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September 10th 2017. RBG Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. The vireos are on the move, Red-eyed, Warbling and Philadelphia, all heading south. I’m sad to see them go, but it’s time and birding would only be half the fun if we didn’t have the ebb and flow of migrants in their varying seasonal plumages. In the valley there were lots of vireos in what seemed to be small groups, I think though it could well have been a mass movement and I was just seeing several whenever I stopped to look.

It wasn’t only vireos; the valley was busy with birds (and Sunday strollers). Obvious migrants included Swainson’s Thrushes, American Redstarts, Rose–breasted Grosbeaks and a pair of Scarlet Tanagers, the male now dressed in olive green rather than the fiery scarlet of spring and summer.  Few birds stay still long enough to allow me a good photo, for every one photo I post dozens are discarded. But today a pair of vireos was moving slowly enough for me to get at least one decent shot.

I have to admit that I was surprised to see I’d photographed a Philadelphia Vireo and not a Red-eyed Vireo as I had assumed. While they are quite similar my pride had assured me I knew the difference, the Philly is a bit smaller and distinctly washed yellow below, but somehow I’d missed the cues. It doesn’t matter, I’m happy to have a decent picture of a Philadelphia Vireo and it was my bird of the day.

There were many Common Yellowthroats too. The adult males of the species with their bold Lone Ranger mask are unmistakable all year, but the females and juveniles are much subtler. Here, above, is one from today showing a yellow throat as you might expect but little else to make it an easy identification. Their damp habitat behaviour and rather flinty chip note helps with identification but I have to say there’s lots of room for mistakes.

September 6^th 2017. Morgan’s Point, Ontario. My calendar was open and invited me to squander a day in aimless birding.  Well not quite aimless, I had some ideas where good birding was to be found so made my way to the shores of Lake Erie. At this time of year there’s a reasonable chance of finding gatherings of southbound shorebirds; conditions have to be right.

What makes Lake Erie most productive for birds and birders is a spell of churning stormy weather to drive swaths of loose aquatic vegetation ashore. Then allow a week or so for rank decay to begin and you have an odiferous feast of invertebrates for hungry birds. Understandably these are conditions that shoreline property owners hate and believe that ‘they’ (government at some level) should do something about it.  It was that way at the end of August four years ago when I had a marvellous day studying and photographing yellowlegs, sandpipers and plovers.  But today was the sort of day made for beach-strolls and sunbathers but not much good for birds and birders. Inland was a little different though.

It’s an hour’s drive to Lake Erie and I took back roads as much as possible. A couple of open fields held distant clusters of what I assumed were Killdeers, but they were too far away to invest a lot of time studying.  Much better were a pair of Sandhill Cranes seen gleaning a recently harvested wheat field.  I pulled to the shade of a Burr Oak and watched them for a while thinking of the Grey Crowned Cranes of Uganda I had admired for the same reasons six months ago.  Stately would be the right adjective for cranes.  What would it be like, I wondered, to be a crane, stalking fields with precisely chosen strides, hunting late summer grasshoppers, tidying up grain spills and unafraid; at that size and with a dangerous looking spear of a beak you would think cranes are pretty well unassailable.  I know that in some mid-western farmlands crane populations have become a nuisance and many are shot, whether a ‘harvest’ is really warranted or whether it’s itchy trigger fingers I don’t know; I hope they taste good.

I was sure these Sandhill Cranes would be my Birds of the Day but it was still early and exploring the shores of Lake Erie was yet to come. I stopped for a while at a wooded lakeside park, it was unexciting and I didn’t see much except for this delightfully subtle Swainson’s Thrush, it stopped me in my tracks; my Bird of the Day.

It’s hard to put my finger on just what it is about these reclusive birds, all of our thrushes: Swainsons, Grey-cheeked, Hermit and Wood Thrushes and their Veery cousins are generally soft brown, cream or buff; hardly showy. But they are songsters that lay down ethereal and fluting songs in the spring forests, sounds that always make birders stop and listen.

I wrapped up my day gazing at a scattering of shorebirds working the shallow stretches of a flooded and now abandoned quarry. There were several Greater Yellowlegs and to my surprise two Black-bellied Plovers, one adult and one juvenile. It’s been a few years since I last saw this species and they always make for a satisfying sighting. I wouldn’t call them stocky or stolid but they are well-proportioned and handsome, typically plover-ish like their Killdeer cousins, only better. Killdeers are inclined to act a little hysterically, like street performers and so are hard to take very seriously. Black-bellied Plovers on the other hand conduct themselves with an air of solemnity, more ringmaster than juggler.

The shot below shows Black-bellied Plovers in spring, at their most handsome, surrounded by a mass of Short-billed Dowitchers.

September 2nd 2017. Algonquin Island, Toronto ON. The Cape May Warbler has been a bit of a nemesis bird for me. It’s not particularly uncommon during those two short times of the year when they pass through, but somehow I seem to keep on missing them. I have quite a vivid memory of one from some years ago and I thought I had a photo too, but I can’t find it. This is the fall migration time for many warbler species and things changed today, not only did I see two or three Cape May Warblers but I had time enough to register what I was seeing and I came home with a few decent photos; here are two of them.

Like many warblers, it’s an even more eye-catching bird in May when the streaky-chested male shows handsome chestnut cheek patches encircled by a bright yellow face. At this time of year though the cheek patches are fainter, although with a bit of imagination you can make them out in the photos. This Cape May Warbler was my Bird of the Day, hard earned in a day of much walking and hard searching.

I had joined a group of bird enthusiasts exploring a cluster of islands lying a short ferry ride from the shining geometry of downtown Toronto. Appropriately named, Toronto Islands, are a recreational refuge covering a lot of real estate. It took us all day to walk, well saunter, from one end to the other and I estimate we covered nearly ten kilometres.

At one time our route took us hard alongside the perimeter fence of a commercial airfield and we were entertained by a metallic voice from a motion-triggered recording that told us sternly we were in a restricted area and had better leave right away; we just kept slogging along. Shortly afterwards a bored looking security guard drove past us, he on the inside we on the outside, and I’m not convinced that he saw us.

I think the group as a whole tallied about sixty-six species, I counted fifty-four including several other warbler species including Blackpoll Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Magnolia Warbler and Nashville Warbler, all shown below with photos from other late summer excursions.

 

August 26 2017. Paletta Park, Burlington, ON. There are times when a bird is visible just long enough get some clues but not quite long enough to identify it with any certainty. That’s birding and it drives some people crazy, but I try to shrug, tuck the memory away and sometimes label it as a Bird-for-Another-Day. On one of my trips to Uganda there were lots of puzzlers and one day when I said out loud, “It’s a bird for another day” Emmanuel, one of my African companions, looking puzzled, took a while to process what I had said. I had thought it just an introspective comment but it puzzled him deeply, eventually he found it really quite funny and from then on a Bird-for-Another-Day met with broad smiles. We later invented Cup-of-tea Birds (to be identified from photos later over a cup of tea) and just plain Mystery-Birds (forever a Who-knows?).

I found and photographed a Mystery Bird today. Other birders might have named it in a flash but frankly I didn’t. At the time of writing I think it’s a juvenile female Tennessee Warbler. It was obliging in its tendency to pause from time to time and I was able to take several photos even though sharp focus was rare and the bright sky distracting. You’d think that identification would be easy matter with reasonable photos; well maybe. Here are four photos and some comments.

In the photo above you can see the bird that it is bright lemon yellow below, has a greyish tail, a sharply pointed beak, a dusky line through the eye and a bit of a grayish cheek pattern. In the second photo, below, we can see an olive-yellow back, brownish yellow wing feathers and a yellowish-grey cap. The dusky line through the eye is clearer, the dark line slicing across the back is distracting but it’s just a shadow. All of the above is generally consistent with a juvenile female Tennessee Warbler although the yellow in this bird is I think unusually bright.

The third and fourth photos confirm some of the key points and you’ll see that its underside is quite bright yellow right to the grayish tail feathers; and there’s the sticking point, Tennessee Warblers are usually white under the tail although apparently a blush of yellow is not out of the question.

I’ve taken a few days to write this awaiting the thoughts of a few experts or near-experts; the consensus is that it’s a juvenile female Tennessee Warbler.

Mystery bird aside, the last couple of days have been a little on the cool side, good for birders because the first chills of late August set fall migration in motion. The woods, fields and skies, although still fragrant with summer, have been dotted with birds on the move. In my wanderings today I enjoyed watching a Yellow-throated Vireo, a couple of Magnolia Warblers, a Least Flycatcher and a Yellow–bellied Flycatcher, among others. They were all fueling up for the long journey in the weeks ahead, they’ll be heading to central America, anywhere from Guatemala to Panama; it seems so improbable, three to four thousand kilometers, half of it over water, on a diet of insects.

August 20 2017. Townsend, ON.  It’s a longish story but by way of a website that links visiting birders with locals willing to share, I spent the day showing a young British birder and his fiancé Andrea, around one of this season’s best birding places. This is Andrew’s first time across the Atlantic so for him the volume was at the sensational level; by breakfast he’d thrilled at the sight of our robins, goldfinches and nuthatches. I know how he felt, it takes a few days for the waves of first impressions and novelty to move aside and allow for a more measured assessment.

Our first and longest stop was at a large expanse of mudflats, actually a sewage settlement lagoon that was dotted with hundreds of hungrily feeding shorebirds. Andrew was almost delirious at the abundance and variety of lifer birds, mostly confusing sandpiper species: Least, Semipalmated, Pectoral, Solitary and Stilt Sandpipers mixed in with slightly less puzzling Killdeer, Semipalmated Plovers, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs and Short-billed Dowitchers. Every sweep of the binoculars turned up something new for him, something that leapt to life which, until that moment, had been just remembered photos in magazines, books or field guides; I’m certain he could have stayed all day, Andea was very patient.

Our first sighting here (really our very first!) was a young Peregrine Falcon found hunched along a shoreline watching over these hundreds of meal tickets. My companion was a touch blasé about the peregrine, I wasn’t though. I’ve seen and watched many peregrines over the years but can never quite get over their clean and powerful elegance.  To see a peregrine zip past on easy wing flicks is really spine tingling; but then to witness today’s bird joined by another and take flight to scatter the shorebirds into a panicked mass-escape, to see them separate one as their quarry and chase it hard in wide sweeps and staggering climbs was a lifetime spectacle, a bit like those wildlife wolf-and-caribou or lion-and-zebra hunts that usually end badly for the hunted.

In this chase the (probable) Pectoral Sandpiper eventually got away, leading the hunters in zigs and zags and finally outrunning them. Most shorebirds, even if they’re tasty, are fast and efficient long distance fliers. Peregrines do better stalking from above and killing by diving and clobbering their prey; with their selected sandpiper and chasing it on the flat or on uphill turns they were evenly matched.

We were enjoying a privileged birding spectacle, just us and all these shorebirds! A spectacle that in the U.K would have attracted many dozens of birders and a collective fortune in optical equipment. I was thrilled to pick out a slightly different-looking bird that turned out to be a Stilt Sandpiper, perhaps the only one among the many look-alikes. I can barely remember the last time I knowingly saw a Stilt Sandpiper and studying it today was a lesson that will stay with me. Next time I should have no trouble picking one out in a crowd.

When I convinced Andrew to turn away from inhaling shorebirds he added a Wilson’s Snipe, Bufflehead, Purple Martin, Bobolink, American Widgeon and a magnificent adult-plumaged Bald Eagle to his head-spinning day’s list.

Despite the novelty of so many shorebirds the peregrine was the most breathtaking episode, and it was just the start of a very full day.As we left the lagoons he asked if there was a chance we might see a Green Heron,  I said, ‘Maybe”.