an eleven-o-clock meeting. Gotta run.

June 22 2018. Kerncliffe Park, Burlington ON. In early May I wrote about Sora seen in the old worked-out quarry on the edge of my town. Today I went back there, not just to check on the Sora, I was taking part in an event called a bioblitz, a concerted effort to inventory all living things over a large defined and ecologically mixed area. My companion and I elected to spend our time inventorying this old quarry as well as a neighbouring tree-fringed grassland. Much of our effort went into trying to recall the names of common plants, many of them considered roadside weeds; still it was an interesting morning and it inspired me to make an effort to tidy up my knowledge of herbaceous and woody plants. I stood for a long time dumbfounded by a couple of obviously different willows realizing they were clearly not the same species but having no idea what they might be and realizing I have work to do.

We made our way to where I had last seen the Sora and to my surprise there was no sign of them but instead there were a couple of Virginia Rail chicks foraging quite openly for food. Around them the parents uttered short ‘keek‘ alarm notes and made high-speed dashes from one thick cluster of cattail to another. There was no earthly way I would ever photograph either of the parents, they emerged from what always seemed like the least likely place and made a panicked, half-run-half-fly, dash to the other side of open water.

The consolation was that the chicks were totally unconcerned about the risks of being in the open so were easily photographed. They obviously did not yet understand what their parents knew very well, that they were exposed to predators, not the least of them were many Northern Water Snakes sunning themselves or swimming around, my bet is that a very young rail chick would be an easy meal for one of the larger snakes.

Our task was to note living things of all kinds. In the quarry we recorded 38 herbaceous plants, 36 trees and shrubs, 1 mammal (Black Squirrel) and 20 birds species including Blue Jays, Northern Flickers, Scarlet Tanager, Eastern Kingbird and of course Virginia Rail, Bird of the Day.

June 21 2018. St. Cross, Winchester, UK. We have returned from a week and a bit in the ancient City of Winchester, south-central England, where a lovely cousin gave us the key to her home in a particularly old and richly textured part of the city. This was not a birding trip, it was more of a spontaneous getaway, but I’m an early riser and usually spent the hours before the household was awake exploring the marked and unmarked footpaths in the water-meadows of the River Itchen.

It doesn’t take long to realize that birding is much easier in Canada than it is in Britain and Europe. Our American birds are far easier to see and study, far more approachable, I assume this is so because they aren’t the evolutionary product of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of persecution. European birds have evolved, I think, to take urgent flight at the approach of a person, however distant. Despite the challenges of seeing birds well and more especially photographing them, those early morning walks were also an opportunity to feel the place before the day’s rush hour frenzy and try to imagine how the contemporaries of Chaucer had lived in that same geography. Some things have not changed: Winchester Cathedral was there in Chaucer’s day, the water meadows were pasture then as they are now, and the plague pits (sites of) were recent and raw evidence of things gone horribly wrong; and the site of that mass burial is noted on modern maps of Winchester.

Some of my bird sightings set me recalling and inventing collective nouns: a Clatter of Jackdaws came to mind easily and is, it turns out, not in the slightest bit original; a Flapping of Wood Pigeons may be new to literature while a Charm of Goldfinches is pretty conventional. I was reminded too of a couple of traditional folk names: Yaffle for Green Woodpecker, onomatopoeic because of its rather crazy-laughter call (Similar to but faster than the Pileated Woodpecker’s ringing call,- if that’s helpful.) and Throstle for Song Thrush, also onomatopoeic.

For a while I was mentally collecting rooftop birds: Wood Pigeons, Jackdaws, and Swifts, but it was a short list and not all that interesting after a bit.

So where is My Bird of the Day in all of this? Well other than the Skylark of our trip to Stonehenge, I was hard pressed because every day held many possibilities. Almost nothing was absolutely new to me with the possible exception of a few Red Kites seen soaring and swooping over the motorway near Oxford, they are a fairly new breeding bird to the UK having been successfully reintroduced some decades ago. Long-tailed Tits were scarce in my recalled childhood but I noted one in a pollarded willow one morning; similarly Bullfinches, I encountered a pair of them not far from those ancient plague pits; and Grey Wagtails sometimes seen but rarely more than a glimpse until I found a pair busy carrying food to their nestlings. (Those formative years of bird study were without binoculars, an inconceivable expense at that time. Much of our youthful study, education and enjoyment revolved around finding birds’ nests and collecting eggs.)

It sort of came to me on our last day that if there was a Bird of the Day, perhaps it was the Magpie I had been photographing some distance from me inside a walled garden. Not just because Magpies are splendid, if not always welcome, birds but because it was apparent that there was more than one Magpie, I think in the end there might have been six, a family group, out teaching the kids how to find a feast in a vegetable garden bursting with goodness. And somehow it all fitted together, an English garden on a gentle summer day, Magpies raiding ripe strawberries and no-one around to say no.