A solo hike up Mont Ste-Anne
June 27th, 2009
So I went walking alone up on Mont Ste-Anne yesterday afternoon. Yes, I know I said my body was worn out. It was. But the mist was lovely, and the woods were calling.
I discovered that there is in fact a way to get those songbirds out of hiding: annoy a robin. The path I was on seemed little used, overgrown in places, so perhaps that explains why the robin pair I encountered treated me as though I were some strange alien being instead of--as robins usually do with humans--ignoring me. They both started making alarm calls, and followed me around squawking incessantly for the next fifteen minutes.
If you followed the hyperlink on "pish" in my last post, you learned that to "pish" is to imitate the sound that birds (particularly chickadees) make when they discover a predator, and want to call together a mixed-species mob of birds to harass it. (Specifically, this is for land predators or perched raptors. A raptor in flight provokes a very different alarm call, one that means "stay in hiding and don't move a muscle.") Pishing is thus a way of tricking birds into coming out in the open. Well, no one pishes as expertly as an actual bird! As the robins hopped around fussing, every songbird in the area popped out of the foliage to see what was going on. One of them was a beautiful male Black-Throated Blue Warbler. Not a lifer, but a pleasure.
Later down the trail I also spotted a Golden-Crowned Kinglet and several Nashville Warblers. In all, three last-minute additions to my "Gaspé list", and three birds that I had never before seen in their breeding habitat.
June 27th, 2009
So I went walking alone up on Mont Ste-Anne yesterday afternoon. Yes, I know I said my body was worn out. It was. But the mist was lovely, and the woods were calling.
I discovered that there is in fact a way to get those songbirds out of hiding: annoy a robin. The path I was on seemed little used, overgrown in places, so perhaps that explains why the robin pair I encountered treated me as though I were some strange alien being instead of--as robins usually do with humans--ignoring me. They both started making alarm calls, and followed me around squawking incessantly for the next fifteen minutes.
If you followed the hyperlink on "pish" in my last post, you learned that to "pish" is to imitate the sound that birds (particularly chickadees) make when they discover a predator, and want to call together a mixed-species mob of birds to harass it. (Specifically, this is for land predators or perched raptors. A raptor in flight provokes a very different alarm call, one that means "stay in hiding and don't move a muscle.") Pishing is thus a way of tricking birds into coming out in the open. Well, no one pishes as expertly as an actual bird! As the robins hopped around fussing, every songbird in the area popped out of the foliage to see what was going on. One of them was a beautiful male Black-Throated Blue Warbler. Not a lifer, but a pleasure.
Later down the trail I also spotted a Golden-Crowned Kinglet and several Nashville Warblers. In all, three last-minute additions to my "Gaspé list", and three birds that I had never before seen in their breeding habitat.
| ← | → |