Pair of dead birds outside Blair Station sparks mystery
On Wednesday, OC Transpo called an Ottawa organization devoted to reducing bird deaths from window collisions to collect a pair of dead birds.
The birds — and a fish — had been found outside Blair Station. OC Transpo routinely calls Safe Wings Ottawa to report bird-window collisions, and assumed the birds had perished by colliding with the glass.
Safe Wings, which also conducts research and rescues birds injured in collisions, dispatched a volunteer to pick up the birds and put them in a freezer. But the volunteer, who was not an experienced birder, could not identify the birds.
The fish offered a clue. Perhaps they were ospreys, a fish-eating bird of prey.
Or maybe they were some other bird that had died in an aerial battle over a fish. The volunteer sent photos to Safe Wings Ottawa founder Anouk Hoedeman.
“My first reaction was that it looked like a ptarmigan,” Hoedeman said. She was even more certain they were ptarmigan after seeing the feathered feet.
But that opened up a new mystery. Ptarmigan, partridge-like grouse, live in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. They eat seeds and berries, not fish. Oddly, these two ptarmigan were sporting their white winter plumage.
Safe Wings volunteers have sometimes found dead and injured birds in unexpected places: boreal chickadees and yellow-billed cuckoos in Ottawa outside of their ranges, and northern shrikes and whip-poor-wills downtown.
But ptarmigan are not found anywhere near Ottawa, said Hoedeman. Her working theory is that the ptarmigan came from someone's freezer and were intended as food, along with the fish.
Funny things happen in the bird rescue world. Just a few months ago, a volunteer checking around a building on Lancaster Road thought she had located an injured hawk under a pile of pallets and called in reinforcements. It turned out to be a groundhog, which makes squeaky noises similar to a hawk.
How the ptarmigan were misplaced or forgotten outside Blair Station is still a mystery.
“We're still curious,” Hoedeman said.
Joël Lamoureux, communications manager at Tungasuvvingat Inuit, said “country food” harvested in the north is often sent south to members of Ottawa's Inuk community.
“It is always shipped frozen and whole. Once it arrives here, it is often shared with other family,” he said. “So, it may be that a member of the Inuk community simply forgot the animals while boarding the bus. And, if that is the case, I'm sure they are very upset about it as country food is so important and difficult to find in the south.”