Winter watchers
Bruce Mactavish: Winter tends to drag as we pass the midway point. For the first half of the season we were adjusting to the relative novelty of the snow and cold still carrying with us memories of fall and late summer.
Winter tends to drag as we pass the midway point. For the first half of the season we were adjusting to the relative novelty of the snow and cold still carrying with us memories of fall and late summer.
After crossing the hump we are all looking ahead to a new spring and summer.
We ride the cycle of the seasons with the birds. You do not have to be an outdoors person to notice the rapidly increasing minutes of daylight at this time of year. The sun is a little higher at mid-day making each day a little brighter than the day before.
Winter birding is getting a bit repetitious.
It is mostly the same birds at your feeder every day. Active birders are running out of different things to try. St. John’s and area birders tend to gravitate toward Quidi Vidi Lake on the weekends.
There is a good variety of birds there even if we know most of them on a first name bases by now. The four double crested cormorants that spend part of the day at Bowring Park are now also visiting Quidi Vidi Lake.
A group of 3-5 common mergansers regularly visits the west end of the lake adding a little spice to the routine duck fare.
The return of the rare yellow-legged gull after a five-week absence gives the gull watchers something to look for. Watching the parade of gulls as they drop into the open water at the mouth of the Virginia River and Rennies River to bathe and drink is one of the most interesting gigs in town.
Learning the gulls is a lifelong activity. The bewildered stand shoulder to shoulder with the experienced gull watchers absorbing tips on identification. There are seemingly endless combinations of patterns among the immature and adults of the 7-8 species of gull present daily at the lake.
Like the Rubik’s cube, the flock is solvable.
A couple of special winter rarities have been hanging out at the open water hole at the mouth of the Virginia River.
The red-winged blackbird, one of the most numerous birds across North America, is quite scarce in Newfoundland but is particularly rare in the winter. One has been living in the willows by the foot bridge.
It was benefitting from the bird seed that people were giving to the local ducks but now people have made a little feeder just for the blackbird. After a very close call from a sharp-shinned hawk it has been keeping a low profile in the willows.
At least four song sparrows are joining the blackbird for the seed handouts.
This is also a good place to see the wigeons, ducks that normally have a shy streak within are forced to jostle with the common ducks to survive the winter.
Another bird trying to get through the winter at this location is a piedbilled grebe.
This amazing little brown diving bird is a master of escape and concealment. Like a water snake it can move through the tangled willow roots along the shoreline with near invisibility. During a cold spell we thought it had departed or died.
But then during a warm spell it resurrected itself and appeared in the open water of the lake like nothing had ever happened. It lives on small fish which it can probably find in the running water of the Virginia River even when the lake freezes over for short periods of time.
Another go to spot for St. John’s birders in the winter is Cape Spear.
Things can get interesting here in late winter when the southward moving pack ice covers the eider feeding shoals on the northeastern coast of Newfoundland.
The first big flock of eiders for the winter at Cape Spear occurred this past weekend.
Randy Wheeler was there at the right time with his camera when a flock of 1,000 eiders came into to feed by the rocks.
He got shots of a beautiful drake king eider but more unusual was a rarely seen hybrid cross between a king eider and common eider.
Randy secured several shots documenting this oddity.
However, in the background of one of his pictures was a drake common eider with a bill the colour of a freshly peeled carrot.
The normal colour of our winter eiders is olive-yellow.
Orange is the characteristic bill colour of the eiders from the western part of the Arctic. Normally this population of eiders flies to the Pacific Ocean to spend the winter. There have been a couple of Pacific eiders photographed on the Avalon Peninsula in the last few years perhaps indicating a spread of these birds across the Arctic with the more open waters in Northwest Passage.
One step at time we will conquer winter.
March is just around the corner.
“The return of the rare yellow-legged gull after a five-week absence gives the gull watchers something to look for. Watching the parade of gulls as they drop into the open water at the mouth of the Virginia River and Rennies River to bathe and drink is one of the most interesting gigs in town. “