Month: May 2018

Point Pelee Revisited

I’m out early, walking the trails, enjoying the morning air perfumed with Sweet Cicely, which white flowers carpet sections of the woods. Vaguely, eucalyptus-like, to me at any rate. Bird song everywhere too. Magical. Not much moving in the bushes yet. I have hopes for the boardwalk. No wind this morning and the light is great – photographer’s light. Somewhere in the reeds, a Green Heron squawks reveille and various sparrows kick in. I’d like to linger but it’s time to go. I’m meeting my brother at the Visitor’s Center and I know the parking this time of year will be brutal.

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Point Pelee Woodland

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Point Pelee Boardwalk

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What the early morning light reveals

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White-throated Sparrow

V and I were here last fall but most of the warblers had departed, and the forest green, so vibrant now had muted. Scads of Sharp-shinned Hawks overflying the peninsula didn’t help the birding much but you take what you can get.

Timing is everything with birds – when they’re gone they’re gone. Right now, they’re here. Just. Many migrants have already passed through on their way to the Boreal Forest. Not all the Blackburnian Warblers though. One pops up beside the path. A favourite of mine, the Blackburnian. Striking little bird.

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Blackburnian Warbler

This year Baltimore Orioles seem to be the flavour of the day. Now that the sun is up, they’re everywhere, flashing orange, black and yellow in the canopy. Yellow Warblers are also abundant, lisping out their ‘sweet, sweet, sweet, I’m so sweet song’ from every thicket. Brother Steve makes the discovery of the day – a Common Nighthawk snoozing on a branch, it’s chest covered with cryptic hieroglyphs. Out at the tip, a squadron of Common Terns have found something interesting. Delicate, pretty birds, agile on the wing. They’re hungry and so, reminded, are we. Time for lunch!

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Common Terns

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Eastern Painted Turtle

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Baltimore Oriole

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Common Nighthawk

 

 

The Salton Sea: February 2018

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American Avocets and Coots

Burrowing Owls – I can’t seem to get these little guys. By ‘get’, I mean ‘add to my list’, not as in ‘I don’t understand them’. Although I don’t. Anyway, I’m determined on this trip — steely-eyed. The owls are ‘reliable’ in the intensely agricultural Imperial Valley south of the Salton Sea. It’s a curiosity, the Salton Sea. An accident. Sort of. Being below sea level the Salton is a sink soaking up seasonal runoff. Boy, that’s a lot of ‘s’s!

In centuries past, runoff created a lake, which the sun quickly evaporated away. Then about 1905 or so,  a water company goof let the Colorado River fill the basin and suddenly the folks in Palm springs and LA had a big beautiful lake to visit. Great! Resort communities sprang up; probably Bogie and Bacall spent time here. In the a 1950’s it was a Beach Blanket Bingo kind of a place. That was then. Nowadays, almost no new water comes in and the lake is shrinking under the hot desert sun. Did I mention the smell? It has an unusual bouquet and when the wind’s in the wrong quarter, it’s fierce. If nothing changes, all the fish will die within seven years — even the hardy African Tilapia. Birds will suffer too as water levels drop. Where will the migrating flocks go to replenish their energy when the Sea is gone? Who knows?

The change is happening now. Three years ago squadrons of White Pelicans cruised the Sea; today not a single bird. Maybe there just aren’t enough fish anymore. Maybe the Pelis are at the other end of the lake. Lots of birds still come – they have to –  but fewer and fewer every year they say.

But I need to lighten up. It’s not all doomsday. There are folks trying to get more water for the Sea. The birding’s still good. American Avocets, which don’t need the Tilapia, still work the retreating edge of the water picking up brine shrimp. They are tall, pretty shorebirds with their French lawyer robe colouring and upturned bills. I can vouch for the upturned bill, not the other.

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Waterfowl in Transit

The  Sonny Bono Wildlife Refuge has Burrowing Owls — or they’re close by at any rate. Just inside the Refuge, a Roadrunner ambles by and then darts off looking, I suppose, for a snake or lizard for breakfast. Some Gambel’s Quail chuckle their way through the undergrowth. On some ponds, huge numbers of waterfowl rest on their way north; on others amazing numbers of shorebirds, including dozens of Dowitchers.

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Roadrunner

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Gambel’s Quail

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Dowitchers

I stop at the Refuge office for tips and also to ask about Sonny. Politicians tack their names on projects in which they otherwise have little interest but Sonny, once mayor of Palm Springs, really cared. So, thanks Sonny, (though not necessarily for “I Got You Babe)! As for the owls – “just walk out to the end of the parking lot and look right.” Which I do. In the wild, they’d use the abandoned burrows of other animals as they don’t dig their own. Here people have installed nesting pipes. And there they are, right on their doorstep, taking in the morning sun. So easy. How come it took me so long to get ’em’?

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Burrowing Owls