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25 April 2017. Reynold Gardens, Winston Salem, North Carolina. Tomorrow I work helping a friend and Friday I’ll be driving for twelve hours, but today I have a birding day to myself in North Carolina; it’s my chance to get a jump on spring. I had thought I’d venture up into the Appalachian Mountains where spring’s unfolding is legendary.  But I was cautioned in advance that spring came extraordinarily early and if it was spring ephemeral wildflowers I was interested in, I’d be too late. In any case it’s a very long drive to the mountains on roads I don’t know, and its all so novel anyway, so I opted to take a short drive to Winston Salem (home of the tobacco industry) to explore the grounds of the Reynolds Estate.

I was astonished by how much further ahead spring is here compared to home in southern Ontario which is just seven degrees of latitude north.  It is almost like summer here, and it shouldn’t be.  The broadleaf forest canopy is fully open, Flowering Dogwood and spring azaleas have finished flowering and Tulip Trees are now in flower.  In comparison Ontario’s Tulip Trees flower in mid-late June, another two months from now.

This can’t be right! There will be migrant birds arriving, expecting, perhaps depending upon, an invertebrate food source that has already been and gone. Whether any of the birds of today were baffled by the state of the seasons I don’t know.  But I enjoyed a full day, a lot of walking and getting reacquainted with many of our familiar landmark birds-of-spring. Almost my first birds were a couple of Worm-eating Warblers, a species I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  Although I have a recollection of having one pointed out to me about thirty years ago, I remember that I was distracted and it was little more than a skulking shadow.  I count today’s as my firsts.  They should have excited me I suppose but seeing them was a reminder that there are a number of species here in North Carolina that we don’t see in Ontario and that I’d better be on my toes; I needn’t have worried, there were no more challenging strangers.

I filled a page of my notebook with sightings.  New for me this year included: Great Crested Flycatcher, Eastern Towhee, House Wren, Gray Catbird and Scarlet Tanager. There were several Blue-headed Vireos and Red-eyed Vireos, and in the warbler family, Ovenbird, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Black and White Warbler and a couple of sensational, male Black-throated Blue Warblers.

It was in the thrush family that I found my best birds.  Shy may not be quite the right word for thrush behaviour, perhaps retiring is a better choice, whichever, they certainly they don’t stand for close encounters with people.  Only the Hermit Thrush seems to have much tolerance for onlookers, that may be because some of them manage to over-winter in southern Ontario and turn to whatever food source they can, regardless of who’s watching.  I was privileged with a handful of sightings of thrushes: one Hermit Thrush; at least five Wood Thrushes, distinctive with their boldly spotted breasts and ethereal, forest floor, ‘ee-o-lay’ song; and my best, my Birds of the Day, were a pair of Veerys.

My first Veery I first spotted hastening away from me, it felt safer behind an old chain-link fence.  I waited quietly until it saw me as less of a threat and happily wandered to where I could see it well and even photograph it quite clearly.  Another Veery joined it and, as a bonus, they were joined by a Blue-headed Vireo and a Black-throated Blue Warbler, all obligingly well out in the open.

April 21 2017. RBG Arboretum Hamilton, ON. I have many times been asked if I have a favourite bird; I don’t. But I do have a favourite bird family: the vireos; I’ve written about them here many times.

If you were to browse back over previous entries you’ll see that at one time or another I’ve headlined all the vireos we see in Ontario: Blue-headed, Yellow-throated, Warbling, Red-eyed and Philadelphia (in roughly that order of frequency) and White-eyed Vireo on one of my trips to Cape May. I love them all when they’re here, love them for a various reasons: attitude (self assured and a bit pugnacious), song (evocative of summer) and the identification challenge (although I’ve got that under control now, but it wasn’t easy to begin with.)

I undertook one of our bird counts on this ugly-cloud morning, with the weather trying to settle down after a chaotic twenty-four hours of heavy rain. You know how it is when you have one of those short-lived but violent stomach flu episodes, and when it’s over, how you feel delicate, tentative and battered? That’s how our landscape looked today. But it’s an ill wind etc. because the woods were alive with migratory optimism and that’s where my vireo story starts.

Walking a fresh-green flushed woodland edge I was enjoying and counting the short tumbling songs of several Ruby-crowned Kinglets. I was following a Yellow-rumped Warbler as it worked through the lower levels of some old cottonwood trees, and a pair of Hairy Woodpeckers, some American Goldfinches and a distant singing Field Sparrow, were all keeping me fully occupied when my brain’s bird-song-processing-centre tapped me on the shoulder and directed my attention to the fractured notes of vireo song somewhere behind the foreground clatter. It was a longish way off but I pinpointed it to a thicket of old hawthorns and crab-apples. Moving closer, the song became clearer and I was increasingly sure I was hearing a Blue-headed Vireo, all I needed was to see it and confirm it, and soon enough I did both and asterisked it in my notebook. The Blue-headed Vireo’s song, by the way, is similar to that of the Red-eyed, Philadelphia and Yellow-throated Vireos, similar enough at the start of the season to give me pause. I wasn’t aware that any vireo species was likely to be around this early in spring but a bit of research revealed that yes, Blue-headeds start showing up in mid-late April; earlier by a couple of weeks than the others of the clan.

That was all well and good and very satisfying; a nice bird at any time. I kept walking and it wasn’t too long before I’d seen and heard four more; this was becoming a very good day.

By the end of my census walk I’d added six Pine Warblers (heard but not seen, that’s the way it is with them.), two Brown Creepers another Yellow-rumped Warbler, two Bald Eagles and a Broad-winged Hawk. My day’s tally was thirty seven species. By the end of the census walk the sky was opening up with sizeable patches of blue tearing at a bank of deep grey clouds and the sun dabbed around a bit of warmth.

12 April 2017. Stoney Creek Mountain, Hamilton ON. There are yellowlegs and there are yellowlegs; Greater and Lesser, two closely related and closely-resembling-each-other species. Thank goodness their common names tell everything you usually need to know to make a field identification; they have yellow legs and one species is noticeably smaller than the other. It’s (pretty well) all about size.

In the absence of some kind of yardstick it can be difficult to know whether you’re looking at a big one or a little one. There are some subtle differences and with experience you can usually make somewhere between an educated determination and a hopeful guess.

Experienced birders faced with uncertainty know to look at the length of the bird’s bill in relation to its head. The greater’s bill length is about one and a quarter times its head length whereas the lesser’s bill length is equal to its head length. The greater’s bill also shows an upturn towards the tip, it’s slight in some individuals and quite marked in others. Overall size aside, all the relative proportions, the external morphology, of the species are so similar as to make them indistinguishable ( to me anyway).

Today I had the rare opportunity of examining both Greater Yellowlegs and Lesser Yellowlegs side by side. In the photos above and below, the individuals show some slight differences in plumage but I think they only reflect slightly different stages in the individual birds’ spring moult. The difference in relative  bill length is evident and with a bit of coaxing you might come to see the slight upturn of the greater’s bill.

These birds made my day. Otherwise I did rather too much aimless wandering looking for anything the spring winds had blown in. I watched a Peregrine Falcon in territorial display by an established nest site, a male American Kestrel and a couple of active Eastern Meadowlarks. But it was a bit unsatisfying so I opted instead to scout out a woodland where I’m scheduled to lead a nature walk early next month. Capturing shots of the emerging leaves of Wild Ginger and flowers of Blue Cohosh was every bit absorbing as the close study of two yellowlegs species. There’s always something to be learned outdoors.

April 13 2017. LaSalle Marina Burlington and Bronte Marina Oakville ON.  Grebes – they’re sort of raffish. I think raffish is the right word, if it means (which I believe it does) defying convention in a mild, erratic and somewhat dashing way. Yes, raffish will do. It’s as if creation intended to make a duck but it came out a bit wrong, with lobed rather than webbed feed, a tendency to sink sometimes, and an appearance of being a little un-combed rather than smooth and handsome.

Every year we have the pleasure of the company of three, sometimes five, grebe species; in warmer weather only that is, they all leave for the winter. Let the lakes freeze. But come spring they return, some just passing through, one or two staying to breed. I watch for them every April and yes, they’re back.

Horned Grebes gather along our lakeshore for a week or two, or three, and there are a few reliable places to go and admire them up close. They deserve admiration; just look at the photos above and below, gorgeous golden ear-tufts, chestnut neck and along the waterline, and piercing red eyes. Getting a decent photo took a lot of patience: to keep myself from being conspicuously silhouetted I had to sit low among some large boulders and then wait for one to make its way inshore and close enough. It was diving for whatever they eat and perhaps one in four photos showed just a puddle or a vanishing wingtip or foot.

Inspired by the Horned Grebes I went to a nearby marina where Red-necked Grebes return to nest each year. They are encouraged to stay by someone, maybe the harbour authority, who anchors a tire in a nicely boat-quiet corner of the marina, the grebes use it as a suitable semi-dry platform on which to build a nest. It is within a very few feet of a harbour-side path and the countless morning-strollers, joggers, dogs-with-owners, and wound-up pre-schoolers stop to admire, or bark, or just smile, point and wonder at them. As I watched, the grebes seemingly snoozed, floating at all times close to the tire to stake their claim to this, their territory for a spring and summer. The vast majority of Red-necked Grebes choose to nest much further north and west of here and the handful of pairs that settle in this and other nearby marinas are a mysteriously disjunct population.

And the others, the rest of the handful?  Well Pied-billed Grebes (above), curious to look at and even stranger if heard calling on territory, can be found in southern Ontario, breeding on small weedy lakes and ponds. Eared Grebes and Western Grebes are just occasional stray visitors; a pity. Eared Grebes are cute, like mini-Horned Grebes in a way and Western Grebes in spring are majestic and elegant – if still raffish.

April 11 2017. RBG Arboretum Hamilton, ON. Good birds came tumbling in today. I did a walk around one of my favourite woodland and lake routes and was almost breathless at the sight and sound of new arrivals. The day before a blast of warm air pushed up from the south and it must have swept a lot of anxious migrants along with it. I tallied forty species, many old familiars of course but within a few minutes of getting started I found a Yellow-rumped Warbler. In a week or two they’ll be commonplace, but today it was a treat. I wonder just how far south it had overwintered; every year a scant handful is seen to stay with us but few survive.

Within a few minutes I’d added American Tree Sparrows, Northern Flickers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers and White-throated Sparrows to my notes. Then a pair of Rusty Blackbirds flew up in front of me, a good sighting at any time. They were feeding around the margins of a squishy woodland edge, typical Rusty Blackbird habitat.

Much farther along I spotted a small bird flitting high in a White Pine, as I examined it and was searching my mental database, a large and noisy military plane flew almost overhead distracting us both, but I wrote down Pine Warbler with a question mark; not sure. But then I heard it and others singing; delete question mark. First of the spring.

Out across the lake I could barely make out a small duck-like thing. Again I struggled to make an identification. At times like this I’ll sometimes use my little camera’s long zoom to see what I can make of the grainy image. It worked, I satisfied myself that it (actually they) were Pied-billed Grebes. Here’s the evidence, you’ll need to look closely.

Finally my Bird of the Day was an American Bittern. It surprised me by exploding into purposeful flight from a small marsh just in front of me. I was almost shocked at the luck and improbability of seeing it and for that shock value it was my Bird of the Day. But the Yellow-rumped Warbler, Rusty Blackbirds,Pine Warblers and Pied-billed Grebes all tied for a very close second place for welcome-back value.

There were of course many more interesting birds which, at other times, would be special for any number of reasons: Carolina Wrens in full song, an Eastern Phoebe, a busy Ruby–crowned Kinglet, Double–crested Cormorants – 185 of them! a pair of American Wigeon, a flotilla of Common Mergansers and a very vocal Pileated Woodpecker – heard but not seen.