My Bird of the Day

June 2nd. 2011. I have only knowingly seen one living Least Bittern, it was at Long Point on Lake Erie many years ago. It’s quite possible that I’ve been very close to more, they’re so hard to spot and very elusive.  Five or six years ago I found a dead one alongside a busy road that bisects a large cattail marsh not far from home.  I took the time to admire it closely for Least Bitterns are very handsome birds. But admiring a dead bird is a bittersweet experience.  It makes me wonder about our ancestors’ fascination with bird taxidermy, all those glass cases of birds caught in suspended action, their eyes never quite right, either deadly flat or overly bright.

Anyway… that was then and this is now. In late May I was told that Least Bitterns and American Bitterns were to be seen and heard over that same large marsh where I found the road kill some years ago.  I spent an hour or two hours walking the length of the busy road looking and listening.  The road is heavily used, probably not more than a minute goes by without a car or truck passing. The problem with the vehicle traffic, apart from near death experiences, is the noise.  From a mile away the hum of car or truck gets in the way of listening closely for birds, and of course as it approaches the noise pollution only gets worse.

Somehow the birds seem not to mind. At this time of the year they’re busy staking out territory or finding a mate, so seeing birds was not a problem.  Not the birds I’d come seeking, but Sora, Virginia Rails, Marsh Wrens, Green Herons and Great Blue Herons were easy to find and I even suspected a Red-headed Woodpecker calling in the surrounding forest.

I consider hearing a bird to be the equal of seeing it, so I was thrilled to identify the calls of Least Bitterns from three or four locations deep in the marsh.  They call softly, but persistently, it’s best described as a muted ‘poo-poo-poo, poo-poo-poo, poo-poo-poo.”. , These singing Least Bitterns made my day. The call of its congener the American Bittern is weird, it’s hard to find a better adjective and I won’t attempt to characterize it, better you Google it and listen to someone’s recording.

Either Bittern (American or Least) is a wonderful sighting.  They are both secretive and both are threatened by humankind’s practices of destroying their marsh habitat.  In our more ignorant days marshes were seen either as opportunities to drain and cultivate, or backfill to eliminate the nighttime miasmas that caused diseases such as typhus, smallpox, cholera and apoplexy (whatever that was).

August 12th. 2011.  Seeing an Acadian Flycatcher in Southern Ontario is noteworthy, but I probably would not have made much of a deal of it if not for the fact that it was a very late and barely fledged nestling that caught our attention and it explained a mystery bird that I’d been unable to place half an hour earlier.

August is a time to turn your attention to migrant shorebirds.  The Arctic nesters, having raised their broods, are starting to head south and birders check out mudflats and sewage lagoons (more on this another day) in quest of shorebirds: sandpipers, dowitchers and plovers.  My companion and I had spent a couple of hours on the fringes of a local wastewater treatment facility (government-speak for sewage pond) enjoying the varied bird life.  Sitting protected from the wind we’d watched Solitary Sandpipers, Lesser Yellowlegs and Semi-palmated Plovers find delicacies in the half digested human waste. A Northern Harrier swept by sending the shorebirds piping in wheeling flocks and dozens of Bobolinks, the males no longer  dressed in black, white and yellow, fed in the nearby goldenrods and thistles.

But we left that feast of migrants to check out a quiet wooded valley to see what late summer does for trout streams and fern glades. As we explored the forest I heard a constant and metronomic ‘pikk’  ‘pikk’. It was a small bird that hung close but refused to show itself. Frankly I gave up trying to identify it because it doesn’t really matter much what it is; it’s far more important to let it be.

As we went to leave the forest my companion pulled me to an abrupt stop to point out an eye level bird just a few feet ahead of us.  It was juvenile, barely fledged and obviously dependent on parents for food, within moments we could tell that we were intruders in the middle of a family group as more youngsters hopped around and adult birds moved in.

The youngster ahead of us and then the parent that came to feed it were clearly flycatchers, and then it all fit together: Acadian Flycatchers, the habitat and the mystery calls. A delightful Southern Ontario rarity and bird of the day. 

October 11th. 2011.The signature colours of N.W British Columbia in mid-October are gold, orange and yellow set off against the dark expanses of the spruces and mountains. This colour scheme is taken up by the Varied Thrush, a striking bird, similar and closely related to the American Robin, and found in dense, moist coniferous forests. My first fleeting view of a Varied Thrush came this cool morning against a soundscape of rushing mountain streams.

I spent part of the afternoon scanning a still, small lake trying to make out distant birdlife. It was the right time and place because within minutes a Western Grebe paddled past at close quarters. It was my bird of the day. Two Red-necked Grebes and a pair of American Cootes fed not far off, a small group of Lesser Scaup wheeled by in tight formation and in the distance a Black Tern (BLTE) picked food from the lake surface.

The BLTE had been a puzzle to me for several days, I had seen it before but at such a distance that I was far from sure about it. It was swooping in large loops and twists with a light flitting flight, rather like a nighthawk, and making low passes over the water to pick at food. No field guide lent support to the idea that it might be a BLTE, but today it was close enough to make out clearly.  One of the lessons of this week (learned with Sandhill Cranes and now BLTE) is that the field guides are rather sketchy about range when it comes to places like the interior of British Columbia.

Anyway, here’s the Western Grebe.

October 10th. 2011.  The Wren is how I first knew it; just the Wren – popular country lore called it Jenny Wren; Troglodytes troglodytes. Impossibly tiny  brown birds, the size of a baby’s fist, with an intense, complex song like the dark and tangled brush piles they favour. Much  later I discovered that the (Jenny) Wren that I grew up with is the same bird as America’s Winter Wren, also Troglodytes troglodytes.

In time I learned that wrens as a family are birds of the New World, consequently the greatest number of wren species is found in the Americas; nine species in North America and more than thirty in Mexico.

Things have changed since I was first birding.  The (Jenny /Winter) Wren is a bird of perhaps many  species, so  Troglodytes troglodytes has been split. Not sure if you’re following this, but anyway now there’s Troglodytes pacificus, the Pacific Wren.

On a walk up an severe cleft in a B.C mountainside I heard the familiar peppery ‘tchkkk’ and with a bit of coaxing, managed to catch a glimpse of my first Pacific Wren.  Just as compact, just as busy, just as confident in its tinnyness as it’s former congeners, T. troglodytes.

A new-to-me species is deservedly (though not always) bird of the day and Pacific Wren was it today.  Frankly the competition was slender, a visit to a stunningly beautiful lake earlier in the day only produced 2 Red-necked Grebes, a handful of Common Loons and a female Wood Duck, while a Common Raven was calling hollowly from the other side.

Here’s one of the Red-necked Grebes.