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February 22 2018. Saltfleet, ON. The way we keep seeing Snowy Owls around here is a bit of an embarrassment of riches. Yet that’s the way it is these days, I saw two today making it at least six this year. Whether they are close at hand or far off, snowies are always a wow! bird so, by the strict definition of this site, it should make them my Bird of the Day every time. But I think we’d all tire of a steady diet of Snowy Owls, there’s more to life.

Today’s second (the first one was a long way off) Snowy Owl rounded out nicely a cold morning that included several late winter novelties including a trio of Horned Larks and the first-of-the-year Red-winged Blackbirds.   A recent surge of warmish air has cleared away our thick blanket of snow, streams and rivers are running fast and full with many low-lying areas now under water. An advance guard of ducks and geese anxious to secure the best breeding territories, has flown in. When winter comes storming back unless they are ready to retreat in a hurry I suppose they’ll take whatever cover they can find. In these flooded fields we found groups of Canada Goose, Mallard, Gadwall and a few American Wigeon.

We spotted a Northern Shrike on the top of a bare Red Ash tree and in the time it took to safely pull off the road and get my camera ready it flew to a nearby Hawthorn shrub from which it made a couple of forays to ground, probably in search of voles. I managed to get a couple of shots. Not the best but shrikes are few and far between and we were pleased with this one, Bird of the Day number one.

The Snowy Owl that rounded out this morning was almost pure white. First year males and females are heavily marked with dark brown barring and spotting. Second year birds are less marked in males, slightly less in females but it is unknown how long it takes for males to reach pure white adult plumage. We usually see strongly marked younger birds (like the one a month ago) but today’s was clearly an adult male, they’re sort of the prize find among snowies. Bird of the Day number two and only marginally marred by the muddy furrow it obviously found so comfortable; that’s just the way it goes.

Footnote. I like words and wordplay, you’ve probably noticed.  With so many hours spent bashing out stuff for this site it’s hardly surprising I suppose. Part of my fascination with wordplay lies in the scientific names that follow italicized behind the common names of our familiar birds. (And all other living organisms for that matter.) Some are tongue-twisters, some surely private jokes and many just mellifluous.

How about Lanius excubitor ?- the Northern Shrike, Lanius being Latin for butcher and excubitor a sentinel. Not only does it fit the bird’s way of life, but doesn’t it just roll off your tongue? And, Bubo scandiacus the Snowy Owl. I’m not keen on the bubo part, a word which in English means the swollen lymph node symptom of Black Death (caused incidentally by Yersinia pestis), but the scandiacus part I like – a nod to the northland.

Other bird name delights include Vanellus vanellus, Anas platyrynchos, Tyto Alba, Alauda arvensis and Melanerpes erythrocephalus. Here’s just some of them.

February 11 2018. Algonquin Park, ON. The pull of the work week meant that this, our second day at Algonquin Provincial Park, could only be a half day. Still we packed in as much as we could in the search for interesting winter birds. In the end we came up with nineteen species for the weekend, a handful of them were barrel-scrapers like Dark-eyed Junco, American Goldfinch and Blue Jay but everything else held some magic. Among the winter finches only Pine Grosbeaks and Redpolls were worrisome misses, but day lists for the sake of lists are not a priority for me, instead I had a couple of target birds, old acquaintances I hadn’t seen for a while.

On this day my companions were determined to hike a snow-smothered trail on a second attempt to find a putative Black–backed Woodpecker. We had tried to find it yesterday but came up empty handed but, rather than traipse through the snow in pursuit of one bird, I opted to stay at the park’s visitor centre today. Birding from the observation deck was somewhat compromised by a light but steady snowfall but I can overlook a lot of discomfort when the reward is Evening Grosbeaks. I didn’t count them but I’d guess at perhaps twenty coming and going from a feeder loaded with sunflower seed.

As I hope these photos show, the male grosbeak’s plumage is an almost impossible extravaganza of yellow, gold, black and white. They really are spectacular, and faithful readers of this site may remember my euphoric encounter with them last June in northern Michigan.

If Evening Grosbeaks are the gaudy court jesters of winter then Gray Jays must be the butlers. Gray Jays show up just when you need them and have a certain dignified demeanour implying, You go ahead, everything’s under control. And show up they did in a couple of slightly remote locations.

I managed to get many photos and share some here. I think the effect is rather spoiled by the colourful leg bands on both birds. The bands are courtesy of park biologists who are studying the species’ population dynamics. Breeding success is a major part of the study amid concern that Gray Jays are starting to lose ground as the climate warms and winters become less reliably cold. Gray Jays cache food for later consumption but in recent years, warm winter days have led to spoilage of some caches.

The Gray Jay has been the centre of quite a bit of political fuss lately, the jays themselves couldn’t care less. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society, citing inaction by the central government, decided that more than anything else Canada needed a national bird. Predictably most Canadians pointed to either the Common Loon or the Snowy Owl as most the appropriate embodiments of the Canadian personality, but both of them, while arguably worthy, had already been claimed by a couple of provinces. (Somehow the Canada Goose didn’t get much of a look in.) The Society was steadfast in its deliberations and noted that because Gray Jays are found across Canada from coast to coast the title should go to it.  Fine, but few ever get to see one because they are generally found too far off the beaten track. Now it seems that there is a move afoot to rename it the Canada Jay; fitting I suppose.

My companions succeeded in finding the Black-backed Woodpecker, they deserved their victory and even managed some for-the-record photographs, I know they were happy to have made the effort.

More pictures from the weekend. Click on any one to enlarge it.

February 10 2018. Algonquin Park, ON. I thank my new-ish group of friends for a last-minute invitation to join them on a weekend birding the snows of Ontario’s Algonquin Park. The majority of Ontarians view Algonquin as The North, though really it’s not. It lies at about 46°N on roughly the same latitude as Portland, Oregon, Croatia and Venice, hardly sub-arctic. But it’s an understandable perception since it can be eye-wateringly cold up here in February and the dramatic, rocky and lake-dotted landscape has a lumberjack country feel to it. In any case, anything more than a three hour drive from the city starts to seem like terra incognita.

It is a different world from southern Ontario: the Algonquin highlands are, in altitude, about 500 metres higher and geologically, topographically and climatically different. All of those factors taken together mean the biotic contents of Algonquin have little in common with the softer lowland south.  It is landscape for year-round recreation by canoe trippers, campers and snowmobilers.

We left the comforts of our heated cabin as early as we could today and had hardly gone half a kilometer before we saw a Red Crossbill on the tip of a White Spruce, and not long afterwards pulled to the roadside to watch a more crossbills associating with a handful of Pine Siskins. After several such stops and diversions we had to acknowledge that we really should keep going and eventually arrived at the park’s visitor centre where the viewing platform provides a spectacular opportunity to watch and photograph birds and sometimes deer, moose and wolves.

Many birders make a mid-winter pilgrimage here to seek out cold-hardy ‘northern’ bird species, with itinerant finches as a special target.  We missed Redpolls and Pine Grosbeaks but saw many Pine Siskins, Red, and White–winged Crossbills, Purple Finches and Evening Grosbeaks all of which depend on a winter diet of conifers and alder seeds. Charming, but overlooked by many, were many Red-breasted Nuthatches. I suppose they’re too commonplace to command much attention but I enjoyed a prolonged conversation with this one which I’m sure believed I was bringing food for it.  Sadly no, it left empty but I got this close-up photo.

Crossbills are so called because their upper and lower mandibles are specially adapted to pry open pinecones. And there is a really interesting, if somewhat complicated, symbiotic relationship between crossbills and coniferous trees that should be worth a paragraph or two; I’ll try to keep it brief.

Conifers such as spruces, pines and hemlocks (all found in Algonquin) go through feast or famine cycles of cone production, several years of modest production followed by periodic bumper-crop years. Each cone holds dozens of seeds and it is a spruce’s hope and expectation (if it is capable of such sentiment) that at least one of those seeds will find fertile ground and be the next generation. Birds and rodents like those seeds too and will eat every last one given the chance.

Biologists believe that a series of modest cone-production years is effective in holding the populations of squirrels and the like at a subsistence level. Then just when those seed-eaters least expect it, the conifers have a big year and produce huge, branch-bending crops of seed-bearing cones. It’s a strategy to improve the odds that a seed will survive to germinate before a mouse, chipmunk or squirrel eats it.

Birds have been around a long time too, long enough for certain species to find a way to live with and exploit the conifers’ surprises. Birds have mobility that rodents do not, so enter the crossbills: Red, and White-winged. They are highly nomadic species driven by the variable nature of cone production and are found across North America and Eurasia. So when the spruces, pines and hemlocks of Algonquin produce big crops, crossbills from across the continent somehow find them. This is one of those rare bumper-crop winters and it makes for good birding; next year when Algonquin’s cone crop is likely to be just so-so the crossbills will be somewhere else.

A feast is one thing and in response the crossbills are now starting to breed; they can initiate breeding at any time of year.  It was way below freezing and snowing purposefully as I started to write this yet the male crossbills were in full courtship singing and selecting a mate.  Some have nests and eggs already and, being mid-winter, the females must sit tight incubating eggs and protecting their chicks while the air temperature may fall to -30 C. She dare not leave the nest so the males’ job is to bring food for everyone.

Needless to say that for this first day of this weekend my Birds of the Day were crossbills. There were many other very inspiring birds to be admired, but I’ll get to them tomorrow.

 

February 8 2018. Hagersville, ON.  On a snowy, mid-winter afternoon three, I’ll call them life-experienced, men took the afternoon off to go birding.  The end goal, if we were lucky, was to see Short-eared Owls – and we did; so perhaps that’s a good place to start. Under a darkening dusk sky, tinged along the western edge with orange and swept by a cutting wind, we spotted two and perhaps three Short-eared Owls swooping and hunting over scrubby, hawthorn-dotted, grassland.  Although we had half expected to see them we were deeply awed, Short-eared Owls are a rare treat and our oohs, aahhs and wows were heartfelt.  They were exciting and lovely, conclusively Bird of the Day for two of us, but I found myself searching my soul on this point. Really, after an hour of magical, tumbling flocks of Snow Buntings just an hour or so earlier, could Short-eared Owls be any better?

You see, at the front end of our journey we had pulled to the side of a snow-drifted country road, to watch a couple of large flocks of Snow Buntings feeding on scraps of leftover corn. Together with the buntings there was also a dozen or two Horned Larks  and one, just one, Lapland Longspur. They’d gather en-mass to feed busily for maybe a minute and then take off as if in a panic to sweep around in broad turns before returning to settle back down as if nothing had happened; we were mesmerized. Any birds not feeding would wriggle down into the fluffy snow until only their heads and backs were exposed.

In past winters I have spent hours at this very spot helping to capture and band Snow Buntings, so the spectacle wasn’t altogether novel, but it never loses its charm.  And just four years ago, also at this very spot, I was frostbitten for my bunting-banding troubles, perhaps I deserved it.(For lots of Snow Bunting pictures click on this link.)

Snow Buntings thrive in the cold, they winter in the open grasslands and farm fields of the mid latitudes of North America, from coast to coast.  Flocks sometimes move a hundred kilometres from day to day in their search for winter seeds. When spring approaches they head north to breed in the High Arctic where the snow still lingers. Early evidence suggests that buntings wintering here in southern Ontario return to Labrador and Greenland for the summer.

 

So there you have drama in the end and the beginning of the day – in that order, but there was lots more to it.  As we drove quiet roads from one all-white site to another we saw at least five Rough–legged Hawks, spotted a group of Turkeys and the occasional American Kestrel.  It was a day of highlights, two lifers and two Birds of the Day.

 

February 3 2018. Captain Cootes Trail, Royal Botanical Garden Arboretum, Hamilton, ON. One of my young friends runs a once-a-month programme for people who want to learn more about birding. He styles it Not-Just-Another-Birding-Club and it’s invariably well attended. I’m privileged to be invited along as a back-up pair of eyes and ears and, it’s hinted, for my elder-wisdom. Of course the meetings include as much outdoor trail time as possible and it’s always an eye-opener how successful we are in finding birds in seemingly impossible winter weather. But I have to remind myself that cold though it may be, as long as birds can find food they’ll probably survive winter, maybe the greater risk is that they themselves may end up as food for a larger bird, a Cooper’s Hawk or a Great Horned Owl.

There were plenty of Black–capped Chickadees, the odd White–breasted Nuthatch and a single White–throated Sparrow. A small group of American Crows held our attention for a while, one in particular was making a strange staccato throat rattle. The rattle is one of dozens of recognized crow vocalizations but one without attribution as to its purpose; maybe it was shivering. I spotted a Brown Creeper but it was so far away and hard to pick out amongst all the monochromatic trees that the others in the group had to take my word for it. Similarly a little later someone spotted a couple of Eastern Bluebirds but they scattered and it was devilishly difficult to re-find any of them. I suppose I had the benefit of experience in knowing how to find and see a small bird in the twiggy distractions of a forest. Eventually I was able to find one, maybe two, and against the whites and greys of a winter woodland, a brief flash of electric blue was all I needed for it to be my Bird of the Day.  Here’s a bluebird from a different kind of day.