Category: Uncategorized

May 21-23 2018, Wetlands Institute, Stone Harbor, NJ. Four years (and a bit) ago I made my first trip to Cape May. I went alone and was smitten by the place, not only by the variety and numbers of birds but also by the shoreline and marsh habitats, which were totally new to me, and the beautiful broadleaf forests.

I returned three years ago with a friend, Dan, and we loved every minute of it for all the same reasons. Today I’m back for the third time with high expectations (well actually make it fourth time because we made an overnight stop here one October) .

I remember encountering Clapper Rails on that first trip and being quite mystified. I could hear them (you could hardly miss them), but seeing them was ridiculously difficult, a glimpse was about the best I could hope for. Their calls seemed to come from the depths of the salt-marsh muds. In my entry for that late April, first day, I wrote: “I spent quite a bit of time trying to spot Clapper Rails, a fairly common bird found in these parts, but it’s so elusive that it both intrigues and frustrates me. It’s a dowdy, mottled grayish-brown, chicken-size bird with a nine-inch long decurved bill. Rarely flying far or for long, it struts and stalks around in the salt-marsh grasses, which at this time of year lie largely winter flattened, and where for the most part it refuses to show itself. But you hear them almost constantly. Presumably they greet each other from time to time, but in order to stay in contact they communicate noisily with a loud and odd series of notes that sounds like a rhythmic, almost industrial, scratching.”

That was at the end of April, but this time, three weeks later on, Clapper Rails were just as noisy but astonishingly easy to see, particularly in the last hours of daylight. The dense marsh grasses have grown to a foot or so, an easy place to get thoroughly lost in but perhaps they now need to come up for air.

 

The expanse of salt-marsh is threaded with gullies, muddy at low tide and swirling with coffee-coloured salt water at high. The Atlantic’s tidal ebb and flow stays in touch with the marsh by these gullies and the Clapper Rails use them as convenient highways, walking or swimming, depending on conditions. We watched individuals calling to their neighbours, exposed to the cold light of day and using exaggerated beak claps while bobbing their hind quarters to the rhythm of the repeated ‘sccrrraaattt scrrraaattt scrrraaattt’ notes.

I managed to take several photos, some of them with the birds standing up as if wanting to be seen and on a couple of other occasions when one of them sauntered down the river’s edge for a quick bath.

Rather than Clapper Rails being Bird of the Day on any particular day, I think Bird of the Evening is where they belong. And, it should be said, they were in the company of Snowy Egrets, Dunlin, Least Sandpipers, Semi-palmated Sandpipers, Short-billed Dowitchers, Fish Crows, Forster’s Terns, Common Terns, Willets and Black Skimmers.

May 21 2018, Cape May, Heislerville, and Belleplain Forest, NJ.  This was our first of three days birding on Cape May, New Jersey, a birding hot-spot largely unnoticed and unappreciated by Canadian birders.  It took us a full day of driving to get here yesterday, much of it through breath-taking, spring-green Appalachia. So today, Monday, as an antidote to eleven hours in the car we spent eleven hours birding.

My companion Lyn had seeing a Red Knot on her list of lifelong ambitions, one Red Knot would be enough she told me. Unfortunately they don’t come in ones, she had to make do with several thousand at a time.

The Red Knot is a strikingly colourful and compact shorebird with a story, some of it jaw-dropping and some of it hand wringing.  On the jaw-dropping side is the bird’s breeding biology, notably the almost incomprehensible 15,000 kilometer, semi-annual migration from the far reaches of South America to its breeding ground shores of Canada’s Arctic Ocean (and back); a journey made in three or four stages with non-stop flights between each refueling stop.

On the hand-wringing side is the knots’ dependence for food at each stage of its migration; at this mid-Atlantic stop they depend on the billions of eggs being laid along the shoreline by Horseshoe Crabs. Saddly a few human generations ago, came the numbskull notion to harvest (a pretty word for an ugly practice) and grind up the crabs for use as agricultural fertilizer. Catastrophic over-harvesting meant fewer eggs to feed Red Knots and less food meant lower breeding success. Ultimately, over the last half-century, the knot populations crashed by something like ninety percent; presumably the Horseshoe Crab population fared no better.

It is still possible to see Red Knots in breathtakingly huge numbers here on the western shores of Cape May, but it is sobering (and hand-wringing) to contemplate what has been lost and what this scene might have looked like a century ago.

Lyn and I watched some of the thousands of those Horseshoe Crabs tumbling in the waves and hauling themselves ashore to multiply. Around them were hundreds upon thousands of shorebirds, particularly Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, Semi-palmated Sandpipers and Laughing Gulls waiting to feast on the eggs. We were almost speechless witnesses to one of the world’s greatest bird spectacles.

Our shorebirds didn’t stop at knots and turnstones. Just outside the scattered coastal village of Heislerville there’s a smallish lagoon threaded with sandbars. At high tide when the thousands of acres of Delaware Bay mudflats are underwater, the lagoon’s sandbars and shingle banks are a gathering place for thousands upon thousands of Dunlin, Least Sandpipers, Forster’s Terns, Common Terns, Black Skimmers, plovers, and even the odd Snowy Egret, all waiting for the tide to recede.

As we studied the crowds I found myself shaking my head at the near preposterousness of it all, seeing birds in front of us which at other times of year we might meet in ones, twos or maybe a dozen; yet they were here in uncountable numbers.  Dotted among them were many Black-bellied Plovers, standing to attention in greys and white with a crisp black morning-coat, dressed as if for a royal wedding. Against the almost baffled what-shall-we-do-now skitterings of their Semi-palmated Plover cousins, Black-bellied Plovers seemed to represent deliberate confidence.

To write of a Bird of the Day from among more than eighty species seen is hardly possible, yet amongst them the Red Knots and the Black-bellied Plovers both brought out the wow! response, so I’ll let it rest there. But equally engaging, compelling and wonderous were: Willets, American Oystercatcher, Clapper Rail, Little Blue Heron, Black Scoter, Acadian Flycatcher and Olive-sided Flycatcher. What a day!

 

May 16 2018 Ward’s Island, Toronto ON. I’m occasionally asked to name my favourite bird; I can’t but I bluster around the question and come up with vague answers. But last year it came to me that while I don’t have an absolute favourite bird species, I think I might have a favourite family of birds, the vireos. Apparently a good answer for what’s just small talk anyway.

Today was a vireo day for me, we saw several Warbling Vireos, heard and perhaps saw one Red-eyed Vireo and spent several minutes at close quarters with a Philadelphia Vireo. Sorting one vireo species from another can be tricky and maybe that’s what endears them to me. I suspect though that Bob, a visiting British birder, found them to be dull fare compared to the many dazzling warblers we showed him. I’m sure for him our May warblers were a perplexing group: mostly small, often yellow with-something-else, and never staying still long enough.We assured him that the glorious male Black-throated Blue Warbler was a very good find but was not to be confused with an equally glorious male Black-throated Green Warbler which was sharing a tree with Yellow-rumped Warblers not far from a briefly seen Canada Warbler.Thank goodness though for Yellow Warblers who are exactly as named, bright yellow.

Eastern Kingbirds and Great Crested Flycatchers seemed to make a good impression on Bob, probably because the flycatchers of Europe are mostly small and inclined to the drab. Then just to confuse the issue we showed him one of our own drab ones – a Least Flycatcher (which at first blush you might confuse with vireos – another problem).

And so it went on: perhaps thirty entirely new birds, some as noted above but also Grey Catbirds, Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, a House Wren and Northern Cardinals. And there were a few which, like Tree Swallow, Cedar Waxwing and Double-crested Cormorants, were easily recognized for being closely related to similar European species, and a small group of familiar faces common to both continents: Barn Swallow, European House Sparrow and Herring Gull.

But while Bob’s head may have been spinning (I’d told him months ago that May 16^th would be peak migration and to expect the best), I was especially enjoying those vireos. And this one, our close up Philadelphia Vireo was My Bird of the Day.

May 10 2018, Rondeau Provincial Park, ON. As birding hot-spots go, Point Pelee (probably the foremost when it comes to rankings) is a bit too intense for me, I prefer Rondeau Provincial Park, topographically similar and just an hour east of Point Pelee. Both are peninsulas of a sort that stick out into Lake Erie and are welcome landfalls for the waves of northbound spring migrants.  They arrive apparently ravenous and exhausted and linger, sometimes for days, refuelling and recovering. I spent this day at Rondeau in the company of good friends looking for engaging birds as well as getting to know my new camera; the two of us seem to get on quite well. Weather conditions were just right: not too hot, not too cold, and generally overcast under light winds.

Bird of the Day from among about eighty species was a Cerulean Warbler. It came just as we were leaving a small woodland pond where Northern Parulas, and Yellow, Black-throated Blue, Black and White, and Magnolia Warblers were busy picking insects from around the margins apparently unconcerned by our presence.

Cerulean Warblers are uncommon birds of tree-tops, more often heard than seen foraging in the thick canopy of oaks and maples. It is a really hard bird to study and its social system and breeding biology is poorly understood. Even hearing their little inconsequential song is a stretch.

But today the trees are still a long way from leafing out and this bird was staying down low, probably because it was warmer and more productive of insect food. I was photographing an Eastern Pheobe when one of my companions spotted it and called out, “Cerulean Warbler.” It’s a bit of a clarion call and word spread quickly by text. In no time we three birder pals had grown to a dozen, more were arriving and the bird was obliging everyone by staying fairly low and at one time bathing in the watery shallows.

The next stop was such an anti-climax that it began to feel we’d had enough for the day, a day that had started with a White-winged Dove, (a large semi-tropical dove that belongs in Arizona, Texas and Mexico, why it was here is anyone’s guess) and many others that have a special place in my heart: Wood Thrush, White-crowned Sparrow, Prothonotary Warbler, Veery, Red-headed Woodpecker and Blue-headed Vireos, among them.

May 8 2018 Cootes Paradise, RBG, Hamilton, ON.  What a day! May birding is supposed to be like this, piling on challenges, exclamations and the improbable; enough to make you burn the candle at both ends.

Starting one of our usual transect routes we soon had a handful of Yellow Warblers, American Robins, American Goldfinches and Northern Cardinals singing within earshot . In no time we were celebrating seeing a Blue Gray Gnatcatcher, and hearing Carolina Wrens and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. My companion, Alex, caught sight of a largish bird flashing black and white as it flew from treetop to treetop and pointed it out. My first thought was Rose-breasted Grosbeak but hardly were the words out of my mouth when I saw big blocks of black and white that made it a Red-headed Woodpecker, a spectacular and sensational sighting in southern Ontario. The photo below shows those big blocks and you can easily see why its folklore names included Half-a-shirt, Shirt-tail Bird and Tri-colored Woodpecker. and Alex may have wondered why I was so jubilant, but it’s a species in decline so all sightings are precious and Bird of the Day without doubt.

Moving on from that rather intoxicating moment we were soon at water’s edge trying to disentangle and identify swooping Barn Swallows, Tree Swallows and Northern Rough-winged Swallows when Alex, a little overwhelmed by it all, gestured up and asked, “And what’s that?” ‘That’ large, white bird with black and white wings, and an oversized, orange-billed head was an American White Pelican, unmistakable, improbable but as large as life. So why a pelican here? Simply because after they spend winter around the shores of the Gulf of Mexico they have to they pass over us on their way to breed in north-west Ontario and across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Still, en-route or not, a pelican overhead in Ontario in May has to be Bird of the Day; and that made two within twenty minutes.

And that was just the start of a richly enjoyable transect. It had its quiet moments but a couple of Bald Eagles, a pair of Cape May Warblers and a Northern Parula all added nicely to a day that produced nearly 500 birds of 47 species.