My Bird of the Day

Cap de bon Desire, Quebec. September 16 2021. The Canadian Government has spared no expense in creating a spectacular whale watching opportunity at Cap de bon Desire, about ten kilometres east of Tadoussac on the north shore of the St Lawrence River.  I had imagined the cape as a commanding headland and place of shipwrecks but it’s not quite that.  It does have a lighthouse to mark a minor turning point along the north shore of the St Lawrence River but the final approach to water’s edge is a gently sloping apron of granite leading from forest to sea; maybe that’s just a landlubber’s perspective.

It is a good and comfortable place, to watch for whales, perhaps just a happy coincidence that whales, principally Minke and Belugas find good reason to cruise by so close to shore.  We sat and watched them come and go for an hour or two and what with Grey Seals and Common Loons to add to the fun, there was always something intriguing out there, just offshore.

It was one of these extras, albeit not in the water, a Canada Jay, that was an instant Bird of the Day. I noticed its arrival on the bare top of a spruce and while all eyes were properly on the water, I followed the jay’s progress.  It didn’t pause anywhere for long, I expect the forest was its preferred and safer place to be, but I was able and pleased to get a few photos.

This is a magical bird. It is capable of showing up quietly and unexpectedly. As Pete Dunne in his excellent Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion, so cleverly puts it, “Ghostlike in its ability to appear suddenly and silently on a limb just above your head….Unusually silent, especially for a jay.”  That spectral quality he suggests is written in the bird’s beautifully subtle white, grey and almost black plumage.

Like the American Pipit of a few days earlier, this is another species that has been subject to some name changes, (not that it cares in the slightest). It was only five or six years ago that the name Canada Jay replaced Gray Jay, but ‘Gray’ was relatively short-lived having been adopted sometime in the early fifties, pushing ‘Canada’ aside for a while.  The reinstatement of Canada Jay was a point of triumphant, nationalist pride to many vocal Canadian ornithologists.

Bonaventure, Quebec. September 11 2021. The first time I drove around the Gaspé Peninsula was a couple of decades ago. I had taken my son back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and decided to take the very long way home to Ontario, circling the Gaspé Peninsula. I have very few memories of it, I think I must have crammed too much driving into too little time. But what scraps I do have include the impression that the south shore of the Gaspé is much less scenic than the north. And so it is, as we found out this week. It is typical of maritime Canada, lots of open space, small towns and villages with indeterminate edges but tied together with a scattering of modest, white with red trim, roadside homes.

Needing a mid-day leg-stretch and hoping that our travelling snacks were at least as tasty and nutritious as the packaging promised, we pulled into a tidy waterside parking lot beside the Quebec Acadian Museum in Bonaventure. Bonaventure is nice looking place, and I fantasised that it would suit me well if, by some kind of sorcery, I were to be transported here and told to make a go of it. It would, of course,  all be contingent on me grappling with day to day life in French.

Congenial as it was, I don’t think we did Bonaventure justice.  For one thing we opted not to check out the museum, we weren’t in a museum frame of mind. Instead we headed out to sightsee the harbour and lighthouse, they’re always worth the visit although when I think about it, once you’ve seen one lighthouse you’ve seen them all. But, from the lighthouse, we found a good walk, a few hundred metres on an elevated path along a breakwater out to its tip. The harbour entrance was to our left and a long seaweed lined beach off to our right. There were fragments of nautical stuff, logs, floats and boat bits, lodged among the huge, black, angular rocks that comprised the breakwater, it made me feel small and fragile imagining of the sort of brutal stormy nights that had tossed them this way.  A brisk wind buffeted and tugged at our clothes raising little offshore whitecaps, a fair wind for a mariner I suppose.

It was as we walked out to the light at the end that I noticed a handful of rather anonymous streaky buff, brown and grey birds picking for food, flitting in and among those large rocks. They rarely stayed still but scampered and bobbed in a rather charming way, reminiscent of Eurasia’s wagtails. They were American Pipits, a bird I rarely see in Ontario. We only encounter them as birds of passage, they spend their summers in the Arctic and winters far to the south of us. That’s what these birds were, on their way south, and perfectly comfortable seeking food in this windswept and debris entangled, shoreline rockpile.

The reference to wagtails is deliberate because pipits and wagtails are of the same family, although wagtails, it must be said are, in general, prettier and perhaps even daintier. Like this Grey Wagtail photographed in England three years ago.

There has been some name-changing going on with this species, too complicated to get into here but suffice to say that it was once called Water Pipit, is now American Pipit and may yet become Buff-bellied Pipit.  Anyway, American Pipit was my Bird of the Day for decorating a rather grim stretch of shoreline and for having that enchanting wagtail air about them.

Île Bonaventure, Quebec. September 11 2021. I think if you want to see Northern Gannets and see them well, you’ll have to find a way to visit one of a handful of oceanic islands, stacks or rocks in the North Atlantic. Bonaventure Island is probably the most accessible to North Americans, and maybe it was a bit of a pilgrimage on my part to go. An easy pilgrimage because we boarded a well packed tour boat that made its purposeful way across a short stretch of open water, churning and wallowing comfortably to allow plenty of camera-worthy views of Rocher-Percé, a tourist landmark.  We got brief glimpses of a Minke Whale, its black back arcing slowly and saw colonies of Grey Seals hauled up on emergent rocks. But for me it was about seeing thousands of Gannets and their colony.

Northern Gannets’ breeding range is limited to the continental shelf waters around Quebec, Newfoundland, Iceland, Scotland and Norway, they wander far and wide from there feeding from the North Atlantic. They are a good-looking bird by any measure made for flight and fishing: larger than any gull, snow white overall with black wingtips and an apricot coloured head. They have the proportions of a glider, long of wing and slender of body, built for riding the steady winds of open waters and for managing steep cliff-faces. As far as I could tell they stick to open waters and either don’t, or wont, fly over the slightest scrap of dry land.

We watched them soar and search, circling watchfully for fish below.  With food in sight they make a side-slip turn to line up a vertical power dive, draw their wings back in a tight W and plunge headlong for the capture.  Sometimes a lucky wave-top sighting brings them in from much lower and they slice to the water at an acute angle. Whichever approach they take, it is only in the last half second, the last metre, that they pull in their wings, tight to body, plunging below a tidy splash.

Woodland Cemetery, Burlington ON. September 1 ^.2021. I had quite forgotten how exciting, and at the same time frustrating, fall warbler-ing can be. Fall migration brings us all the same birds we met in May but now their young too; so, perhaps twice as many individual birds. To we onlooker-birders it’s complicated considerably by the changes in appearance wrought over the past 4 months: In spring there were males, often showy and cleanly marked, and their female companions looking very much like the males but usually a little paler, washed out and less precise – but still head-turners.

But in fall many warbler species look quite different. Without belabouring the point the mix is much enlarged: some adults are quite unchanged (males and females), other adults (m&f) are subtly changed, even more adults (m&f) are drastically changed and finally, there are all those juveniles who may not look anything like their spring parents. Today I spent a lot of time watching and photographing Bay-breasted Warblers of both sexes and all ages, and none of them looked in the slightest like this typical adult male photographed back in May.

I was not particularly expecting to see Bay-breasted Warblers any more than other species; anything can happen, anything could pop up on days like this that follow a change in the weather.  I was certainly surprised to see so many Bay-breasteds and to be honest many of them may have gone unidentified or misidentified by me had it not been for the assurances, tips and prompts of other birders.

Birders anticipate and enjoy encountering warblers when they move through in waves. It is as if pockets of them descend around you and are everywhere for a few minutes, maybe for as much as half an hour, and then they seemingly fade away. I think today I walked into a mega-wave of Bay-breasteds, they seemed to be on every tree flitting to every other tree, never staying still. I took 132 photos and deleted all but about six. I had many like this.

Although they were my Bird of the Day it wasn’t a Bay-breasted Warbler monoculture.  I was also treated to Black–throated Green, Black–throated Blue, and Magnolia Warblers, a surprise Ovenbird, several Northern Parulas, Red–eyed Vireos and perhaps a Philadelphia Vireo. After a full morning I noted that there will be many more such days ahead when I can fire off hundreds of photos to no effect, so why continue spoiling today, so I left for a late lunch.

RBG. Hendrie Valley, Burlington ON. August 27 ^.2021. It was a funny start to birding today, we’d had a cataclysmic thunderstorm late yesterday and the morning dawned dripping and a bit battered. But it was quiet and I wondered whether all the birds had dissolved and washed away. They hadn’t of course and as the sun emerged everything reverted to normal and my transect walk was really quite rewarding. This is the start of the fall transect season, it marks the beginning of two months of fascinating birding, watching late summer give way to autumn and autumn to early winter. For a refresher on what I mean by transects, this post from last year should help, http://www.mybirdoftheday.ca/2020/09/29/birding-a-transect.

There were a few new faces to sort out, almost certainly birds on the move making their way south: couples of Least Flycatchers and American Redstarts and a nice little Spotted Sandpiper. I enjoyed watching a Green Heron stalking a small fish. It stood motionless on a duckweedy log for ages, then eased slowly, and deliberately into a strike pose. It paused, held for a minute and, in a flash, pounced to grab a small catfish; gave it one quick shake and swallowed it.

It was that Spotted Sandpiper that made my day. It was working the storm-swept muddy banks of the creek, lifting and placing its feet carefully, almost ballerina-like, as it picked for food.  Its body bobs and teeters as it moves, a characteristic it shares with Eurasia’s Common Sandpiper, a sister species. These two are closely related and so similar in behaviour and appearance that they almost certainly have a common ancestor. Our Spotted Sandpiper lives up to its name in spring and summer with a boldly spotted breast, but it fades or is moulted out to a very light grey or white by late summer, then it is virtually indistinguishable from its Common Sandpiper sister.

As I walked back to my car, this young male Ruby–throated Hummingbird allowed a couple of photos while it paused briefly between visits to the still wet flowers of Spotted Jewelweed.