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July 12 2017 Fletcher Creek EPA, Wellington Co. ON. Following all the ornithic (look it up) clamour and frenzy of April, May and June it feels as though a quietness veil has been drawn across the July landscape. The birds haven’t gone away, not far anyway, it’s just that it’s no longer in a bird’s interest to be assertive and visible, far better to keep your head down and avoid the attention of the many predators out there looking to feed their growing families.

I try to get out and revisit favourite sites or explore as many new places as I can during these birding doldrums. Today I revisited a really interesting and geologically varied conservation area; it encompasses the headwaters of a significant cold-water stream and has been the site of many instructive encounters over the years. I spent a couple of hours following the stream as it made its sparkling way through a thick and often boggy forest of Eastern White Cedar. In the gloom I was happy to pick up the faint two-note call of a Black-throated Green Warbler, just a fragment of its much longer ‘zee zee zee zee zooo-zee’ spring song and a confirmation that the species is almost certainly breeding here, apt because dense conifer forests are their first choice.

Later, perhaps half an hour, I sat to enjoy the time and place for a while, something I don’t do often enough although it is one of the best ways to get under the quietness veil. After several minutes a Northern Waterthrush approached, drawing closer all the time and ticking repeated notes of irritation at my presence. I wondered for a while whether it would come down to a convenient level and allow me to capture a photo-portrait, it didn’t but as it scolded me from above my left shoulder I got this shot.

The waterthrush’s noisy disapproval drew in a Black-throated Green Warbler, my second of the day, but this time just a few feet away and easy to see (though not photograph). So there, I’d seen and heard two birds both of which were bird of the day-worthy and as I mused on this, I picked up the far off, thread-like musical trill of a Winter Wren; heart-stopping to me because of a sensational Winter Wren encounter four years ago. I refer you to an earlier post and (this is important) its accompanying video.

The wren stayed around for a while singing intermittently, presumably defining territorial boundaries is still important work. And as I listened, an unseen Common Raven arrived far overhead and started its version of singing, gurgling and croaking. At first blush ravens and wrens might seem an odd pairing but both are truly birds of the north and maybe what was more notable was their presence here, both of them at the southern limit of their breeding range.

So, four birds from which to find My Bird of the Day: Black-throated Green Warbler, Northern Waterthrush, Winter Wren and perhaps even Common Raven. It was the wren that stopped me in my tracks and the Black-throated Green that surprised me the most. Two Birds of the Day.

July 7 2017 Burlington ON. Urban birding again but an exception to the rule this morning; instead of me going looking for birds, the bird came looking for me.  At my computer, the one from which all of these posts originate, I was checking the day’s news and idly deleting junky emails. The room was unlit, cool and one window half open; just another start to a summer day.  Hearing a purposeful fluttering to my right I looked back to see a Carolina Wren had flown in to see what I was up to.

I’m used to hearing Carolina Wrens around our home and neighbourhood, often it’s their strident tea-kettle tea-kettle tea-kettle song, other times a declarative purring. They’re not shy birds, anything but, a trait they share with others in the wren family and I believe them to be patrolling the neighbourhood, checking for irregularities, just making sure everything is as it should be. They get under all the overhangs, mouse their way through brushy corners and peer into dark recesses; so what, on a bright day, could be more inviting to a Carolina Wren than a dark opening to an unlit room? So in it came.

The fluttering caught my attention, I recognized it for a Carolina Wren immediately and knowing how interested they are in affairs of the neighbourhood I struck up a conversation, much the way people talk to their cat, ‘Well, what are you doing in here?” that sort of thing; we don’t have a cat. My wife, sitting at her desk just a few feet away but out of sight, was thoroughly baffled. I’m used to her talking to herself and probably she has some sort of reciprocal acceptance of my foibles too, but she says this was a different conversation. I called her to come and see who I had with me.

The wren flitted around the room and, not wanting to see it bash itself against a windowpane as some panicked birds will do, I closed the blinds leaving only a gap leading to the sunlit outdoors.

It investigated bookcases, magazines and chair-backs without apparent concern, long enough for me to get just one recognizable photo, then dropped down to a little window-side table and zipped out the way it’d come in.

Other than a Carolina Wren there isn’t another species of neighbourhood bird I’d rather share my office space with. I may try the open window trick again tomorrow but I suspect being neighbourhood-wise and having satisfied its curiosity, it won’t need to come back.

June 27 2017.Hamilton On. This evening we attended an event at the Art Gallery, the occasion was the opening of new exhibits, the public was invited and the cost of entry free. Free or not we probably would have gone, our daughter has a staff position of some responsibility and she encouraged us to broaden our cultural horizons a bit. So we went, we admired, genuinely admired, the rare sculptural pieces, the recreated artists’ studios and the sweeping pencil drawings of arctic life.

In due course it was time to gather for opening remarks from the people who typically fill gaps in the action this way. The setting was nice, the room acoustically perfect and behind us loomed the quiet, sunlit office-buildings of downtown.

I think I’ve always been on the fidgety side so I have trouble with long, applause-punctuated, introductions of countless dignitaries of descending rank. After a while my attention wandered from the speakers and turned to the bright, geometric cityscape behind us. I was musing on just how different was this scene with its rectangles, triangles and ranks of parallel lines, from the pleasing chaos of the world of nature hinted at by the row of lindens in the foreground. I think I liked what I was looking at but knew I infinitely preferred almost anywhere without concrete or bricks.

As I weighed my thoughts, playing visual games with the intersection of rooflines, a Peregrine Falcon appeared from the lower half of the gap to the right and swept up to exit the stage at top left. It shot through and was gone in one second or two, or three wing-beats maybe; I’m sure no-one else noticed.

In front of me, to my delight, had passed the fastest animal in the world. It was a fly-past by a top predator with not the slightest interest in our cultural gathering, just the natural world saying I’m still here.

 

June 24 2017.   Flamborough Ontario.  Birding is a very different pursuit as June matures. The headlong rush is over: the rush to get here, seize territory and find a mate;  the task now is to get the next generation launched, literally airborne.

I spent half of today scouting ahead for a trip I’m leading tomorrow, it’s billed as Birds, Swamps, Bogs and Marshes.  It was cool when I started but even so a few dedicated mosquitoes viewed me as a warm breakfast and, to add to the distractions, I was irritated by the almost constant sound of small aircraft overhead. There is an airport with a flight school several miles away and apparently the airspace above where I like to go birding is remote enough to try the riskier aspects of learning to fly.

I went to half a dozen of my better birding sites and was a little surprised when a few species I’d expected to find were absent. Still, Northern Waterthrushes, a Canada Warbler and a Grasshopper Sparrow were fairly easily found in the same places as last year. An Indigo Bunting, Common Yellowthroats, Veerys, a Great Crested Flycatcher and an Eastern Towhee were all singing loudly to reinforce their territorial claims and, near a small lake, a pair of anxious Spotted Sandpipers begged me to keep my distance.

Bird of the Day was probably an Eastern Kingbird eyeing me warily from its nest. Kingbirds are pugnacious defenders of their territory and don’t seem to go to a lot of trouble to conceal their nest, but then again set among the spikes and spines of a hawthorn bush like this, maybe it’s not so important.

June 8 2017. Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area, Michigan. Describing a road trip around Michigan as an expedition is a bit of an exaggeration, expeditions surely imply a measure of hardship and some confrontations with the unknown; hardly what you get in Michigan. Nevertheless, this was the last day of what we understood as our Michigan expedition and we were making our way back to the familiar landscapes of Ontario; Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area was on our way. It is a managed wetland on the shore of Lake Huron not far from the once thriving industrial city of Saginaw. Saginaw by the way was formerly a very prosperous manufacturing city with ties to the fortunes of Detroit and the auto industry; but….

Nayanquing is good wetland birding. In a couple of hours we tallied about forty species including Caspian Terns, Trumpeter Swans, Pied-billed Grebes, a pair of nervous Sandhill Cranes and this lovely little Common Yellowthroat.

We were hoping to see Least Bitterns but didn’t despite an intensive scrutiny of likely habitat. Least Bittern has become something of a nemesis bird for me. I remember seeing just one about thirty years ago, then I picked up a dead one at the roadside within the last five years and I know where to go to hear them but seeing them is another matter.

Another target bird was Yellow–headed Blackbird, a species I had never seen, not surprisingly because it’s a bird of the western half of the continent. It took a bit of finding and when we did I was rather distracted by the intriguing landscape in which we encountered it. We had wandered away from the trails towards the shoreline and found ourselves in a small oak savannah on a narrow sandy strip of beach that separated the inland marsh from the cold waters of Lake Huron; I wish I’d taken more time to investigate and understand this isolated and probably fragile ecosystem. While trying to understand the landscape, the ecology and to identify the oaks (they were Black Oaks) that sheltered us from the onshore wind, we became aware of a near cacophony of musical squeaks and parrot-like HhShhhh sounds coming from those same encircling oaks. We soon tracked down the culprits, a small group of male Yellow-headed Blackbirds: immediately My Birds of the Day.

Birds of the Day for several reasons: I’d never seen one before so it would be an addition to my life list should I ever compile one; They were startlingly larger and more imposing than I’d anticipated, I had imagined them be about the same as Red-winged Blackbirds but substituting yellow heads for red wings; And they reminded me strongly of the raucous Yellow–winged Caciques common in the urban parks of western Mexico, so strongly that, for a while, I wondered if they were closely related; it turns out they’re not.

I managed to get just one reasonable Yellow-headed Blackbird photo, here it is along with one of those Mexican caciques (kahHEEkays). And you know, in the cold light of day they are quite different – the challenge of birding.