Snow day - II

With the added inducement of cracked corn, birds of 20 species swarmed our feeders all day. It was hard not to stop and gawk out any of our windows.

There were seven or eight species under the feeder at any given time - click on image to view large and count the species.

Buffleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Mallards and Wood Ducks swam off the dock.

Redpoll numbers grew through day - there were 50 or so here at supper time.

Of course there were the regulars - Hairy, Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, White-breasted and Red-breasted Nuthatches, Black-capped Chickadees, Blue Jays and Crows.

The four Fox Sparrows stood out among the scores of Dark-eyed Juncos, American Tree Sparrows, Purple Finches and American Goldfinches.

Snow day!

The warm weather that sent the salamanders marching also thawed much of our bay over the weekend. Ones and twos of Common and Hooded Mergansers, Wood Ducks and Mallards are foraging along the edge of the receding ice. I heard my first Eastern Phoebe in the early evening and a few hours later, a Woodcock displayed over the nearby gravel pit while an unseen flock of Common Goldeneye passed overhead. All were welcome additions to the BIGBY list, which has grown to 40 species.

We are now experiencing a late spasm of winter weather - about 5 cm of snow has fallen with more expected this afternoon - tough on the Phoebe's I suspect. There was lots of activity at the feeder all day - 17 species. Even a Robin landed in the snow among the juncos and poked around the sunflower seed hulls.

Dark-eyed Junco and American Goldfinch.

Fox Sparrow

Sparrows trying to kick up some breakfast.

Purple Finch and Pine Siskins

Red-winged Blackbirds and Common Grackle

European Starling

Rusty Blackbird

As drenched Black-capped Chickadees, Common Goldfinches and Pine Siskins have been feeding heavily through this rainy day, a lone male Rusty Blackbird has been hanging around under the feeder.

Salamanders and Barred Owls

For the first time this month, warm evening temperatures (+5 C) and rain coincided to trigger a wave of salamander migration. At 8:30 pm I walked out to the county road, adjacent to a known salamander breeding pool, and counted close to thirty Blue-spotted Salamanders and half a dozen Spotted Salamanders crossing the road.

In a week or two, the night air will be filled din of spring peepers and chorus frogs. Tonight, the only calls I heard were those of dueting Barred Owl, one of which called from a white cedar close to the road. The other was perhaps a kilometer away - I only heard it because of the silence of the frogs.

Barred Owls are known to exploit migrating salamanders, and other seasonally restricted food items. They didn't seem to be interested in marching salamanders tonight.

Ice-out waterfowl

Right on schedule, the winter ice is receding from Stony Lake. The Burleigh Channel, and other sections with current, are now ice-free. As the bays open up, waterfowl are staging as they wait for more northerly lakes to thaw.

Today in Dunford's Bay, the gang included, in decreasing order of abundance, Common Merganser, Hooded Merganser, Ring-necked Duck, Canada Goose, Mallard, Common Goldeneye, Bufflehead, American Wigeon, American Black Duck and Wood Duck. On two of my last three visits, single Bald Eagles were patrolling the ice edge where winter killed fish can be expected. All can be viewed leisurely from the public landing at the bottom of Dunford Road, about 1.5 km south of the Big Cedar General Store, northeast of Burleigh Falls.

[On the Mississauga River, where it is crossed by CR 36, just east of Buckhorn, I saw my first Pied-billed Grebe of the season this afternoon.]

Tangled banks

Charles Darwin began the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection with this vivid imagery:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

The bank of vegetation along our shore - in what an ecologist would call the riparian zone - is a tangle of fern, sumac, grape, dogwood, gentian and a dozen sedges and grasses. Rooted in muck in the parallel littoral zone is a similarly rich tangle of pondweeds, water lilies, milfoils, bladderwort and eelgrass.

There's a lot to say about the riparian and littoral zones of Stony Lake: their vital functions, their diversity, their degradation and their preservation. One could focus on a single wetland species and consider aspects of its form, distribution, life history and origin in an intellectually robust manner made possible by Darwin. All of these are complex and important subjects which merit thorough exploration.

But for today it's enough just to momentarily reflect on the stretch of shoreline we've come to know well with a modest appreciation of some forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

A number of most beautiful forms flourish within these tangles. Song Sparrows and Northern Yellowthroats nest discretely in the thickets. Eastern Phoebes stuff their chicks with freshly emerged damselflies gleaned from the stems of the rushes. Just below the water line, thick mats of vegetation provide spawning substrate and nursery habitat for many fishes. By early summer, teeming schools of fry can be seen warming themselves at the surface. Some birds follow the fish.

A little deeper in the bay, down a narrow channel through the cattails, the loons nest. Only hours after the young hatch, the family swims out into the main body of the lake to a sheltered nursery area among some small rocky islands. Other fish eaters - mergansers, kingfishers, bitterns, herons and ospreys - nest elsewhere on the lake but forage along our shoreline. Big fish come to feed on the small fish. With the myriad forms comes a tangle of sounds - splashing, squawking, buzzing, trilling, screeching, drumming, warbling, hooting, chipping, rasping, cooing, peeping and croaking, lots of croaking.


Yet this is more than a sumptuous feast for our eyes and ears. Darwin's great insight - that of our shared ancestry - makes it personal and profound. He shattered the arrogant myth of a separate creation and freed us to find community and communion in all living things. That seems pretty wonderful.

Thanks and happy birthday Charles Darwin.

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Some people don't like their banks tangled. Here's a disentangled bank.

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Related and recent:

Rick Salutin's Valentine for Mr. Darwin (Globe and Mail - 13-02-09)

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution (New York Times - 23-08-05)

Blog for Darwin

Darwin Online

A Shoreline Primer from Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

A rail jumps the track

On a bitterly cold day exactly three years ago, a resident of nearby Apsley discovered this unfamiliar bird on the street, beneath a discarded Christmas tree. It had a damaged leg, was unable to fly, and was thin as a rail. A few calls were made and the bird was driven to the Toronto Wildlife Centre for assessment. It was identified as an immature Purple Gallinule.

This pigeon-sized marsh bird is common in the tropics and subtropics. In the U.S. it breeds in wetlands along the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico with spotty records extending up the Mississippi watershed as far north as Illinois. There have been a few summer sightings in southernmost Ontario but these birds are thought to be individuals that overachieved on their northward migration. A winter occurrence is very unusual.

Unfortunately, the leg injury proved to be very serious and the bird was eventually euthanized. The story is both sad and illustrative.

Some authors describe rails, including crakes, coots, moorhens and gallinules, as very weak flyers and there's nothing in my personal experience to suggest otherwise. I have seen very few rails (other than coots) on the wing. Most often I've heard them and once or twice each summer I'll glimpse a Sora or a Virginia Rail skulking among the cattails. In the hand, they seem lean and bony. They certainly don't have the obvious broad pectoral muscle mass required for explosive vertical takeoffs that we see in Ruffed Grouse.

Yet grouse seem to stay very close to home and rails of many species seem not to have realized that they are weak flyers. Vagrant Purple Gallinules have shown up in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Labrador and Newfoundland. Others touched down in Iceland, Norway, the Azores and South Africa. There's even a record from the Galapagos (West and Hess, 2002). Several other rail species have a histories of straying across continents and hemispheres. They may not be the best navigators but they seem to be perfectly competent flyers.

One result of all of this poor navigation is a remarkable global distribution that includes Africa, Australia, Eurasia and the Americas. Many oceanic islands have been colonized. Where such islands lack predators, natural selection seems to have favoured those descendants that allocated energy into more earthbound pursuits. The flightless Laysan Rail (Porzana palmeri) was one of many such examples. The progenitor of this species is the Old World Baillon's Crake (Porzana pusilla), a number of which made landfall on Laysan (at the north end of the Hawaiian Island chain) after it was exposed by falling sea levels about 125,000 years ago. The loss of flight occurred in a mere blink in evolutionary time (Olson 1999).

[Alas, it only takes a few years for introduced predators - rats, cats, mongoose, snakes and humans - to wipe out these flightless insular species. The last Laysan Rail died in the mid-1940's. Since 1600, 20 insular rail taxa (of which 18 were flightless) have become extinct]

Our Purple Gallinule should have been wintering in a subtropical wetland in the company of ibises, anhingas and egrets, perhaps in the Caribbean. In finding itself in the coldest depths of an Ontario winter it sealed its fate and demonstrated a familial trait - that of straying - which has allowed the rails to successfully colonize far-flung continents and scores of oceanic islands.

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Sources and photo credits:

Olson, S. L. 1999. Laysan Rail (Porzana palmeri), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/426a.

West, R. L. and G. K. Hess. 2002. Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinica), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/626.

Photos of injured Purple Gallinule courtesy of Kim Valenta of the Toronto Wildlife Centre.

Photo of Purple Gallinule on lily pad in Melaque (Jalisco, Mexico) courtesy of Howard Platt.

Range map linked from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Related and recent:

A nice series of Purple Gallinule images taken in Guatemala City by Mike at 10,000 Birds.

Rail images from Lake Titicaca by Paul at The Lost Frenchman Blog.

Weekend feeder update

Again, few changes since the last update. Daily visitors include Pine Grosbeaks (2), Common Redpoll (~10), American Goldfinch (~12), Pine Siskin (~6) as well as one to four each of Hairy Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-breasted Nuthatch. A dozen or more Blue Jays rule the roost for several hours each day. A pair of Rock Pigeons put in a brief appearance earlier in the week.

The highlight of the week was a first-time showing by a White-winged Crossbill, this morning. It joined a handful of Common Redpolls on the platform. It's not a huge surprise, give the magnitude of the ongoing crossbill irruption but it's a nice addition to the other finches that frequent the feeders.

A few years ago, we enjoyed watching Red Crossbills at a neighbour's feeder down the road, closer to Petrogylphs Provincial Park, which is a very good place to observe both crossbill species.

Common Goldeneye

We can expect to see the Common Goldeneye through the winter, usually in the ice-free fast water above and below the locks connecting lakes along the Trent Severn Waterway. We often see goldeneyes and Common Mergansers together. These birds were diving in the churning back eddies of Burleigh Falls.

Birding goes green

Long ago, bird watchers amplified a mild hobby to quixotic extremes. In 1939, Guy Emerson got things rolling with a total of 497 species seen in North America. The Big Year record didn't last long as a succession of fanatics invested increasing time and resources into raising the bar. According to the Wikipedia entry, from which I've culled these numbers, the current record is 745 set in 1998 by Sandy Komito. It's a great accomplishment under which must lie some other remarkable numbers. I don't know any of the particulars of Komito's travels but it will serve the purpose of this entry to consider the logistics of a former record holder.

In his book Call Collect, Ask for Birdman, author James A. Vardaman chronicles his 1979 record setting tally of 699 species. To achieve this total, he covered a lot of miles - plane (137,145); car (20,305); boat (3,337); bicycle (160); and foot (385).

Thirty years later, one can't help but think of the carbon footprint involved such an intense chase. Many have eased back on the throttle and it is becoming more common for Big Year and local birdathon participants to compete without burning fossil fuels.

No one have given this more thought than Richard Gregson, of Baie d'Urfé, Québec. Richard came up up with the catchy acronym of BIGBY - the BIg Green Big Year - to promote a culture of birding with a very minimal carbon footprint. Participants in the BIGBY initiative sign up and share the results of their efforts to find birds using human propulsion.

In 2008, Andrew Kleinhesselink and Josiah Clarke took the concept to a new planet-friendly extreme. From their base in northern California, the Bike-by Birders, cycled their way to an amazing 295 species.

Closer to home in the annual Carden Challenge, a local fund raising birdathon, the bicycle borne Carden Plain Janes have set a fine example in each of the last two years. In 2008, The Janes raised $907.00 for conservation while tracking down 102 species during the one day event.

In a similar spirit I will track the birds I see in the Stony Lake region, within areas circumscribed by circles with diameters of 80 and 24 km, centred (44.547873, -78.152851) at the government dock on Juniper Island.

The the larger circle includes a good variety of habitats north and south of the margin of the Canadian Shield. Many areas can only be reached by canoe or trail. Others, I drive through regularly as I commute to and from Peterborough.

The smaller circle is the same size as a Christmas Bird Count circle; and overlaps the Petroglyphs CBC circle on its east side. Within this circle are familiar hiking and ski trails as well as the backwaters we like to explore by canoe.
I'll track the results in the right hand column. BIGBY birds - those seen within the green circle, without the use of a car or power boat - will be listed in green.

Pine Siskins

Pine Siskins may show up here in any month although sometimes a year or more may pass between visits. This year, they have irrupted south of their breeding range throughout eastern North America and a half dozen or so showed up at the niger silo this morning, in the company or the more regular American Goldfinches and a Common Redpoll.

Weekend feeder update

There hasn't been a whole lot of change in the feeder gang this week. A lone Evening Grosbeak was here for a day. A pair of male Pine Grosbeaks and 5 or 6 American Goldfinches are daily visitors.

Here's what I've seen today:

Red-bellied Woodpecker -1
Hairy Woodpecker - 3
Downy Woodpecker - 1
Mourning Dove - 1
White-breasted Nuthatch - 2
Red-breasted Nuthatch - 1
Blue Jay - 10 +
Black-capped Chickadee - 10 +
American Tree Sparrow - 2
American Goldfinch - 6
Pine Grosbeak - 2

While the bird activity has been constant this week, deer visits and persistence are on the rise.

Cold turkey

A mass of cold arctic air settled in this week and the bird feeder continues to be busy. In addition to the steady stream of chickadees, nuthatches, Blue Jays and woodpeckers, deer are present through the day. Most are does with swelling mid-sections. They quarrel with each other and scratch the snow for what seems to be the very meager reward of a few fallen sunflower seeds.

Just down the road the servings are more generous. Today I watched the deer assemble in anticipation of their afternoon feeding at the neighbouring resort. Rob, the employee who dispensed feed from a 50 lb bag, pointed out some of the individuals he's come to recognize. One had a healed forelimb fracture, another was missing part of her lower jaw and another had a good sized tumour on its flank. I asked about predators. Rob said that coyotes have keyed in on the area and that there are several kills a week, usually out on the lake ice. I guess it's not easy being a deer.

At dawn it was -36 C - cold enough to freeze the wattles off a rooster I suspect. I wonder how the Wild Turkeys, with their unfeathered heads, cope with the deepest of freezes. The 20 or so birds mingling with the deer seemed to be just fine - they gobbled and squabbled and scratched as they always do. I looked closely at their exposed extremities and saw no signs of frostbite. Tough birds.

Habitat # 1, dammed headwater lake

White Lake, near Gooderham.
This is headwater lake in our watershed. The submerged stump field is typical of most of our lakes, which were dammed more than a century ago. Many of the higher elevation lakes are drawn down by more than a metre each autumn to help reduce the risk of spring flooding downstream.

Fowl reception

As seen near Buckhorn today.

This isn't our antenna although ours is similar. We see pigeons around the feeders, only two or three at a time, maybe several times a year, if at all. One of the first times was also the last for one very unfortunate bird.

A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker does like to drum on our steel antenna in late April.

Weekend feeder update

The backyard feeder is doing a good business these days. Finch numbers vary from day-to-day. Here's what I noticed this morning:

Red-bellied Woodpecker (female - see photo)
Hairy Woodpecker - 3
Downy Woodpecker - 1
White-breasted Nuthatch - 2
Red-breasted Nuthatch - 1
Blue Jay - 12 +
Black-capped Chickadee - 12 +
American Tree Sparrow - 5
American Goldfinch - 6
Pine Grosbeak - 3

Pine Siskins were here on and off through the week, as were a few Common Redpolls.

A new yard bird for the year was Ruffed Grouse that landed in the cedar outside the bedroom window.

Near Gannon's Narrows today, I came across a flock of 30 Cedar Waxwings and an overflying dark phased Rough-legged Hawk.

Northern Hawk Owl makes the news

click to enlarge
It's kind of nice to live in a part of the world where an owl sighting is front page newsworthy.

Courtesy of the Lakefield Herald.

UPDATE - JANUARY 25

Other Northern Hawk Owls in the news this week:

• Northern Hawk Owl makes rare visit, Ottawa Citizen, ON.
• Rare Hawk Owl attracting tourists to region, Plattsburgh Press Republican, NY.
• Northern hawk owl a rare sight in Maine, Bangor Daily News, ME.

Bohemian Waxwings

I surprised a good sized flock, more than 250 strong, of Bohemian Waxwings along a farm road. Half were on the dirt road, picking up grit and the other half were gleaning fruit from roadside wild grape vines and Eastern Red Cedars. They were very skittish and noisy. The flock picked up and headed east after I'd watched them for a few minutes.

Petroglyphs Christmas Bird Count

Petroglyphs Count Circle (click to enlarge)
For the 23rd year, local naturalists took stock of wild birds during the annual Petroglyphs Christmas Bird Count (CBC). Most of the (22 km diameter) count circle falls on the southern edge of the exposed Canadian Shield. Agriculture and road development are limited and much of the area remains forested. Bird counting, by sight and sound, is concentrated along county and township roads, ski trails and backyard bird feeders.

The day broke clear and crisp at -20 C. As for most of the past counts, open water was limited to a few very small seeps and some fast sections of streams. Water birds would be scarce at best.

Soon after dusk, Tony Bigg of the Peterborough Field Naturalists crunched the numbers tallied by 17 volunteers who had scattered across six sectors within the circle. Seven other people provided observations from their backyard bird feeders. In the following discussion, the number in parentheses is the average count from the last ten years.

A total of 2779 individuals of 38 species were found, close to the averages of 2773 birds of 34 species. The highest species count, 41, was in 1998 following an unseasonably mild autumn that left our lakes unfrozen and hospitable to five species of waterfowl.

As in past years years, three species - Black-capped Chickadee 859 (998), Blue Jay 437 (306) and Red-breasted Nuthatch 239 (179) - accounted for more than half of birds seen. Some others were present in record numbers. Eighty-nine Rock Pigeons and 93 Mourning Doves broke the previous records of 87 and 27, respectively. Prior to 2002, Wild Turkeys were unknown from the count. Last year, a record 29 were seen and this year, 51. Almost certainly the population will continue to increase. I wonder how and when their number will stabilize. Wild Turkeys - three - were found on yesterday's Algonquin Park Christmas Bird Count for the very first time, evidence of the spread of this species well beyond their introduction sites.

The only water bird seen was a hardy Belted Kingfisher (seen only once before, in 1998) beside a tailings runoff pool below the Indusmin Mine at Nephton. New to the count was a Red-bellied Woodpecker (a Carolinian species steadily marching northward) seen at a suet feeder at the east end of Stony Lake. The ecotonal character of the southern shield is reflected by the juxtaposition of this southern species with Black-backed Woodpecker (a spruce-loving bird of the boreal forest) found today in suitable breeding habitat in Petroglyphs Provincial Park and on the Kawartha Nordic Ski Club trails north of Haultain. Three Gray Jays, another northern species at its southern breeding limit, helped themselves to the hiking snacks of the Petroglyphs Park crew.

Birds of prey were present in small numbers. The observation of three Barred Owls, a resident species, marked the 13th consecutive appearance for this nocturnal hunter. Much rarer, recorded only once before on count day, was a single, day-hunting Great Gray Owl, found by Anne Anthony, Marilyn Taylor and Lynn Smith near Jack Lake. This is the third area sighting in recent weeks, leading some to wonder whether these birds represent the vanguard of a more significant flight. A spectacular winter irruption of Great Grays into Peterborough County last happened in 2004-2005.
Great Gray Owl near Jack Lake courtesy of Anne Anthony
A previous record high of two Goshawks was matched but no other accipiters were seen. A lone Red-tailed Hawk was the only buteo. Red-tails are much commoner in more open country south of the count area.

Veteran CBC participants are always mindful of "misses" - the absence on count day of a species they have come to expect. For species with low populations, misses are a statistical inevitability. If a Sharp-shinned Hawk - perhaps one of only handful in the 400 square km. count area - zigs moments before a human observer zags then the bird will be missed. A notable miss of this year was the sometimes numerous Snow Bunting. Only once before, in 1990, did this visitor from the tundra fail to appear on count day.

Nine species have been seen on every one of the 23 Petroglyphs CBCs. One is the numerous and conspicuous Common Raven. Seven are abundant feeder visitors - Black-capped Chickadees, both nuthatches, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, Blue Jay and American Tree Sparrow. The ninth species, the Bald Eagle, is much less common (average of 5) and was very nearly a miss - only a single sighting - in this and five other counts. This year's singleton, a white-headed adult, was spotted by Jerry Ball and Bruce Kidd east of Kasshabog Lake.

Other interesting sightings included 11 Bohemian Waxwings and a single Northern Shrike. Winter finch numbers are highly variable as a result of annual fluctuations in natural food availability in the vast boreal forests of the north. The absence of both crossbill species in odd numbered years since 1999 reflects the cyclic scarcity of spruce and pine cones here and elsewhere. This count turned up 80 White-winged and three Red Cossbills. Rounding out the finch assemblage were 23 Pine Grosbeaks, 12 Purple Finches, 206 Common Redpolls, 75 Pine Siskins, 189 American Goldfinches and two Evening Grosbeaks.

Tony Bigg did an outstanding job of organizing the count and compiling the results. Thanks Tony.

I'm especially grateful to the feeder watchers in my sector: Christine Church, Robin and Roman Miszuk, Doug Charles & Elina Laird.

[The map above is derived from a handy utility, the CBC Base Map Generator, developed by Bird Studies Canada, the organization that oversees CBC activities in Canada.]