Category: Uncategorized

May 6 2018 Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON. There’s sort of an expectation in the contemplation of these postings that on a May day like this I’d come up with something, if not exotic, then at least semi-tropical as my Bird of the Day. We are at that point on the surfer’s wave where the fun begins. New, neo-tropical spring migrants are tumbling in and some warbler mornings can be breathtaking.

Today, ahead of the dog walkers and family groups, my companion, Lyn, and I walked a familiar transect route to identify all birds seen and heard. By the end of the morning we had seen, heard and counted 621 birds of fifty-nine species. I have to say we worked hard at it, Lyn kept a steady stream of sightings and counts coming at me. Easy for her, my job, as I saw it, was to keep it all organized and readable on one page of my field book.

Our birds of summer included Yellow-rumped, Black and White, Chestnut-sided and Palm Warblers, Baltimore Orioles, Gray Catbirds, Great-crested Flycatchers, an Eastern Kingbird, Warbling Vireos and a first of the year Ruby-throated Hummingbird; all very satisfying and welcome. Our more common birds were in fine form too, a Green Heron, Northern Flickers, a Cooper’s Hawk and sparrows White-throated, Song and Swamp. For some reason I have a special place in my heart for Swamp Sparrows although I suspect some companions struggle to see what’s so special about a little brown bird that sings in soggy places.

But, as the heading suggests it was an Eastern Screech Owl that stole the day. In the clamour of bird song, we were trying to separate Northern Cardinals from Carolina Wrens, Black-capped Chickadees, European Starlings and Red-winged Blackbirds from everyone else when a small background sound caught my attention: a low tremolo, familiar-ish but out of place; it was there for a moment and gone, only a whisper so I had to let it go. Minutes later I heard it again and was able to get Lyn to give it her attention, although at first she couldn’t help. We moved towards it and kept working and trying until somehow the sound moved to the foreground. It could only be a screech owl (unlikely during daylight hours) or perhaps a woodpecker drumming on a particularly resonant branch (plausible but a weak option). As I listened; Lyn scrutinized likely trees with possible nest cavities and then came a little exclamation, found it! Then took her binoculars off it and had to search all over again. But there it was, an Eastern Screech Owl overseeing the world around it and singing along, Bird of the Day.

 

May 1 2018. Kerncliffe Park, Burlington ON. What is today a city park with some intriguing wildlife was, until half a century ago, a limestone quarry. It’s easy to picture it in its sepia heyday: barren rock walls, big piles of excavated stone, a couple of glowering steam shovels and a band of overdressed, mustachioed workers, standing arms-folded above their heavy tools and glaring at the camera.

But as I started out by saying, today it is a city park notwithstanding several recent decades as a place for campfires and beer parties and somewhere to abandon old couches. In all those years of neglect a modest sized wetland grew, wildlife moved in and eventually the city thought it could become a nice piece of green space and fit with its plans to soften some of the city’s neglected corners.

Every year I pay a few visits to the park hoping to find Sora and/or Virginia Rails in the marsh. It doesn’t usually work out but the inevitable consolation prize is safe-distance views of large tangles of Northern Water Snakes sunning themselves. I understand why snakes repulse many, and I am trying to convince myself that I’m perfectly at ease with them. The truth is that instinctively I recoil from snakes while intellectually I admire them for all their adaptations. Today’s long overdue warmth had masses of snakes tangling and piling on top of each other in dozens, I suspect they were copulating; a lengthy process apparently.

My companion and I found two Sora almost as soon as we arrived. She had never seen one before and was quite smitten, I’d told her to expect something like a small dark chicken picking its way through the reeds. We did better than that and watched as two of them made their nervous way past us not two metres away, scurrying and swimming to the next island of reeds across areas of open water. Sora, by the way, is a native American Indian name, one of the few that has endured.

I pointed in the directions of the songs of a couple of Swamp Sparrows not far off (my companion already knew them and nodded in agreement), two Brown Thrashers singing to each other as they skirted the woodland edge above us and a pair of migrating Broad-winged Hawks drift-circling overhead.

All of this came after nearly three hours counting birds elsewhere. It had been a bit predictable and pleasant enough, but the Sora as an afterthought were quite a treat. Birds of the Day.

April 22 2018 Hendrie Valley, RBG, Burlington, ON. Almost all photographs accompanying previous posts are my own work; not absolutely all though because on a handful of occasions I have had to seek help. My trusty camera, a Nikon P510, is now six or seven years old and generally still going strong although it seems to be gobbling up battery power again, so yesterday I indulged myself with a new one; it was, I’ll admit a bit of an impulse purchase. Specifications don’t matter all that much, this new little Nikon B700 is the lineal descendent of my ‘old’ trusty and I’m sure will serve me well.

I set out early to complete a transect survey cognizant that I had a new camera on my shoulder and hoping to put it through its paces. About fifteen minutes along I noticed the head of a Great Egret poking above the top line of a retaining wall. I stopped. It had promise of a nice shot if the bird would stay for a while, there were lots of nice elements about it: a bright white, statuesque bird against a dark background and back-lit. My new camera behaved well, exceeding my expectations, for a handful of portrait shots,

….and then when the egret eventually flew I tried for an in-flight shot hoping the camera would find focus quickly; it obliged with this for Bird of the Day.

The rest of the transect exercise was modestly rewarding with pairs of Northern Shovelers, Gadwall and Pied–billed Grebes on one of the ponds. Dark–eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows are in short supply, they breed much farther north of us and I think we may have seen the last of them until mid-October.

While the Great Egret was the morning’s wow! factor, I was entertained for a long while by a pair of Black–capped Chickadees who were excavating a nest hole in a river-side stump. They were industriously taking turns entering the cavity then moments later merging with a beak-full of dry wood pulp. I put my new camera to work trying to capture the birds’ efforts, I should have selected a faster shutter speed because the exiting birds were too fast for ‘Auto’ setting and I usually only captured a blur. Still here they are, not eye-catchingly flashy like the egret but charming and every bit Birds of the Day too.

April 20 2018.  I am being deliberately evasive about where I saw owls today. Birders tend to be reluctant to share the location of owls they’ve seen because of some historical tension between two camps who you would expect to see eye to eye on most things, birders and bird photographers. Purist birders are in the “Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.” camp, while some bird photographers, a very small minority I’m sure, have shown little regard for the well being of an owl in the quest for a possible money-shot photograph.

The upshot of a few years of rancour is that I, like most birders, withhold the location of owls that might be considered photogenic. I carry a camera almost every time I’m birding and I have my own opinions on the subject but this is not the place for them.

The first of today’s owls was a young Great Horned Owl, so young that at first there was some concern it might have crash landed on its maiden flight the evening before and been unable to take off again. I was one of a team concerned for its safety so went to look for it at first light. We were happy to find it apparently fine and it was last seen on a safe perch well above ground level. Here it is.

Don’t be misled by its cuteness, it’s talons will pierce flesh and its beak can rip it into digestible chunks.

Much later today, a trio of companions and I conducted a transect/survey along one of our set routes. For a while we cursed the continuing icy winds wondering if they would ever let off. The birding was quite good but the need to wear gloves got in the way a bit. Still, as if to confirm that there are better days ahead, we watched a Yellow-rumped Warbler, my first of the year (although a few have been reported by others over the last week), a Swamp Sparrow (heard but not seen) was another first and an Eastern Phoebe a second of the year; it’s starting to come together.

Wood Ducks, we recorded twenty-six of them, were busy greeting, chasing and socializing, most that we could see were gaudy males, suggesting the females may already be hidden from sight incubating a clutch of eggs, but the females are quite cryptically coloured so it’s equally possible we couldn’t pick them out against the shoreline debris.

My second owl today, an Eastern Screech Owl, was spotted barely visible in a wide cavity on the sunny side of a hickory.. Two owls in one day is a happy accomplishment, and Yellow-rumped Warbler and Swamp Sparrow notwithstanding, they made my day; Birds of the Day.

April 17 2018 Cootes Paradise, RBG, Hamilton, ON. Bird of the Day today was unquestionably an American Woodcock, actually there were two of them. The story behind it takes a bit of framing, recent weather conditions, the bird’s hunger and a big dollop of luck came together to allow us the privilege of a prolonged look at this relatively common but hardly-ever seen bird.

First the weather. Spring sometimes shows its hand in April but I’m sure the month owes its allegiance more to winter. My diary has as many April references to nasty cold snaps, thick ice and driving snow as it does to patches of unseasonable warmth. We have just emerged from two-and-a-bit days of mistreatment by the convergence of a couple of storm systems, one delivering moisture, rain, the other bringing Arctic temperatures, turning it to ice. All is quiet now but the ground is either frozen and overlaid with crunchy snow and ice, or open and waterlogged. This violent and icy storm was almost certainly fatal to birds of all species as food became totally inaccessible.

And what is it about American Woodcocks that makes them such a novelty? Woodcocks are birds of the woodland-floor and must go unseen and unnoticed. They are cryptically coloured like a scattering of woodland debris and if danger is close they usually become absolutely motionless, freezing on the spot. The only time and place to reliably see them is when the males perform their elaborate spring display flights, and it’s usually dark or nearly so, so you don’t really get much of a look, just glimpses of a bird spiraling up against the fading evening sky.

They need to be where the ground is richly organic and soft enough to use their exaggeratedly long bills to probe for squishy invertebrate food. Books all say they live on a diet of earthworms yet there are no native North American earthworms. Before the arrival of Europeans (bringing familiar plants and, inevitably, earthworms), woodcocks must have lived quite happily on something else. Earthworms or not, for a woodcock to survive a freeze-up it must find soft ground and today’s sites, low boggy hollows with free-running water, met their need.

All of the above is probably more than enough to set the stage, because really all that happened is that we were out birding and happened upon two American Woodcocks. Both sightings were, I’m sure, because the birds had been driven from the frozen forest floor to the margins where it was wetter and most importantly soft. One hastened away from a tangle of blackberry canes heading back to the forest on little bouncing strides, the second and by far the most breathtaking we found in a wide and damp wooded valley. Realising the difficult conditions woodcocks were facing, I half anticipated finding one here so, using binoculars to search the ground methodically and without the usual peripheral distractions, it somehow just popped into view.  Unlike the first who promptly left the area the second one opted for the invisibility tactic so crouched motionless for as long as we were anywhere in sight.

I have included these few photos, but interesting as they may be, they don’t quite capture the way the bird can vanish against the background; you can see it one minute and lose it the next.

And just for fun and to further illustrate the exquisite camouflage of some birds here are two other candidates for invisibility: a Wilson Snipe ( choosing to be conspicuous) and a Red-necked Nightjar.