My Bird of the Day

March 9, 2026.  Aldershot, ON.  It’s the same happy thing every March: spring is imminent, the first Snowdrops push through winter’s matted debris, and the sun starts pouring real warmth to the pummeled earth; a welcome change though still no guarantees  Those tail-end days of February and first of March are potential Tundra Swan days and I went looking for them today.

The swans in their thousands have wintered the dark days in sheltered bays along the Atlantic coast.  At the first easing of winter, it’s their time to start a two-month journey north to Canada’s  coastal tundra; two months of following winter’s melting. After an overnight first leg, they stop to rest and re-fuel in quiet back waters of Lakes Ontario and Erie, which is where we find them.

My first stop this morning was a small marina facing our industrial harbour.  There were Trumpeter Swans, a close relative but not what I was looking for, I was on high alert for Tundra Swans.  The first clue of the approach of tundras is their soft flight calls, suspected more than heard, and while binocular-sweeping the ice-scattered waters off the marina I felt a small nudge. An uncertain suggestion but I searched and soon found a smallish group of Tundra Swans, around twenty, struggling against a buffeting west wind flying low over the waters.  Tundras for sure, and a mental check mark for 2026.

Now I wanted to find more. A hike of trails beside a nearby lake was good exercise for my newly installed knee but produced no Tundra Swans.  I was quite happy though with a dozen Ring–necked Ducks, some Gadwall , Northern Shovelers, American Wigeon and a high-soaring Bald Eagle.  This Mourning Cloak butterfly was a welcome sight: it’s an insect of woodlands who over-winter as adults sheltered under loose bark and ready to take flight as soon as it feels the sun’s warmth.

Returning to the marina, in case anything had changed, I ran into a fellow naturalist.  We swapped ideas and suspicions, and with his instincts the two of us were able to find just the right bit of waterfront (mostly taken up with high-priced and sometimes imaginative housing) where we could get quite close to a quiet flock of resting Tundra Swans, about 150 of them, and a scattering of Mallards, Scaup, Goldeneye, Bufflehead and White-winged Scoters. It was a privilege to enjoy them like this.  I’m not much of a species chaser or year-list keeper, but spring wouldn’t be complete without them.  Birds of the Day of course.

February 16, 2026. Not far from home a 800M-long, important ship canal links Lake Ontario with our industrial harbour, the canal is crossed by three important roads.  The two busiest roads pass high overhead on twin arching bridges, and a much quieter service road crosses by way of a lift bridge, the scene of today’s bird of the day.  The lift bridge is rather monstrous, and while the engineering details really don’t matter for our purposes, it is quite something to watch as the road deck is hoisted between opposing steel towers by a system of cables and counterweights.  Like many such structures, these bridges are home to a large community of feral pigeons, Rock Doves strictly speaking.  And the canal below is a winter refuge for ducks who breed in the far north.  They are here in their thousands sometimes, of several species who live by deep diving for Zebra and Quagga Mussels.  The water in the canal remains open all winter regardless of ice conditions of the harbour or lake.

To further set the stage, those pigeons and ducks are an important year-round source of food for a resident pair of Peregrine Falcons; pigeons at any time, ducks when in season.

I stopped at the canal this morning hoping to admire thousands of ducks, but they weren’t there in anything like the usual numbers, the canal was rather quiet, presumably the lake was more enticing.  I helped a couple of novice birders sort out differences between the few White–winged Scoters, Long–tailed Ducks, Mallards and Red–breasted Mergansers.  They urged me to walk further and join them counting heads, but lunch sounded like a better plan to me, so I turned to leave.  Walking away I became aware of a different sound, not traffic, not industry, something new, a kind of aggravated che-che-che-che. I turned back, suspecting right away a Peregrine Falcon, and looked up to where they might be seen if it were breeding season. I quickly found them both.  I guess it’s close enough to breeding season, territory-claiming time anyway, for the male was posturing and calling.  The female watched as he flew out and away in a wide loop, his broadly pointed wings made a marked impression.  For the other birder pair, this was utterly unexpected, a totally new experience.  For me it was spine tingling the way a surprise peregrine encounter usually is and on a winter day that was otherwise pretty lean on bird life, Peregrine Falcons were easily My Birds of the Day.

February 14 2026.  This morning’s sky was almost cloudless, and a warmish sun was chipping at our thick snow cover. As I headed out on a pre-breakfast errand, I heard my first-of-the-year Northern Cardinal’s spring song coming from a garden a short distance away.  Clear blue sky or not, his cue was probably daylight length. We now enjoy nearly 12 hours of daylight (ten and a half hours between sunrise and sunset). It’s amazing and heart-warming what a few notes of the cardinal’s clear and pure-toned “Tewww-tewww-tewww’ can do to a mid-winter morning.

This was a male Northern Cardinal responding to something telling him that spring courtship is on the agenda and he had better stake out his home turf before someone else gets in ahead of him. Time to get organized and besides, this is St. Valentines’ Day, a sweetheart would be in order and it’s a safe bet that she was almost certainly nearby and listening.

February 1 2026. Lincoln County, Ontario.  January has laid a thick layer of snow and firmed it into place with weeks of deep cold; not birding weather, not for me anyway.  But flipping the calendar today was a step in the right direction. February brings more sunshine than we’ve seen since the radiance of fall and soon will come the small heart-lift you get from sitting into a sun-warmed car.  I thought finding some Snow Buntings would make a nice start to the month so, with valuable information from a friend, we made our way to a new-to-me corner of the province.

Snow Buntings favour open landscapes, the sort of windswept winter farmland that possibly looks very much like the barrens of Greenland or the Arctic where the buntings breed. At this time of year, they gather in loose flocks and scavenge bare roadsides for weed seeds, spilt grain and even insects immobilized by the cold.

We soon found several flocks of Snow Buntings, many Horned Larks and with the odd Lapland Longspur, swirling and tumbling in flight rather like winter squalls. Nice to see, but I’ve had more satisfying bunting days; perhaps it was the glare of reflected sun, or perhaps their flightiness with our approach that spoiled it, I’ve done better.

Just four years ago I enjoyed large flocks of Snow Buntings who were feeding along the margins of a wide trail that bisected a large field and is popular with dog-walkers.  As people and dogs approached, the flocks lifted, swirled around and soon regrouped, landing to resume feeding. Sometimes they were too close to another approaching threat and so, repeat.

More recently, October 2022, I was astonished to find a handful of Snow Buntings on the shoreline of Kattegat, the strait between Denmark and Sweden.  They had me baffled for a while, the context was all wrong, but then the penny dropped, Snow Buntings are circumpolar in distribution.  Just where these Danish buntings came from and were heading to, I can only speculate, Lapland and Poland maybe.

And I have written before about winter days spent helping to band Snow Buntings. Icy days with at least one episode of frostbite, but worth it to enjoy birds that really are cute.

Satisfying doesn’t always happen with birds; they were nevertheless my Birds of the Day.

January 8 2026. Haldimand County, Ontario. A bright sunshine day in January is a rarity and on this, right around lunch time, a bit of take-a-chance-on-it birding beckoned.  A friend accepted the challenge and we made an afternoon drive to the next county over, farmland of wide flat fields. I told my friend that this is Short-eared Owl and Northern Harrier country,  and possibly Snow Buntings too, but with a couple of caveats: For the owls we’d have to hang around until late dusk, and buntings are more easily found when there’s good snow cover – and there wasn’t any.  Still, it was a bit of birding with potential, and you never know.

I forgot to include Rough-legged Hawks as a possibility and was a little chagrined when one appeared far off across a field of stubble but thrilled at the same time because it’s been a few years. Rough-legged Hawks breed in the tundra of arctic and subarctic Canada and cross the boreal forest to spend a few winter months in our open country. We don’t see many, but when we do it’s special.

We had no luck on the owls, harriers or buntings but did well with three or four Rough-legged Hawks.  Sometimes when they’re on a wheeling soar, they drift far and it can be hard to decide whether you’re seeing different individuals or the same one.  We were lucky though to see two at fairly close quarters and separately.

I never see Rough-legged Hawks without remembering a pair from some fifteen years ago. It won’t hurt to re-tell the story: I was driving around this same corner of the world and far to my right at the back of a big white field, I could see movement under a large, bare oak, I pulled over and stopped. The activity was an erratic wing-flapping and tumbling.  It took a while before I was able to make out that it really was birds, hawks of some kind, and that there were two of them.  But when I did, I saw that they were Rough-legged Hawks; a good winter sighting. Fortunately, I had my camera ready and took several reasonably good, but very longshot photos. What the interaction was about I have no idea, it was some kind of squabbling competition, the birds seemed to tussle, skip and pull at each other’s flapping wings. Rough-legs are known to play aerial-tag in small groups, perhaps this was the mid-winter version. Eventually one broke off the play and flew up to the branches above, game over.

To see two Rough-legs at once and to witness this kind of interaction, was new to me and I haven’t seen anything like it since. But the intrigue of that play, or whatever it was, was topped by a surprise discovery later. When I looked closely at my photos, I was at first astonished and then laughed loudly to see that two barn cats had watched this show from the comfort of a sheltered doorway behind. Look closely.