Rare Find

I'm a terrible birder.

While I find birds to be interesting creatures, I simply don't have the patience to sit for great lengths of time, hoping that one will land close by. When I walk through forests, my eyes are focused more on the path ahead of me than what's going on overhead.

The only time I seem to be able to capture images of our feathered friends is when I happen upon people who have already spotted them and are either capturing images, themselves, or they tell me where I can find something.^*

This happens a lot at Mud Lake, as the real birders get to this Britannia-area nature trail for sunrise, long before I arrive, and they know what they're looking for. Of course, there are common birds that seek DW and me out when they know we're carrying sunflower seeds, but we have never spotted any birds out of the ordinary.

That is, until this past Sunday.

It was a fairly quiet morning at Mud Lake. It was Easter Sunday, after all. But not only were there not as many people on the trails, there were few birds fluttering about. I could hear chickadees in the distance and, high above out of sight, a woodpecker was going to town on a tree. But we didn't see a single nuthatch nor any cardinals.

After a few hundred metres on the trail, without a single bird seeking out DW's outstretched hand of seeds, we decided to head back to the car. Even the birds seemed to be taking a holiday.

Before we returned to the car, we walked down Cassels Street, toward the water filtration plant, and looked through the woods where, last year, we spotted a screech owl sleeping in a tree.

I say we spotted it but there were actually a few people standing at the side of the road, taking their own photos. We spotted them as we stepped out from the trails and were wondering what had caught their attention.

Since that day, DW and I always take a short walk to that spot so see if the owl is in that tree but it never is. And we haven't seen any owls around Mud Lake since then. But it never hurts to try.

Of course, it wasn't there on Sunday, either. But as we walked toward the car, I saw something in a tree on the lake side of the road that caught my attention. It was about the size and shape of an owl but I couldn't quite make it out, so I held my camera up and looked through my 300mm zoom lens.

It wasn't an owl but I didn't know what it was, and it was a bit difficult to see. The sun had the tree back-lit and the bird was obscured by several leafless branches. I tried to move to a better angle to see it, and as I walked further east along the road, I could make out two more similar birds.

When I got to a better vantage on the road for these two birds, the first bird was even more obscured but at least these birds were at a better angle. The tree was actually in Mud Lake, about 20 metres away, and I got to the lake's edge, and realized this was going to be the closest I was going to get. So I took some shots.

DW and I tried to guess what these birds were but had never seen one before. I knew I wasn't going to get any better photos so we decided to head back to the car, and we would look up the birds later.

As we made our way to our car, we passed an elderly woman with a pair of binoculars and we pointed to the birds in the trees, asking her if she had seen them before.

"Oh yes," she said, "those are black-crowned night herons. They're not from around here. They must have flown all night to get here and will sleep most of the day." Without another word, she continued on her way, now that she had conveyed the information.

In the car, DW looked up the birds and confirmed, showing me a photo of them.

"Yup, that's them," I said as I pulled out onto the road.

It would have been nice to see the birds more clearly. Perhaps we should have returned later in the day to see if they had moved or were still there. We could have brought binoculars of our own or my spotting scope that I received from work, for 15 years of service, but rarely removed from their case.

I may be bad at spotting birds but this time, I lucked out. And while an experienced birder was able to identify them for DW and me, I can take pride in knowing that I found them without help.

I wonder what we'll spot next time? Happy Tuesday!

^* That toucan from yesterday's blog post? Yes, I photographed it but that was easy: it was in a cage in the Bronx Zoo.