nature – Page 3

Walker’s Woods in winter

I am not, and never will be, a city girl. I’m here currently mostly because of circumstances, rather than choice. I grew up in the countryside, and find myself going a little stir-crazy if I’m stuck in the city too long, or if several of the city’s inconveniences pile on me at once. The problem with being in the city is that in order to get anywhere to go for a hike in a natural setting to relax and calm your mind generally requires a bit of an undertaking. It becomes a concerted effort, instead of a quick pop outside to hike through the woods at your backdoor, as it was as a kid, and any outing usually kills half your day, rather than being a short hour-long hike. As a result, I don’t get out nearly as much as I might like.

Today we decided to visit a TRCA property northeast of Toronto. It’s called Walker Woods, and it, along with the neighbouring Glen Major Forest, are sites in consideration for possible future expansion projects of the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station (a project of TRCA). The outing had the dual purpose of getting outdoors, and having a first look at the general area to assess the landscape.

The snow was deep, and we kept to the trails, which had been flattened by many cross-country skiers. The footing was still slippery, though, as the snow wasn’t hard-packed and your toe would dig into it as you walked, a little like walking on a sandy beach. After walking a little distance we decided to loop back along a trail branch that would take us back to the road and try driving some sideroads to look for open-field birds or, if we were lucky, perhaps a flock of berry-eating Pine Grosbeaks or Bohemian Waxwings. We found neither, though I did think as we were starting to head home, along a busier street, that I caught a glimpse of a Northern Shrike perched atop a spindly little tree in a field.

Much of the area we walked was these pine plantations. Likely planted either as windbreaks, back when this landscape was still mostly used for farming, or for commercial harvesting, they have very characteristic, obvious linear formations. These sorts of plantations look unnatural, because of the pattern of the trees and their uniform age, and I don’t even feel make great habitat because they lack the diversity of structure that encourages many species to inhabit the woods. There’s no understory. The only small plants growing there were small pine seedlings, and even these were few.

At one spot along the trail there’s an old shelter, which looks like it may have been used to house either farming equipment like tractors, or hay bales for storage. Given its placement in the woods, it seems like an odd place to keep either, but it’s possible it hasn’t been used in a while and the young forest had since grown up around it. Or, if it was used to house equipment, that could be brought in through the trees.

A bit further down the trail I spotted the remains of this foundation, slowly growing in with young saplings, possibly black cherry, and a couple of birches. Presumably this was the homestead that went with the old storage shed, but it could also have been another barn or outbuilding.

We walked back along the road to where we had parked the car. In several sections the fence was overgrown with vines and dried goldenrod. I didn’t take a close look at the vines, but I’m not sure that I’d be able to tell the difference between wild grape and Virginia Creeper without their leaves. I scanned these open fields and the fenceposts that lined them for any small white lumps that might reveal themselves to be Snowy Owls, but with no luck.

In many spots along the trails there were young beech saplings, brightly coloured against the white snow and dark evergreen forest as they retain their dried leaves throughout the winter. The phenomenon is called marcescence, and applies in this case to leaves withering without falling off. There’s some debate about the reasons it happens, but it’s noted only to really happen on very young sapling beech or the lower, young branches of older trees. I read a good blog post about it recently, but I’ll be darned if I could find it now to link to it. (Edit: I just found it. It’s posted by Carolyn over at Roundtop Ruminations.)

On the drive home I noticed a number of flocks of geese heading north over the fields. I associate these sorts of large, multiple-flock movements with migration so… hopefully a sign that spring is on the way?

Make a list, check it twice

For Christmas, I got a number of books, one of which was Julie Zickefoose‘s new book, Letters From Eden. I read it in just a couple of sittings, and enjoyed every page (some day I wanna be just like Julie!). Another one I got was Good Birders Don’t Wear White. It’s a collection of “essays” by some of the country’s best-known and leading birders and naturalists. There are some good stories and advice in it, but one of them that I thought was a particularly good suggestion was submitted by Julie as well. It’s titled, “Write it down: making a calendar”.

A bunny in my mom’s garden – photo credit my mom

Many naturalists, and birders especially, are great at keeping track of what they see. Usually, however, it’s in the form of lists. Here I have my backyard list. There is my year list. This one’s my life list. Lists are great because it’s a record of what’s been seen. The more specific the list, the more useful it can be later (for instance, a list for your backyard is more useful than a list for a state or province because it’s more specific to a certain spot; not everything on your state list will be encountered in a given spot in the state). The best lists are those that are accompanied by extra information. Rather than simply being a list of names, more details are attached to each name. For instance, recording the date you first saw a particular species in your backyard, or the location that you saw a certain species in your state.

This is the basis to Julie’s suggestion. Keep a calendar of your observations. When you see the first robin of spring, write it down. When the first green frog starts to trill in the swamp, make a note. Record notable observations you have, such as a bluebird feeding babies, or a fox trotting across your backyard. If you do this over the course of a few years you start to get a very precise picture of the timing of nature. You have a great reference to refer to when you want to know when something happens, or where, or even if. There are some great online tools for tracking bird observations, the best perhaps being eBird.com (or eBird.ca for Canadians).

The Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station, which I currently volunteer for, has essentially created such a calendar through careful records of observations every day for five years. It’s really interesting to compare arrival dates for species to previous earliest (or latest) dates, or to look at frequency (you actually have numbers to back yourself up when you make the statement, “this is the most bluebirds I’ve ever seen in a spring!”)

My mom has lamented recently that she wishes she’d kept a journal or record of her observations. My parents have lived at the same home in the southern Ontario countryside for nearly 30 years. By now my mom has a pretty good idea of when the Red-winged Blackbirds arrive, or when the spring peepers start to sing. But it’s still a general idea when, and there’s no record of whether it’s the same as it was 30 years ago. My parents are planning on moving and were thinking to leave some nature notes, including a species list, for the new owners. Such a calendar would have been a great introduction to the home.

Look at that great bill! And those out-of-this-world eyes!

I myself have kept a very casual personal journal on some of my birding observations over recent years, going back to 2004. It’s been helpful to refer to for some things, when I saw a certain bird, or took a particular trip. This week, I looked back through it for the date the American Woodcock arrive here. I had been thinking that they should be showing up soon. I had the notion in my head that they start their dusk display flights at the end of February.

Well, I browsed through all my late-February entries, and saw no mention of it. I tried early March in case I’d written it down late. Still nothing. Finally, it twigged that I was a month early, they won’t return till late March. Sure enough, there were the entries, at the end of March.

How disappointing. But at least it saves me from trudging out through the snow at dusk this week looking for birds that aren’t there yet.

(For those who were curious, that leading photo is from a point count survey I did one spring for the bird research station. I had forgotten my pen and notepad, but handily found a bit of charred wood to make notes with; the list washed away in the next rain. Hopefully you’ll have paper available when making your lists.)

Hiking the Rouge

Today was Family Day here in Ontario, a newly-created holiday courtesy of our provincial premiere, who believed that the unbroken stretch between New Year’s Day and Easter was just too long for an employee to reasonably have to suffer through. This was the first year the new holiday has been in effect, and there’s still some kinks to be ironed out. Federal employees such as postal workers and some unionized groups were on the job today because the holiday hasn’t been negotiated into their contracts.

Blackburnian had the day off today, however, and I’m basically self-employed at the moment and take whatever days I want off, so we decided this afternoon to take advantage of the mild temperatures and head out to the Rouge Valley, out in the east near the Toronto Zoo. Back when I was in university I had a job for a couple summers inventorying the birds of the Rouge Park. It was very informal, I basically spent the summer hiking around as I pleased, trying to cover everywhere but not following any sort of rigorous protocol. It was a fabulous job, and I have a very fond spot for the Rouge because of my time spent there getting to know it and its birds. Despite this, I’ve rarely been back since then, and I’d never been there in winter.

The top photo is an image of the valley, taken from the top of a high bluff overlooking the Rouge River. Blackburnian’s standing at the top of the cliff, to give you a sense of scale. This isn’t a little bluff that you’re going to shimmy down to the water. The Rouge Valley contains two primary rivers, the Rouge and the Little Rouge, which joins it. This is the Little Rouge. Doesn’t look so little here, but the Rouge is a bit wider and deeper. Most of the river is upland forest, but there’s the odd patch of wetland here and there.

The Rouge is a gorgeous, mature woodland through most of the Park’s valleys, and it can be easy to lose yourself among the extensive habitat. However, reminders of the city next door are hard to ignore. On the horizon are apartment buildings and rooftops. The trails run 1.6 km along either side of the river, between two roads. Road noise from the city carries the short distance into the park. People come out here to walk their dogs, and many of the dog owners don’t pick up after their pets.

Or themselves.

But the scenery is beautiful. The trails cover a number of different habitats, starting in scrubby meadow at the edge of the woods, passing through a powerline corridor, and then entering into mature upland forest. It’s a mixed deciduous-coniferous forest, with the evergreen component mostly hemlock. The trees here are no western Red Cedars, but put in perspective are pretty impressive themselves.

We didn’t see many birds. Of course, winter birding is like that, very hit-or-miss and sparse even when there’s hits. This guy was the indisputable highlight of the outing. A Hermit Thrush, very out of place in the Toronto snow. Seeing a Hermit in the Toronto area isn’t unusual, per se, but it’s certainly very uncommon. This is the first one I’ve seen around here in the winter. Virtually all Hermits leave the province for the winter, though they don’t go far and may winter in the northeastern states.

This guy had found himself a stash of Black Cherry berries. I didn’t even notice the cherries until I saw him pop one. I watched him eat three or four before a movement I made, possibly shifting my weight or adjusting the camera, startled him and he flew off to a nearby hemlock.

Frozen berries such as these are a large component in many overwintering birds’ diets. Two species of northern birds (Pine Grosbeak and Bohemian Waxwing) will feed pretty much exclusively on frozen berries such as crabapple, chokecherry, buckthorn, hawthorn, etc. There seemed to be a fair bit of Black Cherry in the forest, which should give the Hermit Thrush lots to eat.

The first group of birds we came across were these robins, perhaps 20 of them. Nearly all robins leave the Toronto area in the winter, too, although in recent years increasingly more will stick around through the winter and feed on frozen berries in the woods as well as urban gardens. Another great reason to plant berry-bearing bushes!

We found a few groups of chickadees foraging in cedar stands along the floodplain of the river. Blackburnian pished at all of them, but these were the only group to respond strongly. They were seriously pished off! You can even see the right one yelling, “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee!” Chickadees drop the “chick-a” from their call when they’re responding to perceived threats or dangers. Some research has suggested the number of “dee”s is correlated with the seriousness of the threat, with more meaning a greater danger.

This Red-breasted Nuthatch pished in with one of the flocks of chickadees. It was the fourth and final species of the outing. I was thinking as we were leaving that it wasn’t a great diversity or abundance of birds, and would’ve made for a very lacklustre Christmas Bird Count. I loved the haziness of the periphery of this image created by peeking through a gap in the foliage.

We walked nearly 4 km on very uneven, slippery trails (not groomed trails, so they were simply packed down by many feet, and every step you were trying not to slide). It’s the furthest I’ve walked since the fall, I’m pretty sure, and the addition of the trail condition means we’ll probably be feeling achey legs tomorrow! Ah, but it was good to get out.