Jun 05, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Margaret Carney
How many species of birds can you find in a single spring day in Durham Region? You'd be amazed.
Look beyond the robins, mourning doves, song sparrows and cardinals nesting in your neighbourhood and whole new worlds open up, each habitat home to its own special birds. Plan your count at the peak of spring migration and numbers soar. With luck and logistics, a small group of birders could spot 150 or more.
You need 24 hours to find them all, starting in the middle of the night next to a wetland, where you may hear Virginia rails and soras calling, marsh wrens rattling, American bitterns doing their deep, gulping "oonk-a-loonk" and common snipes winnowing.
Near the right woodlot, you might hear a screech-owl's mournful cry, or, deep in a forest, a barred owl.
Atop the Oak Ridges Moraine, you'll hear whip-poor-wills singing at dawn.
Hermit thrushes, wood thrushes and ovenbirds sing at first light, too, so you'll want to be near a woods then as well.
The chorus becomes a symphony as other songbirds wake up and join in -- scarlet tanagers, rose-breasted grosbeaks and a dozen different warblers. Forest edge and grassland species like indigo buntings, brown thrashers, towhees, meadowlarks and a handful of sparrows add their own unique voices, some buzzy, some beautiful.
But water birds are migrating, so you mustn't linger! You have to dash to Lake Ontario to see if brant, whimbrels or red-throated loons are flying by. Or if any goldeneyes or bufflehead are still around, diving alongside flocks of long-tailed ducks and red-breasted mergansers. You have to check lakeside woodlots for migrating warblers, flycatchers and vireos.
Of the many habitats being destroyed by the expansion of humanity, ponds and mudflats so necessary for shorebirds are vanishing most quickly. The lagoons at the Port Perry water treatment facility aren't anywhere near as welcoming to these long-distance flyers as they used to be, since modern "improvements" took out all the natural, water-cleansing cattails. But you'll want to walk around them, scanning for yellowlegs, dunlin, dowitchers, phalaropes or a number of small sandpipers. Ruddy ducks, teal, pintails and shovellers may be floating about and black terns, an endangered species in Ontario because of loss of breeding habitat, flying over the water.
Afternoon is a good time to scan the skies for soaring hawks and vultures. Far fewer birds are vocal then, but red-eyed vireos and eastern wood-pewees sing all day, and in late afternoon vesper sparrows, once common in Durham, start singing.
Scoters may be flying at dusk, or a black-crowned night heron heading to a marsh to hunt, so you may spend sunset on some clifftop along Lake Ontario, gazing out over the water as it turns from blue, to bronze, to inky black.
Nature queries: 905-725-2116 or
mcarney@interlinks.net.
Durham resident Margaret Carney, in addition to writing nature-appreciation columns, has also published several children's books.
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