Category: Uncategorized

May 10 2017 Paletta Park Burlington, ON. I don’t know where to start with today except that well, it’s mid May, and if the birding is good, that’s as it should be. I spent an almost indecent stretch of time checking out favourite birding spots and two out of three were very rewarding. The not-so-good one yielded a single calling Virginia Rail barely meeting my minimum standards for a thirty kilometer drive. Still, just around the corner from it I found a pair of Merlins who looked as though they were setting up home.

But the best experiences of the day came not far from home at a small lakeside park with a rambling old stone house, unkempt hedges, wet spots and a small creek. Arriving there shortly after breakfast and while early-morning dog exercise was in full swing, my first impression was that of a quiet morning. But down almost at the shoreline I could hear a faintly familiar and slightly disturbing song coming from a dense honeysuckle bush, disturbing because I felt I should know it although somehow it kept eluding me. Then a bright yellow warbler popped up showing bold black streaks on the side of its chest. Hmm, which warblers have a yellow breast and a necklace of black pearls?, Magnolia Warbler? Canada Warbler? Black-throated Green Warbler? And with that it flew up and away and was lost against a bright sky high in a nearby maple, although hauntingly it continued singing.

My brain’s Bird Song Analysis Dept. kept trying for a match while the rest of me turned to other birds: a startling Black-throated Blue Warbler and an American Redstart in particular.

Eventually, with the help of a passing dog-walker, we re-found the mystery bird and somehow fragments of memory came together and my birding subconscious started to suggest Prairie Warbler. I latched on to the idea, pulling in old fragmentary memories, then, aided by a few photos, the bits fell into place and before long I remembered when and where I’d heard that song before (eight years ago). Yes a Prairie Warbler. Here it is, Bird of the Day, rare in Ontario and a tingling start to a day that would deliver many more glorious birds.

I could rattle off a string of sightings for the day but I’ll touch on just a couple more highlights. Three Merlins, one seen at the lakeside park chasing a crow hoping to make a meal of a bird three times its size and then the pair I mentioned above; three Merlins in one day is a lot!

More Black-throated Blue Warblers today (all males) than I’ve seen in the past ten years I think. Some years I miss them all together, other years I’m triumphant finding just one, but this year there must be some kind special on Black-throated Blue Warblers. Spring warblers challenge my repertoire of suitable adjectives: Many are dazzlingly colourful, some subtly beautiful but none are as crisply handsome as male Black-throated Blue Warblers.

Today’s birds moved around slowly and deliberately enough for me to capture some great photos, perhaps they were exhausted. Above are my best Black-throated Blue Warbler shots followed by this gallery below of a few more. (visible only on the website not if you’re reading this as an email. Click on any image to enlarge it.)

May 9 2017 RBG Arboretum, Hamilton ON There was a touch of frost on the grass when we started this morning but by the time we finished our bird count it was just a beautiful spring morning.

My companion and I spent three hours, much of it at a standstill as we examined each little bird in the extremities of freshly budding oaks and maples trying to make them into something other than yet another Yellow-rumped Warbler.

It was a decorative day with sunshine, little popcorn clouds and colourful birds: Nashville, Blue-winged, Palm, Yellow and Blackburnian Warblers. Two Blue-headed Vireos, a Yellow-throated Vireo and my Bird of the Day was a showy metaphor for a colourful day, a male Rose-breasted Grossbeak – well actually there was a pair of them, but the poor female is not a head-turner.

The male seemed to have no fear of us, he was far more interested in reaching a small scattering of seed on the forest floor. Here are several photos of him because he was so photogenic; click on any picture to enlarge it.

That large pale beak is powerful and suited for getting into really hard seeds like those in cherries. They are fairly omnivorous and happily gulp down beetles, flies, soft fruit, flowers and all sorts and sizes of seeds, but some kind of almost impenetrable nut must be part of their diet somewhere, if not here then on their Central or South-American wintering grounds. The beak is a formidable weapon and anyone who’s handled a Rose-breasted Grosbeak knows to take great care, they will easily slice fleshy, triangular chunks off your hand. Bird-banders use a special stainless band on them because they will snip off a standard aluminum band.

 

May 7 2017. RBG Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. April – now that’s a month where you know where you stand: even though spring is in the air, it’s quite possibly cold, more likely cool, and on the odd occasion there’s maybe a dab of warmth.   But May, that’s a different matter, it’s a transition month, glorious because it’s green and staring summer in the face, but you never know what just might happen; could be cool, could be hot.

This first week of May has been one of those Surprise! Gotcha! kind of weeks; rain, cold, rain again in biblical torrents, more cold and floods to follow.

Still birders soldier on, wet or dry, and I have been diligently doing our bird counts. Both yesterday and today I explored the same verdant valley I’ve mentioned so often, the one that is a happily overgrown, forest-rimmed flood plain of a small and meandering river; an inundated flood plain yesterday, a silty, squishy flood plain today.

Among terrestrial passerines the long wet spell seemed to make little difference, but among Canada Geese and Mute Swans there appeared to be a lot of upset. Both nest in the valley and probably Trumpeter Swans too.

Yesterday I noted an unusually high level of territorial aggression: goose to swan, goose to goose and swan to swan (and even goose to me). My conjecture is that the rising waters drowned some nests, killing the embryos and pushing the adult birds to disperse or perhaps seek an alternative site to re-nest.

Whether it was just a case of dispersal or whether it was birds looking to re-nest, many geese and swans were aggressively posturing and driving out intruders. One large pond has held one pair of Mute Swans for a month or so, yesterday another Mute Swan dared to show up and I was awe-struck witnessing the whistling-winged, jet-fighter approach of the male Mute Swan hell bent on driving an interloper away. So successfully that the ousted male was forced to fly low through a cluster of dense trees, twisting and stalling, quite un-swan-like.

If the Trumpeter Swans had a nest in the valley (Probably because one and sometimes two individuals have been seen regularly this spring) then I suspect their nest has been lost to the flood.

Well so much for drama, both days turned up lots of species: thirty-nine yesterday and forty-four today.

I mentioned the cold; this morning before breakfast it was seven degrees, brisk for us and really tough for insectivorous birds. I found an Eastern Kingbird hunched grumpily (hungrily) probably wishing it had never made the dash north from Peru in the first place and a Warbling Vireo working over some low dogwood shrubs searching for food. Seeing the vireo at close quarters was unusual, they are birds of the forest canopy, often heard but rarely seen. I got several decent photos of it, one showing its rear end like I’ve never seen before, but none of them showing its face really well.

Bird of the Day? Heard but not seen on both days was a Northern Waterthrush, possibly two. An unremarkable looking bird but wonderful nevertheless. Not a thrush at all, waterthrushes are brown streaky warblers, of low-light swampy woods where they build a nest at ground level in a well-hidden crevice. They have a short emphatic song which I once anthropomorphized as “heck heck not me- no he DID-IT! ‘ spillled sharply without pause.

I suspect this bird is passing through. This valley may provide suitable nesting habitat but there are better, wetter, darker, more mosquito-infested places not far away; rather them than me. The photo above was taken a couple of years ago at a time and place where mosquitoes were relentlessly drawing my blood as I worked.

May 2 2017. Hamilton and Burlington ON. I know they’re trying, I met them just a week ago in North Carolina, trying to reclaim the territories they gave up late last year. But lousy weather is holding them back, a big sweeping arc of foul weather, a wall reaching from the further reaches of Texas all the way to Quebec. Yesterday and last night were soakers and the birds that somehow made it this far were grounded, today we went out looking for them and it was worthwhile.

Our woodlands are still pretty bare of leaves so such birds as there are can be spotted quite easily. I took the morning to check three well-wooded parks along the shore of Lake Ontario. In this urban sprawl, parks by the lake are natural refuges for tired migrants although I suspect they’ll drop in anywhere where the insect-pickings are good. But it’s better that we who carry binoculars and cameras are seen wandering around parks than prowling residential neighbourhoods.

It was wet and slushy but I could hear Palm Warblers and Yellow–rumped Warblers almost everywhere. They weren’t alone, I found singles of Yellow Warbler (the first of millions to come), Northern Parula, Black and White Warbler, Ovenbird and Black–throated Green Warbler and several Black–throated Blue Warblers, all of them quite spectacular in their full-on breeding colours. For a while I envied the close-up quick-fire photos of some of the other birder/photographers. This is the time to capture those brilliant portrait shots you find in glossy magazines and I wondered whether I might be better off with a faster camera and big, long lens. But I think not; my little camera gets in the way often enough and I rank seeing the birds, the experience, above photographing them.

Setting aside those warblers for a moment, I watched a Veery, shy as always (see April 25 post), heard a Wood Thrush singing and had long lingering looks at Blue–headed Vireos and an inquisitive Yellow–throated Vireo.

Despite the choices offered by all of the above, my Bird of the Day was a newly arrived Baltimore Oriole. For me it was the first of the year, I anticipate their arrival towards the end of the first week of May. I heard it first, calling its clear, beckoning whistles long before seeing it. Those calls will brighten the days for a few weeks but just as they become tiresome they’ll stop, their pair-bonds made and territories secured. I found the oriole working through a flowering cherry tree where it looked stunning as though it belonged on a Mother’s day card. Here it is.

Here are a few more lovely birds from the day.

May 1 2017. Burlington ON. It’s the First of May and pouring rain, actually cold and pouring rain; and has been all day. It’s a date with significance around the world, it’s International Workers Day and many European cultures celebrate May’s arrival and association with spring. For me it’s a blockbuster month for birding, but today rain; this might be the wettest spring ever.

I look out onto our flooded urban back yard where a crouching Cottontail Rabbit, its fur matted and damp, looks balefully at the rising waters. Closer to the house a pair of American Robins have a nest, I’ve been watching the female sitting tight over her clutch of eggs for the past couple of weeks and marveled at avian instinct. The way she and her mate built the nest just like every other robin has for centuries, a skillfully woven if slightly ragged cup with a lining of mud. How the chicks when they hatch will prompt the parents’ dawn to dusk non-stop delivery of food (Academics seem to prefer to call feeding by another name, provisioning; it sorts out the birders from the ornithologists I suppose.) The first chicks have hatched in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve seen the male bring small fragments of food to the nest. Today’s often-torrential rains present another challenge, how to keep the eggs and chicks warm and dry. I don’t imagine for one moment that the female received any instruction from her mother in how to keep the kids dry, yet she knows exactly and instinctively what to do. In the photos below you can see how she has mantled the nest with her outstretched wings.

As I took these photos the male turned up with a couple of morsels, as soon as he delivered it and left she was back. My marveling at all of this innate breeding cycle know-how: nest-building, incubation, feeding and safeguarding (not exclusive to American Robins of course) just underscored how much we don’t know or understand about life. It also made American Robins my Birds of the Day.