Birdwatchers can enjoy their passion close to home
Birdwatching at its best in the Prairies
You heard it here first: Canada’s three Midwestern provinces are a paradise for birdwatchers.
We’re talking about a region that spans 1.8 million square kilometres (almost 700,000 square miles), more than three times the size of France, and an immense territory that invites superlatives.
To the north, broad swaths of boreal and mixed-wood forests receive an annual influx of migrating songbirds, millions upon millions of them, drawn to some of the richest and most productive breeding grounds anywhere in the world.
Farther south, wide-open expanses of prairie provide living space for grassland specialists like greater sage-grouse and longbilled curlews, permitting them to extend their range into northerly latitudes.
Meanwhile, the region’s thousands of prairie potholes, or wetlands, are home to enormous flocks of ducks that hatch out most of the ducklings on the continent.
Add in rugged mountains, active sand dunes, even a strip of Arctic coast, and it becomes easy to understand why birdwatching in the so-called “Prairie provinces” can provide a lifetime of fascination and happiness.
Here, in an excerpt from a new book from Greystone Books, John
Acorn — one of three authors of the book — takes a look at birding highlights near Calgary.
BANFF NATIONAL PARK
When it comes to birding in Alberta, it’s hard not to think of the Rocky Mountains. You can find all of the signature bird species of the Rockies in any of the mountain parks (Banff, Jasper, Waterton, and Kananaskis Country), but my favourite Rocky Mountain destination is still Banff.
Mountain naturalists think in terms of three altitudinal zones. The lowest is the montane, where the town of Banff lies, along with most of the park’s roads and hotels. This is mountains-in-thebackground birding, and the birds here are abundant and delightful.
On one visit to the Cave and Basin Trail this past summer, my student Sydney Mohr and I had close-up views of mountain chickadees, Townsend’s warblers, and ruby-crowned kinglets, and then, much to our delight, we spotted nine soras, including babies, from the blind down at the marsh. In winter, my birding buddy Brian Leishman and I have seen everything from rusty blackbirds to Virginia rails here, all attracted by the year-round flow of water.
The mid-altitude zone is called the subalpine and, to me, it’s the least exciting, covered largely by continuous forests of Lodgepole pine, and of only moderate interest to birds and birders. However, there are wonderful lakes in this zone, including the famous Lake Louise, and the almost-as-famous Lake Minnewanka. Here, you’ll have a chance of seeing some of the true mountain species, such as Clark’s nutcracker, Steller’s jay, and gray-crowned rosy finch.
For the high-altitude species, you need to get up to treeline and above, in the alpine zone. Here, you might find a white-tailed ptarmigan or a timberline sparrow. If you have time, do visit Jasper, Waterton, and Kananaskis as well — you never know what you might spot.
DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK
Yes, it’s true: birds were the only group of dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction 66 million years ago. Dinosaurs are defined as all descendants of the first dinosaur, which lived more than 230 million years ago. Since the ancestors of birds were small theropods (bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs), birds are technically dinosaurs, as odd as that may seem.
Many of the finest dinosaur fossils on earth have come from the badlands at Dinosaur Provincial Park, which is why the park was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
But fossils were not the only reason for its designation; riparian cottonwood forests and their songbird populations were also mentioned in the original designation, as were the extensive badlands themselves and their resident birds of prey (golden eagle, ferruginous hawk, and prairie falcon, for example) ... The birds here are wonderful. They include not only diurnal raptors, but also common nighthawk, great horned owl, Say’s phoebe, rock wren, and lark sparrow. If you’re lucky, you might see a pair of mountain bluebirds nesting in an erosion hole in a sandstone hillside ...
The badlands are the main draw here, but the riverine riparian forests are also spectacular. Plains cottonwood forests provide a tremendous environment for songbirds, with shrubbier stands of willows, thorny buffaloberry, and Manitoba maple here and there, in which you might spot a yellow-breasted chat. In places, the area between the forests and the badlands takes the form of sage flats, extensive muddy plains dotted with sagebrush and loaded with birds, including ring-necked pheasants.
Of course, the river itself is worth checking for birds, including great blue heron, American white pelican, common merganser and wood duck. I first visited the park in 1975, and I still get excited every time I return.
FRANK LAKE
Not far from Calgary, Frank Lake is another classic Alberta birding destination, and this book would not be complete without it. Well, actually, this book is far from complete, because it’s just a select offering of top spots, but it wouldn’t be complete enough without it.
Frank Lake itself is the result of a waterfowl and wetland conservation project, undertaken by Ducks Unlimited, with the help of numerous other partner organizations, back in the 1980s. In other words, it’s an artificial reservoir, not a natural lake. This probably explains the utterly uninspired names for the three lake basins: Basin 1, Basin 2 and Basin 3.
Everything here has been optimized for the breeding success of game birds, but the spinoff benefits for other wetland birds, not to mention non-avian plants and animals, are impressive. Of course, birders, and especially bird photographers, also benefit. On a busy day in springtime, with all the birds in their breeding plumages, the observation blind can be a very popular place indeed.
On a recent visit to Frank Lake, I joined my birding friends Brian Leishman and Chris Fisher. We had brought fresh coffee from nearby High River and we settled in for a nice, long session. For most of the visit we had the blind to ourselves, and we got great looks at a variety of ducks (I was especially pleased with the closeup views of ruddy ducks and northern shovellers) as well as white-faced ibis, blacknecked stilts and eared grebes. Even the American coots were putting on a great show, gathering food for their babies. In early June, baby coots have bald orange heads and stringy orange beards, and they’re so darned ugly that they’re adorable. Only baby soras come close.