birds – Page 32

Peering in the pond, part 1: Don’t fall in!

With the days getting longer, and the turning forward of the clocks a few weeks ago, daylight lingers well into the evenings these days. When I finished the day’s house renovation tasks today there was still ample light to go padding about outside, and I wanted to get out for a bit to enjoy the relatively mild temperatures. It was beautiful and sunny all day today, and with the combination of the two factors the snow was doing its best to melt. Of course, with the giant snowpiles we have it’s hard to notice much of a difference, but there was a steady rivulet of water running down the tire-tracks in the driveway all day, as if there was a spring welling up near the house and feeding it.

I decided to go down and see if the warm sun had awakened anything in the ice-free water of the little vernal ponds in the backyard. There’s two small ponds, connected through small channels, both of which mostly or entirely dry up in the thick heat of summer. One I remember skating on when I was quite young. It’s since grown in with seedlings from the Silver Maples in the front yard, creating a miniature maple swamp. The largest of the young trees are now a good 10 cm (roughly 4 in) in diameter-at-breast-height, and while it’s a pretty, picturesque scene, the leaf fall has mostly choked the waters so that the pond that I recall being too deep to wade in even with our rubber boots is now fairly shallow through most of its length. Very little inhabits this pond anymore, although I regularly return to look.

The other pond is in the middle of the fenced-in field the horses get turned out in, but despite the disturbance it sometimes gets as a result, the horses generally aren’t all that interested in it and life does well there. (There’s actually two much larger swamps close nearby, but they’re harder to access without a pair of hipwaders.) It was to this little pond that I headed this afternoon.

The snow still lies thick over much of the pond. Portions of it have melted to expose the water, which was free of ice in the warm sunshine and mild air, but more than half is still concealed by snow. The crusty layer over the surface of the snow allowed me to gently pick my way across without breaking through to my knees, which was generally appreciated. The snow mounds up around the vegetation, creating little hummocks from which the red dogwood branches poke up, reminding me a bit of anthills.

There was a fair bit of bird activity in the area. Behind me, in the larger true swamp, the Red-winged Blackbirds were perched at the top of the small trees calling loudly their familiar “oak-a-lee!” (despite that in most field guides it’s phoneticized as “konk-a-ree”, this is how I learned it growing up). There were a couple of Common Grackles up there with them, doing their best rusty creak.

The dogwood clumps are a favourite foraging spot of both the overwintering sparrows and the local chickadees. I’m not really sure what they’re eating when they’re foraging in or under these bushes, but there’s often a lot of little birds hopping among the branches. There were a few chickadees in the area while I was standing in the middle of the pond, and I watched them for a little bit.

This one came down and had a bath while I was standing there. Naturally, I had my short lens on the camera, and by the time I got the long lens switched over he’d finished up and hopped up to a branch in the back of the clump of dogwood to fluff up and dry off. The water through most of the melted area is quite shallow and perfect for bathing. Well, for the birds, anyway. I think I’d find it a little muddy and cold at the moment.

A couple of American Tree Sparrows were hanging out in the dogwood as well. This one gave me a rather pensive stare before moving into the thicker cover of the bushes. In the areas where the snow has now melted I could imagine there being a fair bit of grass seed and other such food items exposed that had been buried through the winter.

After watching the birds for a bit I turned my attention back to the water. What I was specifically looking for was fairy shrimp. While growing up, we’d come down to look for these every spring once the snow melted, but I think I’m perhaps a tad early yet. Nonetheless, it’s worth a check.

I was a little hasty and forgot that I was standing on an ice ledge. As I moved to the water’s edge to peer in, the snow under my feet cracked and I nearly fell in. Whoops! I did manage to catch my balance without falling and back away from the danger zone. And then circled around to approach from the open, muddy area.

I picked my way across the little patches of grass and stone, the few areas that aren’t submerged, till I reached the point where the water began to deepen. I squatted down on my heels, peered into the water and saw……

Easter birds

At my parents’ for Easter dinner yesterday, I popped outside for some around-the-house birding while waiting for the turkey to come out of the oven. I decided not to venture further because there’s still quite a bit of snow on the ground, and with the (slightly) warming temperatures it’s quite soft now. Also, the driveway practically requires galoshes to navigate cleanly, and I haven’t unpacked mine from the winter yet.

There was still a fair bit of activity even just around the house, which is where birds congregate due to the presence of the feeders. I had to wait a little while, but I did finally get to see the Red-winged Blackbirds that my mom had reported arrived the other day. They usually come to the seed spread out on the driveway in front of the house, but yesterday they were sticking to the cast-off litter under the feeders in the backyard, possibly because of the seven cars parked in the driveway turnaround surrounding the seed. One also visited the suet a couple of times, which was where I got the best photos of him.

This is just a youngster, a second-year bird, meaning he was hatched last year (as birds’ ages are labeled by calendar year – he won’t truly be a year old till the summer). You can tell because the black feathers on his back and wings are fringed with orangey-brown, a characteristic of young males.

American Goldfinch and Red-winged Blackbird

Behind the blackbird, a couple of American Goldfinches were coming to the nyger feeder. They’ve been mysteriously absent for the last couple of months, only just starting to return recently. I’m not sure where they all went. Normally they spend the winter mobbing the feeders in fairly substantial numbers. The most I’ve seen at a time since mid-winter has been three.

The males, like this guy, are starting to get their brilliant summer yellow plumage. You can see it all beginning to come in around his face. In the middle of winter you can still tell the males from the females despite their relatively drab plumage because some males will retain slightly brighter yellow faces. Also, their wings and tails are a sharp, crisp black, rather than the duller brownish-black that females sport.

The starlings have settled in. There’s at least a couple of pairs present now, with the two males often counter-singing to each other from their respective territorial perches. This particular male seems to have chosen the north peak of the house as his nest site of choice. Here he pauses in his singing to check out the activity (me) below. Two starlings, a Blue Jay and a White-breasted Nuthatch are the birds to have discovered the suet dough, so far. The nuthatch takes respectable small pieces, but the other two species really toss it back when they visit the feeder.

While standing out there watching the feeder birds, I glanced up at a crow crossing the the sky, and happened to spot, up high behind it, this Red-shouldered Hawk moving with purpose to the north. It was right at the reach of my (relatively) short 300mm lens, this is a close crop on the original image. There are a pair of Red-shoulders that live in the neighbourhood every year. I’m not sure where they nest, other than that it’s somewhere to the west of my parents’ place. I regularly hear them calling from that direction in the summer.

I recall some years ago there being some concern over decreasing populations in the province, but I think these declines are more limited to the southwestern portion, west and southwest of Toronto. That said, the recent Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas recorded them in quite a number of areas where they hadn’t been 20 years ago. There is some likelihood that this is due in part to new surveys that were implemented for the species by Bird Studies Canada in 1991, contributing a lot more targeted effort than took place in the first atlas. Still, even taking this into consideration, the results of the atlas are encouraging, and probably suggest increasing forest cover in the south of the province as abandoned fields regenerate. They remain an uncommon species in most of my “home range”, and I’m always pleased to see one.

Also on the raptor front, although I wasn’t able to get a photo, I spotted a Turkey Vulture circling over the escarpment, the first of the season. They migrate south for the winter, so are always a welcome sight in the spring. Come summer you can usually see at least one or two over the escarpment where the topography of the cliffs creates great thermals for soaring. During the peak of migration you can have up to a couple dozen.

This Common Redpoll has been hanging around the feeders for a little while, she was there earlier in the week as well. She doesn’t seem to be doing too well, although I’m not sure what she might be ill with. She was feeding periodically, and moving around on the ground, but at other times would just sit on the feeder perch or at the top of the birdhouse in the centre of the garden, looking around but otherwise not doing much.

She’s identifiable primarily because she’s always fluffed up into a near-spherical shape. Fluffing like that is a bird’s way of putting on extra layers – when we would go grab an extra sweater, the birds will fluff up their feathers. The amount of fluffing is similar to the number of layers of clothing, as the air pocket trapped under the feathers, which traps warm air close to the body, will increase as the feathers are further raised. None of the other birds were fluffed this much, it wasn’t that cold out. Birds that are sick will usually fluff their feathers as well, I suspect in a similar reaction to our burying under the covers when we have a fever and are suffering chills.

She was too active for me to consider trying to catch her, and she is continuing to eat, so that’s in her favour. However, she was still sitting at the feeder at dusk, one lone redpoll. I hope she gets well.

Life and death in a birdhouse

With the nice weather yesterday, and perhaps also as a symbol of the new season, I took my screwdriver and went out to clean out the birdhouses to make room for this year’s residents. When I was growing up we didn’t have birdhouses set up. I’m not sure why, because we always had feeders. Perhaps it just hadn’t occurred to us. Sometime in university I think I won a birdhouse in a bird-related contest that I’ve since forgotten the details of. We put it up that summer, and it wasn’t long before a House Wren set up shop. The burbling song brought such life to the garden – not that the garden hadn’t been lively before, but the wren just added that sparkle.

There’s now five and a half birdhouses out in the garden: four traditional single-unit houses, and a double-unit house. The double-unit is the above covered wagon, which my mom won at a convention or AGM some years ago. By the end of the summer, every single one of these houses has been checked out or used, and they all need cleaning the next winter. The primary residents are the House Wrens, although we have had Tree Swallows and Eastern Bluebirds using a couple of them during the early part of the season (once they’ve fledged the wrens move in and raise a second brood there). There’s perhaps as many as three pairs of wrens on the property, although it can be a little hard to keep track of them.

Both compartments of the covered wagon had been stuffed with twigs. Wrens make very characteristic nests in boxes, you can always tell it’s a wren when you take it out. Somehow they manage to tote these twigs, many longer than their own body, back to the nestbox, pull them through the small opening, and stuff them into every corner. They fill every nook and cranny in the box, and the result is a firm rectangular nest that holds its shape even when you take it out of the box.

This wren has lined its nest with horse hair, which is abundant at the property, what with there being five of them plus a donkey within easy flying distance. You can tell which horses donated their hair to the nest by the colour of the strands. There’s also downy breast feathers from several birds, which suggests that this was a late-summer nest, after some other species had already finished raising their brood and had started moulting in fresh feathers. The bright orange one is obviously from a Baltimore Oriole; the others I’m less sure about, but could possibly be from a robin.

In the compartment on the other side of the wagon was this nest, which fell apart as I removed it. It had no lining and appeared to never have been finished. House Wren males will build multiple nest structures that they then show off to their prospective females. The female decides which one she likes best, and then works to finish lining it to start the family in. You can tell a lot about the surrounding trees by what the wren has stuffed in its box; in this case, the box isn’t far from a grove of cedars that would have provided a fair bit of easy, short building material.

This is the Tree Swallows’ box. They usually arrive early in the spring (perhaps in the next couple weeks) and start checking out the boxes in the yard. They invariably choose this one in the end. They raise one brood and then move off. They leave at about the same time that the wren is looking to start up a second brood (or a third), and he’ll often move in to build his own in there.

Here’s the house with the door open. I can’t recall now whether we cleaned this house out between tenants or not, but the wren’s twigs go right down to the bottom of the box, so it’s possible we did, or he stuffed more in there around the swallow’s nest. Either way it’s very much a wren nest now. They like for their nests to be a certain height below the entry hole, and will fill the bottom up with twigs to bring the lined nest up to that height as necessary.

The hole in the covered wagon is much closer to the bottom than in this nestbox, and so the twigs were used more to fill the back of the space than to fill the bottom, you could actually see the snow through the bottom of the cup. In this case they needed to bring the height up a fair bit, and the bottom two or three inches are solid twigs. I’m not sure what laundry Mom was hanging out on the line at the time, but it may have been a sleeping bag or comforter – the lining at the top of the nest is partially composed with synthetic fluffy filling.

When I opened the nest up to check out what the wren had used in building it, I was surprised to discover something in it. At first I thought it was a clump of fur, maybe leftover from an owl’s rabbit kill or something like that, that the wren had picked up. But it turned out to be a little baby wren, old enough to have fledged, but still in the nest. Why?

The answer was in its position. One leg was stretched out way in front of its body, and in removing the little bird from the nest I found a strand of the synthetic filling wrapped around its foot. I actually had to snap the strand to get the bird out of the nest. Evidently the nestling had become caught, and couldn’t leave the nest when its siblings did. It would have starved to death as a result. It’s rather sad.

The nestling was soft in my hand. They are the most beautiful mousey brown, even the colour suggests soft. Their wing feathers are a little rustier, particularly when young, and barred in neat lines characteristic of wrens. I left it in the nest contents where I found it. I feel sad for it, but I also have to consider that this is nature. Perhaps only one of those young birds that left the nest last summer will survive to return to the area this spring. A bird’s first year is brutal, and the death rate among first-year birds is very high. Once a bird has made it through its first year its chances of surviving to three or four years, or perhaps even longer, is greatly increased. So instead of dwelling on this one death, I look forward to the return of these cheerful little birds, the ones who’ve made it through another winter, in the coming month.

Solitude in the heart of the city

This morning I got up early, leaving Blackburnian still asleep in bed, and slipped out the door with my camera and sketchbook to go to one of my favourite spots in the city. Unlike the Rouge, this area is just a short drive, perhaps ten minutes along in-town roads, located in a section of the Don River valley. I discovered it a couple of years ago, when I was hired by the city to do a report for them on one of their properties. This was the area I chose to use as a control site during my study. I chose it initially because it was un-groomed, natural and wild, and over the course of the next several months I really fell in love with the location.

It’s accessed from a small park and playground, through a short, narrow mini-ravine that runs between two rows of houses. The trails are used almost exclusively by the local residents for jogging and dog-walking. I encountered very few people on the trails during my surveys. This morning, in the hour and a half I’m there, I meet no one. This is one of the things I love about the place; it’s quiet, peaceful, relatively undisturbed, and you can almost forget you’re in the heart of the city.

Halfway down the entry trail I notice these snowballs. The sides of the mini-ravine here are steep, and evidently something, perhaps a fallen twig or bit of bark, began sliding down the side of the slope, gathering snow about it as it went. It’s not the typical snowball you see when snow rolls down a hill, and I have to assume that the object slid rather than rolled, and spun as it did so to create these neat doughnut shapes.

The entry trail meets up with the main network, and I turn to follow it to the north. It runs along the base of another set of homes. I think how magnificent the view from their back porches must be, and then I think they must command a real premium on house price for such a location. Indeed, most ravine-backing homes are way out of my price range in the city, usually starting at $500-600k for the small run-down places, and going up to well over a million for the really nice ones. Toronto is a wealthy city. It has to be, in order for so many people to live here, with property prices being what they are. In the neighbourhood where we rent you’re lucky to find anything in good shape for less than $300k. I couldn’t afford to buy here on my own. Even Blackburnian and I together would be hard-pressed to find something we could afford jointly. Who are these people, making all this money?

I turn west down a small side trail, and am afforded my only real view of the city as a backdrop to the park, with a few tall apartment buildings towering over the treetops, at the far side of the Don. A short distance down the trail and the city melts back into the trees, hidden from view, and forgotten, for the moment.

The side trail comes out at a bluff, overlooking a bend in the Don where a gravel bed has been exposed. During my surveys I always scanned the gravel for Killdeer or Spotted Sandpipers, but never saw either, despite it looking like a good spot for them. I did once see a Black-crowned Night Heron fishing from one of the low-hanging trees, but the bend, for all its nice scenery, was always disappointingly empty.

I pause, and look out over the river. The sun is peeking above the trees and casting a warm glow on the bare canopy of the forest across the way. It hasn’t yet reached the river, or even where I’m standing. I briefly consider stopping here, but decide I’d like to sit someplace in the sun, and move on.

The trail goes down a small incline (decline?) and where it levels out it passes through a small grove of spruce. Their lower branches have been pruned from them years ago to make room for trail users to pass through, which gives them an unusually domesticated look, for someplace far from the nearest backyard. In this natural tunnel I recall frequently encountering chickadees, kinglets, and Yellow-rumped Warblers during my spring surveys. There is no one here at the moment.

In other areas, though, the trees are full of song. The cardinals have woken with the dawn, and perch in the upper branches of the poplars, illuminated by the warm orange rays of the rising sun. There are at least a dozen of them, I estimate, throughout the area. They all belt out their declaration of possession of their claimed bits of woodland. “Cheer! Cheer! Whit-whit-whit-whit! … Birdy, birdy, birdy-birdy-birdy-birdy!”

The other birds join in. I hear a pair of White-breasted Nuthatches arguing back and forth at each other over the ownership of a particular patch of cedars, and briefly glimpse a short chase as they dash through a small clearing. A pair of male Downy Woodpeckers has at it over the attentions of a female, who seems rather blasé about the whole episode. House Finches fly over the site in groups of two or three, and I hear the odd male singing. Chickadees move through a patch of hawthorn, calling to one another, and a trio of crows perches atop the maples and caw loudly. The birds seem to be as happy about the sunny morning and approach of spring as I am.

I come out from the spruce grove along side the river, at a lower area along its banks. The river takes another turn here and is lost from sight, winding its way through the city toward Lake Ontario. It is beautiful here, natural and undisturbed, but along its length it will run through less pristine areas, ultimately coming out through an industrial zone at its mouth before exiting into the lake. A freeway runs north and south through a large part of the valley system, but is far enough away here that I don’t notice it. A rail bed also runs along the valley, and a train thunders by while I’m there. It’s just beyond the ridge, and I can’t see it, but I can certainly hear it. I’ve seen salmon in these parts of the river before, and it seems at odds with the surrounding city, particularly considering the state of the mouth of the river. Nature forges onward.

I decide to take a trail branch that I’ve never been down. On this section of the trail I had always been in the middle of my survey and was unable to follow the side branches. They were often muddy, too, compared to the main trail. However, a few people have been down here recently, and the snow is packed enough to walk along comfortably. I come through another small grove of spruce and the trail widens into a small open area. The sun is streaming in here, and the spruce protect me from the wind. The clearing feels cozy, and I decide this is the spot. I find a log to settle on, and pull out my sketchbook.

I am not ordinarily a field-sketcher. Usually I’m too busy watching birds or taking photos to settle down somewhere and sketch. I admire those who do, though. Debby at Drawing The Motmot is a fabulous field-sketcher. I absolutely love her rainforest studies, which are done in pen while sitting in the field, over as many as three days.

While I have the skill to execute those sorts of drawings, I am sure, I also know I don’t have the practice, or the patience, right now. There’s too much to do, to look at, and I haven’t disciplined myself to sit still long enough to study the landscape and develop the eye necessary to render such detail so accurately. I content myself to sitting for perhaps 20 minutes, soaking up the warm sun, and casually sketching the trail in front of me. Perhaps I’ll make an effort this year to pause more often and sketch a little more.

My recent night life

I have been hard at work the last little bit trying to wrap up some reports I have due this weekend. Almost done! It will be a relief to wrap up another project (not to mention, get paid for it). However, I did have a chance to go out owling with Blackburnian recently. We didn’t see much, and nothing responded to our attempts at calls. The one bird that was very obliging for us was the above Barred Owl.

Barred Owls are very cooperative birds. While many owls will take off if you approach too close, start making noise, or just generally begin doing weird things like flashing bright lights at them, Barred Owls will often just sit there and observe you. One has to wonder what’s going through their head as they do so. Curiosity? Amusement? This one is from last winter. He does kinda look like he’s laughing at me.

Barred Owls are one of the most frequently heard owls at my parents’ place. They’re often more common than Great Horned Owls, surprisingly. As such, I have a bit of a soft spot for Barred Owls. I love the patterns of their feathers. You can certainly see how they get their name. Their closely related sister species, the Spotted Owl, is an endangered bird of the western old growth forests (and therefore under considerable contention among different groups). Here, the Barred Owl suffers no similar scrutiny, but it has actually been slowly increasing in abundance, likely in part related to the maturation of many forests in the southern part of the province where old fields have returned to forest.

What big, glowing eyes you have. Owls have some amazing adaptations that help them detect and capture their prey. Here you can see the giant eyes that allow them excellent vision in the dark. However, because of the positioning of their ears, with one being higher than the other, owls can actually triangulate using just sound, and can capture prey in pitch blackness. The round facial disc also acts as an acoustic parabola, amplifying sounds and directing them to the ears.

Another adaptation of owls is their ability to fly nearly silently. They have special barbs on the front of their flight feathers which minimize the turbulence of air flowing over the wing. There are two hypotheses of why they have this adaptation. The first, and most obvious, is that it allows them to sneak up on prey better. But hawks also hunt small rodents and don’t require this adaptation. Another hypothesis is that it allows them to hear better, by minimizing the sound of air tumbling over the wings, which is important when sound is such a key hunting tool.

In the above photo you can also just barely see the front talons poking out from the bird’s breast feathers. Barred Owls have massive, powerful feet and talons that allow them to latch onto their prey items when they grab them. In the fall, TTPBRS does Northern Saw-whet Owl banding, and because saw-whets are a prey item of Barred Owls, there’s always the potential to catch one of these big owls in the net. Fortunately, we never have. I say fortunately because, although I would love to have the opportunity to see one of these beautiful birds up close, I have no desire to get anywhere near those feet!