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November 6 2016. Cayuga ON. Every year about this time our local naturalists’ club undertakes a one-day bird count across the club’s defined study area, a territory lying within a 40 Km radius of an historic grand mansion in the City of Hamilton. Actually a goodly chunk of that range is open water of Lake Ontario – which presents its own opportunities and challenges. I’m sure if our moderator were to compile a map showing the precise areas actually birded by the dozens of active counters he would see an irregular and scattered patchwork. It might reasonably prompt the question of the value of a count with such erratic and incomplete coverage.  The answer to which is that the goal of such a count is more about identifying long term indicators of species increases, decreases or other unusual changes than it is to attempt to know exactly how many birds exist today. Any data is more useful than none – and it’s good exercise too I suppose.

A new-to-birding companion and I spent four and a bit hours criss-crossing our chosen study area, a mix of farmland and thick deciduous forests. It was a bright, sunny and mild day, the predominantly oak forests were startlingly colourful and along some swampy edges were patches of Winterberry Holly carrying heavy loads of brilliantly scarlet berries.

November birding is rarely stimulating but today we enjoyed two or three stops where the birding was really quite good. At one we scanned a line of fences and found several Eastern Bluebirds, an American Kestrel and a Northern Mockingbird – all good sightings even if they were rather distant. A little later, along a quiet gravel road flanked by oak forests, dozens of American Robins and Cedar Waxwings were filling up on holly berries while Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows found something indeterminate yet edible along the grassy roadside.

Birds of the Day were an enormous flock, or murmuration, of European Starlings, murmuration being the generally accepted collective noun for starlings and other chattering crowds; probably conferred upon them by Victorian lexicographers. They had gathered in the pastures around a radio transmission tower and every now and then a swirl of hundreds wheeled around choosing one minute to search for food in the short ragged grasses, the next to gather and chatter amongst themselves on the guy-wires of the radio mast.

Apart from the sight of this large, perhaps five hundred strong, murmuration was the spectacular beauty of the individual birds. Not something you’d usually associate with starlings. But starlings have just finished a post-breeding moult to replace most body and flight feathers, and these new feathers come with pale tips. You’d hardly recognise the birds in these photos as the same rather dark and dowdy starling of urban living; but there they are, glorious for a while until the exigencies of their daily scramble for food, warmth and space gradually wears off those glorifying accents.

October 29 2016 . RBG Arboretum, Hamilton, ON. Many years (decades?) ago I took a course in creative writing. One of the nuggets I vividly remember was that getting published is easy but that writing is very hard work. I’ve rarely been published (unless you count this site), I haven’t tried very hard, but I can confirm that writing IS sometimes very hard work. These little three-, four- or five-hundred word posts of mine can be exhaustingly hard to create, I really try to make them flow decently as well as capture a sense of the time and place. I often get some of it written in my head while I’m out still on the trail but only rarely does that imagined text read terribly well in print.

I tell you all of this because, despite the forgoing, I’m not up for writing much about today’s birding. But I’ll say this, it was warm, rather quiet bird-wise but a small flock of Eastern Bluebirds made the day. Here’s one of them.

October 25 2016 . RBG Cootes Paradise, Hamilton, & Sedgewick Park Oakville, ON. Today just seemed like a good day to be outdoors. It was a light jacket kind of day: bright and breezy and lots of swirling airborne leaves. I explored a couple of favourite locations, the first along a lakeside path to a lookout over an expanse of mudflats, the second the perimeter of a sewage treatment plant where summer birds are known to be lulled into a false sense of security by the abundant insect life.

The first half of the day was enjoyable but not very rich in bird life. I was happy with a close encounter with a Red-tailed Hawk, the spectacle of dozens of spiraling migrating Turkey Vultures and a nervous flotilla of Northern Shovelers, but other than that it was a little quiet.

After a short stop for lunch I decided to see what could be hanging around the treatment plant. It was a busy place: dozens of American Robins clucking and squawking among themselves as they fed on Multiflora Rose berries; many Yellow-rumped Warblers and Ruby-crowned Kinglets; an Eastern Phoebe, and to top it off, two warblers from opposite ends of the glamour spectrum: A Blackpoll Warbler and a Northern Parula. The Blackpoll was devilishly difficult to see and even harder to photograph. It is, as you can see, a faded, dull, greeny-grey-yellow overall, with faint streaks along the breast and back, a couple of pale wing-bars and an indistinct broken eye-ring. ( A note of contrition here.  At first I took the Blackpoll to be an Orange-crowned Warbler. It’s not; Orange-crowneds don’t have wing bars for one thing and are yellow under the tail – not white. I jumped to conclusions, I do that sometimes.)

The Parula by contrast is a study in the tasteful use of colour; truly a picture is worth a thousand words. This individual was startlingly open and unconcerned by the presence of people or heavy vehicles, tame is not the right word here; but it showed no fear. It may, I hate to think, be in trouble (certainly if it tries to stay here for the winter), it was repeatedly opening its beak as if yawning, as if it was trying to clear something troublesome from its throat. A beautiful little bird but something’s amiss.

October 22 2016 . RBG Hendrie Valley, Burlington, ON. A couple of days of rain courtesy of a malevolent storm system streaming up from the south has been followed by strong west winds and a steep drop in temperature. It was enough to prompt autumn’s later  stragglers to get moving.

I took on a census walk in my favourite wet and wooded valley and was soon surrounded by White-throated Sparrows, and with them a beautiful, rich chestnut-brown Fox Sparrow. A happy coincidence because yesterday, looking back over my photos, I saw that late October is their time to show up; and here it was, back from the far north where they breed.  Perfect.

The census was very productive, I tallied thirty-five species including Carolina Wrens, a small flock (43) of young Cedar Waxwings, three or four (heard but not seen) Eastern Bluebirds, a Red-breasted Nuthatch, Ruby and Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Hermit Thrush.

What really caught my attention was the numbers of Turkey Vultures passing over, and the more I looked the more I saw, and looking closer I realized there was a major migration of vultures and hawks underway. I added two Northern Harriers, five Red-tailed Hawks, a Bald Eagle and a Red-shouldered Hawk to my census tally – and those were just the ones I could identify with any measure of confidence. There were many more birds circling and streaming past me, but too high and wind-tossed to feel sure of their identity.

I spent two hours on the census and walked out more than satisfied with a productive morning. But I wasn’t finished; there was too much going on in the storm-torn skies above. So I headed to a nearby cemetery which has the benefit of generally open vistas and a strategic location along the fall migratory track. There I found another birder and between us we spent an hour or so captivated by the steady flow of raptors. Among numerous Red-tailed Hawks and Turkey Vultures we also positively identified three Red-shouldered Hawks, a Bald Eagle, a fast moving Merlin, two Cooper’s Hawks a handful of Sharp-shinned Hawks and, triumphantly, a Northern Goshawk.

The Goshawk swept past us fast and low (dodging between tombstones), we had maybe two or three seconds to take it in.  Tom was quick to identify it as a Goshawk, I was slower. It is one of only three hawks in the accipiter family found in North America, making the identification a rather limited process of elimination. As I said to him, “Had I been alone I would have puzzled over it. I would have thought, obviously too big to be a Sharp-shinned Hawk. Probably not a Cooper’s Hawk – still too big – and muscular. So probably a Goshawk on account of it’s size and sturdy build. I probably would have recorded it as – Northern Goshawk with a question mark. But yes – Goshawk, I agree. I haven’t seen one for several years. What a bird, Bird of the Day!” Tom agreed and was happy to accept it as best bird although he’d been hoping for  Golden Eagle. Another Day.

October 16 2016 Wetlands Institute, Stone Harbor. New Jersey. Considering the variety of birds seen on this quick early morning walk, it rather surprised me when, in a retrospective moment, I realized that it a was a couple of Boat-tailed Grackles that came out tops as my Birds of the Day.

It’s not as though grackles make the grade in any of the usual great-bird adjectives, they’re not cute, engaging, majestic, secretive or colourful, They don’t sing, they’re not notably long distance migrants and they don’t particularly artfully exploit anyone or anything. They’re just there.  But, as it happens, being there is what caught my attention. To me Boat-tailed Grackles are synonymous with some of the warmer parts of North America, Florida in particular, and anywhere along the Atlantic coast from Cape May south.

We were about to start a long day of driving on the second leg of our journey home from Virginia. The day before we had travelled from Williamsburg to Cape May, essentially just a 400 kilometer jaunt up the Delmarva Peninsula. Following this route filled a gap in my comprehension of this particular stretch of Atlantic coastline. It was a pleasant day’s journey through productive farmland which happens to be flanked along its Atlantic edge by some of the gaudiest development and commercialization of the sandy shore itself.

But today we faced a journey of some 800 kilometers (500 miles), a very full day especially if, like us, you prefer to minimize time spent on major highways. Before getting underway I wanted a deep inhale of birding-air, so we paid a rather quick visit to the Wetland Institute, a place with lots of good birding memories and close to the sea-side town of Stone Harbor.

On arrival the first sound was that of a pair of Boat-tailed Grackles sharing and airing their views on the state of the world from a look-out platform. They have a funny squeaky, ringing, clatter of a voice, described variously as “ chreet chreet keer, ee EEch “; possibly musical in a discordant, avant garde kind of way. But however described, their voice unfailingly reminds me of suburban Florida.

The nicely tended yet suitably unspoiled path at the Wetlands Institute has always been an easy and productive birding walk for me.  In May the tidal flats hold such wonders as Whimbrel, Clapper Rails, Dunlin, American Oystercatchers and Short-billed Dowitchers in huge numbers.

Today it was a lot less frenetic but we spotted a pair of Snowy Egrets sitting quietly on the railing of an elevated path; they made a great picture. At the end of the trail we watched a Great Egret working its way around the edges of a small inlet. Uncountable numbers of Yellow-rumped Warblers were busy feeding among the Northern Bayberry bushes that line the path.

An interesting (I hope) side note here: Yellow-rumped Warblers were formerly called Myrtle Warblers, a reference to their ability to successfully overwinter along the Atlantic coast living largely on a diet of myrtle berries. Myrtle is the informal name of Northern Bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica), a common lowland shrub of the east coast (including seashores) of North America. Some forty or so years ago, avian name-callers decided to lump together the eastern Myrtle Warbler and the western Audubon’s Warbler as one species, the Yellow-rumped Warbler. They are very similar it’s true but by no means completely alike. Time marches on and we now hear that some un-lumping may occur. It’s possible that birders will once again have Myrtle Warblers, Audubon’s Warblers and possibly Goldman’s Warblers and Black-fronted Warblers, the last two in Guatemala and Mexico respectively. Declaring there to be four species where formerly (since 1973) there was only one is a possible bonanza to those who covet a life list.

As we were preparing to leave Wetlands Institute I noticed a flurry of movement in a pond some hundred feet or so distant. Huddled in the grasses there was, I think, the largest aggregation of Greater Yellowlegs I’ve seen for a long time, maybe ever. Confidentially I’m not certain that they are Greater Yellowlegs, it was hard to tell in the light but at that distance I fancied that I made out the slightly up-turned bill on one of them – indicative of Greater Yellowlegs, but if anyone has a better idea please leave a comment.