by Gene Walz
When birders get together to brag or reminisce, they usually talk about the three EXes. Not ex-wives, ex-husbands, or Ex-Lax. No, they’re the EXtraordinary birds they’ve seen, the EXceptional experiences they’ve had, and the unEXpected birds that have come their way. EXtraordinary birds like the Resplendant Quetzal or the Secretary Bird (looks like a weird cross between a stork and an eagle with a black mullet); unEXpected or rare birds like stray Mississippi Kites or Painted Buntings in Manitoba, both species much farther north of their usual range than anyone would ever imagine.
EXceptional experiences often include the sight of enormous numbers of birds, and not necessarily rare ones. It’s not the species that is rare; it’s the unforeseen and unrepeatable experience that is rare. These are awesome, awe-inspiring spectacles. Far better than superhero movies on IMAX screens where hundreds of thousands of menacing Stormtroopers attack a small group; we know that these movie hordes are fake—computer-generated. Birding spectacles in real life are on a whole other level (and certainly more enjoyable than the birds in the Hitchcock movie!)
Media stories about birds these days are usually depressing. Bird populations are in serious decline everywhere. So anecdotes about unusual numbers of birds can enliven any birding get-togethers. When someone sees more than 200 loons together on a lake (loons being symbols of melancholic loneliness and usually seen alone or in pairs), it can be myth-breaking—and worth a long, often repeated story.
Even large numbers of smaller birds, passerines, can be staggering. As a group of us crept through an April snowstorm that had cascaded over the Rocky Mountains into the Colorado foothills, we came upon field after field of Horned Larks. So many that it was almost impossible to count them—well into the thousands, surely. They’d clearly been stalled on their migration north and were feeding along the roadside, as larks do, or flitting about in the snow-covered grasses trying to keep from being buried. Not knowing anything about lark migration, whether it happens in small flocks or huge waves, we could only marvel at this rare treat.
It reminded me of the first time I saw a flock of Snow Buntings—over 600 of them in a weedy field southeast of Winnipeg. That was impressive until I realized that this was not all that unusual. Nor was the discovery of seventy-five or so Black-billed Magpies not very far away. I’d never seen more than four or five together before this, usually a family of adults and short-tailed juveniles in June, post-fledging. When we saw a hog farmer tossing pig carcasses into a field, we realized that the magpies were lured in from all over the territory. It seemed a cheat, but we still refer to that place as Magpie City.
In Arizona, I’ve marvelled at the sight of tens of thousands of over-wintering Sandhill Cranes. The thrill of hearing the enchanting language they speak to each other was matched by the whir of all of those wings taking flight together. At dusk in Caroni Swamp in Trinidad, I sat enthralled as 3,000 Scarlet Ibises flew in packs of two, three, and four dozen birds to their evening roosts, like flaming arrows loosed from a medieval army’s bows. They were joined by smaller numbers of white egrets, Cattle and Snowy, and Blue Herons—in the hundreds rather than thousands—and together turned a mangrove island into a giant Christmas tree crammed with brightly coloured garlands. It was so spectacular that it brought some in our party to tears.
Perhaps it was spectacles like this that led hunters in the Middle Ages to play a language game. Between rounds of killing fire they’d dream up names for large groups of birds and animals. You’ve likely heard of a murmuration of starlings. Or a conspiracy of ravens. How about a merl of blackbirds or a spiral of treecreepers or a confusion of warblers or, most peculiarly, a museum of waxwings? (See ornithologist Bill Oddie’s book A Conspiracy of Ravens: A Compendium of Collective Nouns for Birds for more.) What we saw in Trinidad was a posse of herons. (I’ve also seen a vortex of vultures over south Florida and a soar of kites along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.)
My most unforgettable experience of unexpectedly huge numbers of birds occurred on an annual Hawkwatch in September, 2003. A Hawkwatch is part Citizen Science and part social occasion. Every fall, teams of birders are dispatched to familiar areas to count the number of birds that can be found there, mostly migrating hawks but also other species. One Hawkwatch may not make much difference as Citizen Science. But over time, fluctuations in hawk numbers and migration patterns can help professional scientists.
For years, my assigned area has been “Lynchs Point,” named after a campground at the southern tip of Lake Manitoba that only sometimes uses an apostrophe where you might expect one to be. The area includes Delta Marsh and the roads to and from the area. It’s a great venue, good for the highest number of species recorded by any team.
George Holland, Janice Smith, and I were having an average birding day when we decided to eat our lunch on a small hillock near the entrance to the campground at Lynchs Point. At this point we’d seen some kestrels, harriers, and Red-tailed, Cooper’s, and Sharp-shinned Hawks. The usual suspects. Nothing to get too excited about.
As we lounged in the warm sunshine, gazing lazily skyward, Janice noticed small specks against the wispy clouds almost out of range of our binoculars. We all dropped our sandwiches and perked up. George quickly identified the birds—Broad-winged Hawks, fourteen of them.
It was a perfect day for migration. The wind was out of the northwest and as it crossed the warm prairies and hit the cool edge of Lake Manitoba, it created huge thermals—spirals or funnels of ascending air. The Broad-wings were sailing in from the northwest, hitting the thermals, riding them up to their peak in wide circles, and then gliding on until they had to take wing again. A smart way to fly. Hardly any effort.
When we started to pick up individual hawks entering the updrafts at lower levels, we started some serious accounting. Getting the exact number of hawks spiralling up just near the edge of our binocular range was not easy. We began counting by fives and checking with each other. Thirty-four in one kettle, then an additional forty-seven in another. We decided to delay our departure for other prime spots and just hang out there and count Broad-wings. We thought we were on to something big.
A kettle of 320 hawks spiralled in from the northwest. We had to count by tens. Then another seventy-nine flew over, followed by twenty-four, then twenty-three, and a further hundred. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, 350 went by; we counted them by twenties. We stayed on the hillock for four hours, just fixated on the Broad-winged fly-overs. At one point there were so many specks in the air that we could only count by fifties—this huge kettle of birds, coming out of a thermal on a slow, easy glide, numbered an unbelievable 2,250 hawks. It took a long time to pass over us; it was so stretched out that we were confident we’d made a fairly accurate count. With the cloud cover increasing, cutting off the thermals, the numbers diminished. We could count in the ones and twos. But as we tallied our numbers at the end of our watch, we realized we had counted 3,495 Broad-winged Hawks.
To put this in perspective, the usual average is around six Broad-winged Hawks per year in the entire province during migration. In 1982, only 136 Broad-wings were seen in all of Manitoba; that was the previous high. We had almost thirty times as many Broad-wings as that previous record. Astounding!
We could hardly contain our excitement as we drove on to Delta Marsh. What a completely unexpected discovery! We couldn’t wait to tell the other hawkwatchers about our numbers: an unprecedented 3,495 Broad-winged Hawks.
But this made us wonder. Where had they come from? (The boreal forests to the north and west.) Why had we missed them in all the previous years? (Bad timing.) And how do they assemble and decide to migrate together? (Who knows?)
While the number of Broad-wings seen that afternoon was unprecedented, it was miniscule compared to the numbers seen in the Duluth, Minnesota Hawkwatch on the following Monday. More than 100,000 Broad-wings were counted there. Were “our” birds among them? We can only wonder. Perhaps future ornithology s
tudents and birders can come up with an answer.
Fast and Furious Falcons
Buff-breasted Sandpipers migrate through southern Manitoba in late August and early September. But they’re not reliable migrants. Some years, almost nobody sees them. So, when word goes to members of the manitibabirds Yahoo! Group that Buff-breasteds are around, I jump.
The site where they’re often seen is a sod farm near a bison compound just west of Oak Hammock Marsh. John Weier and I headed there after dinner one fine fall evening. No better companion for birding the marsh than John. He spent the better part of a year there and chronicled his birding experiences in Marshwalker.
We spotted the birds, twelve of them, almost immediately.
We weren’t the only ones. There were falcons about. We were in for a rare treat.
The first one was a Peregrine. It flew in from the east, the marsh area, at a considerable height. Every other bird in the area shut up and hunkered down. The Peregrine plummeted. It missed the Buff-breasteds. A juvenile, it’d have to get better to survive its first year, the most dangerous one for young Peregrines.
It quickly headed back to the marsh where the ducks were settling in for the night and were easier picking. Ducks don’t fly very fast. Sandpipers do. You could say that for falcons, they are fast food.
Minutes after the Peregrine missed, a Merlin darted in. It flew low to the ground and scared up the sandpipers. They wheeled in formation as most shorebirds do, flashing in the late sunlight as they banked and turned in perfect synchronicity. There is something glorious and mesmerizing in the way sandpipers can swirl about at great speed in unpredictable directions without touching as much as a wingtip. Not much else can match their coherence and empathy. They are wondrous to watch.
But the Merlin gave them little heed. Probably sated on mice or Savannah Sparrows. For the Merlin, this was just a strafing run, like a fighter jet swooping low over a beach full of sunbathers. If sandpipers could scream, I’m sure they would have. But they didn’t let out a peep. Nor did the Merlin vocalize its shrill “key, key, key” call. It was almost as if the Merlin just enjoyed the confusion and terror it generated.
On the next field over, we spotted a falcon on the ground eating bugs. A warm-brown bird. Another young Peregrine or, could it be, a rare Prairie Falcon. We watched and waited, tense with anticipation.
Suddenly it took wing and banked with its wings spread wide. Aha! The underwing coverts were very dark, almost like wing struts. A Prairie Falcon, kissing cousin of the Peregrine, and just as fast and lethal.
Zoom! It flew low and fast over the sod field; the chase was on. The Buff-breasteds rose and again circled the area in a well-coordinated panic. As acrobatic as they were, they were no match for the falcon, the fastest of all flyers. The chase didn’t last long. With hair-trigger reflexes, it flew into their midst, reacting to their every swerve and twitch. In a flash, it grabbed one right out of the air in mid-flight.
The falcon flew to a nearby fencepost. The feathers flew as it feasted. Its lighter, narrower “sideburns” confirmed that this wasn’t a peregrine. Prairie Falcon. Gotcha! My first of the year.
Before it was too dark to see anything more, we counted eight falcons. They all tried to get a Buff-breasted meal; some were more persistent than others, swooping back and forth, over and among them with malicious intent. Every chase provided as many thrills for us as all six sequels of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. It was like a dogfight between an F-86 Sabrejet and twelve unarmed MiG-15s. Predator vs prey. With stakes as high as they were in the Roman Colosseum or during wartime combat. Live or die, catch or go hungry.
Each falcon relied on its unmatched speed and agility in the air. The sandpipers played the numbers game, trusting in their remarkable ability to fly in tightly packed formations and believing in the old cliché that there’s more individual safety in a large group. The pursuer and the pursued zoomed across the flat terrain in a succession of eye-catching aerial dances.
Only the first Prairie Falcon succeeded. Overall, the falcons were one for eight or ten on the night. The best Major League ball players only hit the ball once every three at bats. I don’t know what the average success rate of falcons is, but on this night they were very light hitters.
On the other hand, John and I had hit the jackpot. We’ll probably never again see such a series of aerial displays!
A Fall-out of Spring Warblers
Nuclear fall-out is terrible. Follicular fall-out is pretty traumatic (I started losing the top of my head—my hair—in my mid-twenties). Avian fall-out is marvelous. It occurs because passerines (songbirds) migrate at night. When a storm front exhausts them and forces them to stop their journeys in great masses, a fall-out occurs. The morning after a fall-out can be a birder’s dream.
I’ve always been a fair-weather golfer. Heavy winds, a sprinkle of rain, temperature below ten degrees Celsius, wafts of mosquitoes (in Manitoba they should be considered weather) and I’m not teeing up. I expect that I’ll teach my grandsons the grand old game of golf someday, but I’m not taking them out to a golf course on a cold, rainy day no matter how much they beg.
Lately, I’m finding fair-weather birding more and more attractive. I guess it started with a bird chase in a canyon in southern Arizona where a rare Flame-coloured Tanager was reported. (It was formerly the Flame-backed Tanager, is now a member of the cardinal family, not the tanagers, and looks like an oriole. Don’t ask me.) It was eighty degrees Fahrenheit, twenty-seven Celsius. A perfect day for birding, and we’d already ticked more than seventy birds off our lists. My friend Charlie Rattigan and I pulled up to a woody Bed and Breakfast and asked if they’d seen the tanager. The owner was a grey-bearded Vietnam vet. Before he answered, he invited us to sit down in padded chairs on his patio and have a beer with him. Our resistance lasted one nanosecond.
His wife quickly ladled some grape jelly onto a nearby feeder. As we sat there in the shade, our feet propped up, the cardinal, er, tanager, an unexpected vagrant from the mountains of Mexico, undeterred by Homeland Security, danced through the trees like an errant sunbeam and whistled like a happy sailor. Then he obligingly flew in and supped on the sugary purple blob. He sat there long enough for us to put down our beer bottles, raise our binocs, and get great, long looks. In fact, he was so close we barely needed the binocs. Brilliant, flame-red/orange body, black wings with white lines or spots, a black-streaked back, and yellow-green underside. When he flew off and sat whistling in a tree, we all turned to each other, lifted our bottles, and toasted a life-bird. Ah, life was good! This is what birding should be.
What made me act differently a couple of years later I don’t recall. All I can say is that when I decided to head off to a Birding and Breakfast outing one cold May morning, I was acting out of character or, at least, out of the current version of my character. On that day, FortWhyte Alive’s thermometer read three degrees Celsius and a fierce, face-chafing wind made it feel colder, especially for May. A dozen intrepid birders showed up. On a good day there can be twenty-five to thirty. Nobody was optimistic.
I have a ready term, courtesy of my daughters, for people who engage in this kind of activity: daffy birdwatchers. On this day I included myself. For some weird, unknown reason I got up at 5:15 am to walk my dog so that I could be at the guided walk by 6:30. In my twenties I knew a woman who refused to go hiking or camping. Her idea of roughing it, she said, was a good motel with a TV. Smart lady.
FortWhyte Alive is a former quarry converted to a nature-education centre surrounded by big box stores and suburban housing. A large, deep pond that attracts migrating waterfowl is its main feature. A quick scan of the water revealed nothing special. A few shivering Canada Geese, some desultory Mallards, teal, shovelers, canvasbacks, and scaup whose paddling feet must have been the warmest parts of their anatomy, and a half-dozen awkward cormorants trying to dry their wings and maintain their balance in the frigid blasts. T
hey must have wondered why they ever came back to “sunny Manitoba.”
We birders split into several groups, grumbled like spoiled teenagers, and headed into the surrounding, mostly aspen, “woods.”
Our spirits perked up when we encountered more than a smattering of sparrows and thrushes scratching through the undergrowth. Many of us quickly and unexpectedly toted up eight or ten first-of-the-year sparrows. Fox, Harris’s, White-crowned, Clay-coloured, etc.—they all stuck to the ground for shelter. The grey and brown birds were back.
Then we started to discover warblers—in bunches. Mixed flocks of early arrivals like Yellow-rumps (“butter butts” to the slangy among us) and Orange-crowned mingling with many other varieties. True spring colours at last: oranges, yellows, greens, sprightly blacks and whites. Our group had fourteen species of flitty, colourful warblers by breakfast. Redstarts fanning their fiery tails. Palm Warblers pumping theirs. Yellow Warblers like ripe, flying lemons. Wilson’s—like Yellows but with jaunty black tams. Common Yellowthroats with their odd burglar half-masks. Black-and-whites scurrying up trunks and around branches like creepers or nuthatches. Tennessee Warblers and Nashvilles (I still have to check to see which is which). And the dazzlers: Chestnut-sided, Cape May, Blackburnian, Magnolia. Other groups added Northern Waterthrush, Ovenbird, Blackpoll, and Black-throated Green. Eighteen species of warblers in all (of a possible twenty-four) and eighty-six total species before breakfast was over. A miracle morning.
Foul weather can sometimes be the boon rather than the bane of our birding experiences. The cold and wind had precipitated this warbler fall-out. They were everywhere, low to the ground and sluggish from the temperature. No “warbler neck” for us from craning back to see them in the treetops. No missed sightings because they spurted away a millisecond before you got your binocs on them. They were easily spotted because the trees had not yet begun to leaf out. Suddenly, the morning didn’t seem so cold.