Breeding Birds In Frontenac Park
June 25th, 2016
I have figured out the cure for insomnia: go on a birding tour with Jon Ruddy.
No, I don't mean that Jon Ruddy's birding tours are boring, quite the opposite. I mean they are a workout and a half! At least this one was. Along with five other birders, we went to Frontenac Provincial Park, a 52 square kilometer protected wilderness north of Kingston, and birded the trails around Big Salmon Lake. It was May 23rd, but few spring migrants were present. Instead the woods teemed with local breeders, singing and nest-building and occasionally fighting with their neighbors.
Many birders' approach to hearing an interesting bird in the distance is to stand on the trail, pish, maybe play recordings of that bird's song, and hope that it will get curious and come within view. Jon's approach is more like this (paraphrasing):
"I hear a Scarlet Tanager over there! Lets go!" bushwhack bushwhack bushwhack CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB descend descend descend
"I hear a Cerulean Warbler back over there!" Lets go!" bushwhack bushwhack bushwhack ...
It helped that the woods were quite open, but there was much scrambling up and down rocky outcroppings. I liked this approach for a few reasons: it made for a terrific workout, it made for a much more interesting hike (I'm often a little bored by the "stand and wait" approach to bird-watching, and it's seldom how I do things when I bird alone), and it meant not confusing/upsetting birds with playback. That's something I've never been entirely comfortable with. I've always wondered: what if a male feels so threatened by this imaginary rival that he just up and leaves a perfectly good territory? Or what if a female wastes valuable time and energy trying to find the imaginary mate, lingering because of that tantalizing song, when she could move on and find a real mate elsewhere? I still remember the reaction I got from a brief playback on a Sora. It called incessantly ("ker-wee?") for the twenty minutes I sat there. When I came back through later, it was still in the same place, still calling incessantly. I felt bad for it.
No photos. For this trip, I just wanted to drink in the sights and sounds, instead of needing to capture them. (I will likely do this trip again next year, and possibly bring the camera then. I also plan to go back to Frontenac on my own sometime.)
Frontenac is stunningly beautiful--and underappreciated, judging by how many people we met on the trail on a holiday weekend. In some ways the park, at least the bit of it I saw, is very reminiscent of South March Conservation Forest. The rocky sunlit outcroppings, for instance, colored with generous sprays of Wild Columbine, with Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks singing on the margins. Climbing up onto those outcroppings I felt like I was back home again.
Down in the woods, I turned up a Dutchman's Breeches. Like the ones I saw in South March on the 15th, it had already lost its blossoms. Even the leaves were gone (wilted and vanished into the leaf litter, I guess), but I recognized the thin, pale green seed pods, arranged in a row along the drooping stem. As I handled the stem, some of them fell off. (Soon the pods will burst, revealing seeds with fleshy appendages called elaiosomes. Ants will carry the seeds back to their colonies, feed the elaiosomes to their larvae, and leave the seeds in a good place to germinate: a symbiotic relationship.)
In other ways it's not reminiscent of South March at all, as in the Cerulean Warblers that were singing all over the place. This little aqua-blue warbler is an endangered species in Canada, and Ottawa has maybe one or two known breeding pairs. Frontenac Park is their heartland. In general, Frontenac had a ruggedness and majesty about it that was unlike anything I'd experienced in Ottawa or Gatineau--one that rather reminded me of Algonquin Park (but much less boreal.)
Highlights:
A knee-buckling view of a blazing Scarlet Tanager, about fifteen feet away at eye level, completely out in the open, singing. I honestly didn't believe it was possible for a Scarlet Tanager to act like that. I thought "hide in the foliage fifty feet up taunting the bird-watchers" was pretty much their genetic programming. We never did a single playback and yet this thing happened.
Same spot: Cerulean Warblers whizzing back and forth practically in front of our faces. These are canopy birds, but the boulder we had climbed to get to the tanager more or less put us in the canopy!
Female Black-Throated Green Warbler and Rose-Breasted Grosbeak landing down on the rocks and foraging for nest material.
Close up views of a Yellow-Throated Vireo, a bird I'd only ever seen before at a great distance.
A Barred Owl, wide awake in the middle of the day, in plain view and calling back and forth with its distant mate.
"Whoooo whoooo?"
"Who cooks for you, who cooks for youuuu!"
(I can only gather that sightings like this are commonplace in Frontenac. A couple of backpackers came by and I asked them if they'd like to see an owl. An invitation like that in Ottawa or Gatineau would usually garner interest, even from people who aren't bird-watchers per se. They just waved their hands and moved on, saying that they'd seen all kinds of owls already.)
In the afternoon, after I had bolted down a heap of extra hot capicollo and SunChips within the allotted fifteen minutes, we went to Napanee Limestone Plain IBA (important bird area). This is a mosaic of grazed pastures, savannah-like grasslands and scrubby woodlots, all growing on a thin layer of soil over limestone bedrock--i.e., an alvar. Alvars are an increasingly rare habitat, supporting many declining, grassland-loving species. Napanee IBA is crucial breeding habitat for the endangered-in-Canada Loggerhead Shrike, one of North America's very few carnivorous songbirds, which would be a lifer for me.
Unfortunately my prospective lifer failed to show. (I'll be back!) So I contented myself to enjoy the Eastern Meadowlarks, Bobolinks and Upland Sandpipers, all of which we saw more of than you could shake a stick at.
And then I went home and slept like the dead.
June 25th, 2016
I have figured out the cure for insomnia: go on a birding tour with Jon Ruddy.
No, I don't mean that Jon Ruddy's birding tours are boring, quite the opposite. I mean they are a workout and a half! At least this one was. Along with five other birders, we went to Frontenac Provincial Park, a 52 square kilometer protected wilderness north of Kingston, and birded the trails around Big Salmon Lake. It was May 23rd, but few spring migrants were present. Instead the woods teemed with local breeders, singing and nest-building and occasionally fighting with their neighbors.
Many birders' approach to hearing an interesting bird in the distance is to stand on the trail, pish, maybe play recordings of that bird's song, and hope that it will get curious and come within view. Jon's approach is more like this (paraphrasing):
"I hear a Scarlet Tanager over there! Lets go!" bushwhack bushwhack bushwhack CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB descend descend descend
"I hear a Cerulean Warbler back over there!" Lets go!" bushwhack bushwhack bushwhack ...
It helped that the woods were quite open, but there was much scrambling up and down rocky outcroppings. I liked this approach for a few reasons: it made for a terrific workout, it made for a much more interesting hike (I'm often a little bored by the "stand and wait" approach to bird-watching, and it's seldom how I do things when I bird alone), and it meant not confusing/upsetting birds with playback. That's something I've never been entirely comfortable with. I've always wondered: what if a male feels so threatened by this imaginary rival that he just up and leaves a perfectly good territory? Or what if a female wastes valuable time and energy trying to find the imaginary mate, lingering because of that tantalizing song, when she could move on and find a real mate elsewhere? I still remember the reaction I got from a brief playback on a Sora. It called incessantly ("ker-wee?") for the twenty minutes I sat there. When I came back through later, it was still in the same place, still calling incessantly. I felt bad for it.
No photos. For this trip, I just wanted to drink in the sights and sounds, instead of needing to capture them. (I will likely do this trip again next year, and possibly bring the camera then. I also plan to go back to Frontenac on my own sometime.)
Frontenac is stunningly beautiful--and underappreciated, judging by how many people we met on the trail on a holiday weekend. In some ways the park, at least the bit of it I saw, is very reminiscent of South March Conservation Forest. The rocky sunlit outcroppings, for instance, colored with generous sprays of Wild Columbine, with Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks singing on the margins. Climbing up onto those outcroppings I felt like I was back home again.
Down in the woods, I turned up a Dutchman's Breeches. Like the ones I saw in South March on the 15th, it had already lost its blossoms. Even the leaves were gone (wilted and vanished into the leaf litter, I guess), but I recognized the thin, pale green seed pods, arranged in a row along the drooping stem. As I handled the stem, some of them fell off. (Soon the pods will burst, revealing seeds with fleshy appendages called elaiosomes. Ants will carry the seeds back to their colonies, feed the elaiosomes to their larvae, and leave the seeds in a good place to germinate: a symbiotic relationship.)
In other ways it's not reminiscent of South March at all, as in the Cerulean Warblers that were singing all over the place. This little aqua-blue warbler is an endangered species in Canada, and Ottawa has maybe one or two known breeding pairs. Frontenac Park is their heartland. In general, Frontenac had a ruggedness and majesty about it that was unlike anything I'd experienced in Ottawa or Gatineau--one that rather reminded me of Algonquin Park (but much less boreal.)
Highlights:
A knee-buckling view of a blazing Scarlet Tanager, about fifteen feet away at eye level, completely out in the open, singing. I honestly didn't believe it was possible for a Scarlet Tanager to act like that. I thought "hide in the foliage fifty feet up taunting the bird-watchers" was pretty much their genetic programming. We never did a single playback and yet this thing happened.
Same spot: Cerulean Warblers whizzing back and forth practically in front of our faces. These are canopy birds, but the boulder we had climbed to get to the tanager more or less put us in the canopy!
Female Black-Throated Green Warbler and Rose-Breasted Grosbeak landing down on the rocks and foraging for nest material.
Close up views of a Yellow-Throated Vireo, a bird I'd only ever seen before at a great distance.
A Barred Owl, wide awake in the middle of the day, in plain view and calling back and forth with its distant mate.
"Whoooo whoooo?"
"Who cooks for you, who cooks for youuuu!"
(I can only gather that sightings like this are commonplace in Frontenac. A couple of backpackers came by and I asked them if they'd like to see an owl. An invitation like that in Ottawa or Gatineau would usually garner interest, even from people who aren't bird-watchers per se. They just waved their hands and moved on, saying that they'd seen all kinds of owls already.)
In the afternoon, after I had bolted down a heap of extra hot capicollo and SunChips within the allotted fifteen minutes, we went to Napanee Limestone Plain IBA (important bird area). This is a mosaic of grazed pastures, savannah-like grasslands and scrubby woodlots, all growing on a thin layer of soil over limestone bedrock--i.e., an alvar. Alvars are an increasingly rare habitat, supporting many declining, grassland-loving species. Napanee IBA is crucial breeding habitat for the endangered-in-Canada Loggerhead Shrike, one of North America's very few carnivorous songbirds, which would be a lifer for me.
Unfortunately my prospective lifer failed to show. (I'll be back!) So I contented myself to enjoy the Eastern Meadowlarks, Bobolinks and Upland Sandpipers, all of which we saw more of than you could shake a stick at.
And then I went home and slept like the dead.
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Mike
June 25th, 2016 at 9:59 am
Sounds like a place to visit, for sure!