It starts with a bang.  A few days of beautiful warm weather, and suddenly they flood northward, crossing the wide expanse of Lake Erie (a risky open water voyage apparently worth the circumvention of Detroit), then push up through southern Ontario and beyond.  I headed out at the crack of dawn on Saturday to see what I could stir up at Snyder’s Flats, and although breeding bird activity was excellent, the only migrant passerines I found were a few Ruby-crowned Kinglets.

However, a violent thunderstorm rolled in late Saturday afternoon, followed by steady rains until well into Sunday.  Bad weather during migration periods makes a birder antsy, as it tends to ground travelling birds.  And grounded migrants don’t sit on their hands (wings?) waiting for the skies to clear up.  No rest for weary warblers, as they must fuel up for the next leg of their voyage.

I headed to the Arboretum after the rain stopped Sunday afternoon.  Before I’d even opened the door to my car I could hear the birdsong — the simple melodies of wood warblers.  Black-throated Green, Palm and a Waterthrush added their voices to the mix, but most prominent were the Yellow-rumped Warblers.

The trees were dripping with butter butts.  At times I had three or four together in the bins, flitting after insects and poking beaks into crevices.  Had the CCD sensor on my little Canon Powershot not died on me last week, I could have easily snapped a few passable photos (which, for a warbler, is saying a lot).

The Yellow-rumps that pass through Ontario once went by the delightful name of Myrtle Warbler, before it was decided that they and the more westerly Audubon’s were a single species (we lose a lot of great bird names to taxonomical instability). They are hardy birds, one of the first warblers to appear in spring, and the last to depart in the fall.  Now that they’ve arrived, there’s no waiting for the vacation time I booked in May — I need to get out now if I’m to enjoy the best of the warblering.  Looks like a trip to Long Point may be in order for this weekend!

Yellow-rumped Warbler. Watercolour.

The Northern Cardinal is one of the most brilliantly coloured of our North American birds.  Originally a more southerly species, it has extended its range north over the past two centuries and is now a common sight in parts of southeastern Canada.  As a non-migratory songbird, this expansion is believed to be influenced by both climate changes and the appearance of food-providing human populations (two factors which have helped the birds survive our harsh winters).

I found this hapless bird by the roadside on Wednesday evening, his vibrant feathers drawing my attention even in the darkening twilight as I drove past.  Specimens such as this give one an opportunity to examine their subject up close, revealing aspects of anatomy and plumage that aren’t obvious in the field.  Check out the lenth of the tibia (or “drumstick”) in the above drawing.  This is actually the bird’s shin (the knee and thigh are well hidden by feathers), and typically only the lower part is visible from beneath the wings of a perched bird.  I’ve seen many a bird painting that fails to include this small but important bit of anatomy (and it’s this kind of lack of familiarity found in a lot of the wildlife art produced for mass consumption that irritates me to no end).

The bill of a cardinal is quite large for its size, and it’s as powerful as it looks (as many a bird bander will lament).  Unlike jays or chickadees, who typically resort to hammering seeds in order to crack them, cardinals shell their meal using the strength of their jaw muscles alone.  The feet were another part that I spent a lot of time examining, as I always find them to be the most difficult part of a bird to get right.

Cardinal Study. Watercolour and coloured pencil.

Red is a truely awful colour to work with — it’s difficult to be subtle with such a hue.  Hopefully I’ve managed to capture some of the true vibrancy of the bird, as well as create a useful piece of reference material for future work.

Can you see us?

Photo: NASA

The Earth, as a tiny pale dot caught in a shaft of scattered sunlight as seen from the Voyager I spacecraft, at a distance of six billion kilometers away.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan, 1996

We’ve reached the lull, that period of spring migration where the usual early arrivals have already settled in and we wait eagerly for the coming onslaught.  I spotted a Barn Swallow wheeling overhead yesterday, decidedly early for this species.  It won’t be long now.

Here’s an Eastern Phoebe, found on a windy day near the bluebird boxes at Guelph Lake:

Snow returned on Monday to blanket the countryside, but this past Sunday was a beautiful balmy day.  I went for a walk in the fields while out at my parents’ place, enjoying the weather while it lasted.  It still feels strange to wander around back there without my old boy keeping me company.

Pausing at the end of the trail, a shape out in the middle of the field caught my eye.  Deer, perhaps?  It looked rather formless, and raising my bins I was relatively certain that it would resolve into nothing more than a large clump of grasses.  Wrong again — it was a coyote, head down as it casually sniffed about.  Preoccupied as it was, it hadn’t spotted me yet, giving me the opportunity to drop out of sight and continue to observe it until it dissolved into the tall grass in true coyote fashion.

Eastern Coyote

Back down the trail, I was somewhat dismayed to discover that one of the neighbours had taken down the lone sugar maple near the marsh.  This isn’t the first of my favoured trees that he’s removed (and likely won’t be the last, either, as I tend to be rather fond of very old trees, particularly those that serve as landmarks to my childhood memories).  Here’s a photo from last fall, decked out in its autumnal glory:

Lurking about the piles of branches left behind was a male American Robin, merrily singing away in between bouts of foraging and leaf turning.  The maple, reduced to a foot-high stump, now served as a stage for his cheery performance.  Who could resist?

Neibauer Marsh is a large pond situated in a cornfield on the outskirts of Guelph.  Being a relatively shallow, stagnant body of water, it can be late to thaw in the spring, but once it opens up it attracts large numbers of migrant waterfowl.  We had enough warm weather this past March to see the ice disappear by the middle of the month, and so Neibauer was able to entice a passing flock of Tundra Swans to rest there awhile and fuel up for their continued journey north.

My lifer Tundra was seen at Neibauer three years ago, only a few days after I had just purchased my first spotting scope.  I couldn’t get enough of these big, elegant birds with their mellow calls, and at dusk I would often park at the roadside with the windows rolled down and listen to them as the sun sank.  For several weeks they remained in the marsh, spreading out into the surrounding fields during the day to feed, and returning to the pond in the evenings for a little socializing before nightfall.

This year the marsh was host to about sixty swans, who hung around for a week or two before pressing on to their breeding grounds.  I stopped by the marsh at the end of last week to find that they had all departed — save two individuals wading in the shallows by the eastern shore.  One of the birds sported a yellow plastic wing tag, and a look through the bins confirmed my suspicions: these two were Trumpeter Swans, larger relatives of the Tundras that had been extirpated from eastern Canada two centuries ago.  Recent decades have seen the species successfully reintroduced, and they are now a relatively common sight here in the Great Lakes region.  Trumpeters, although they look very similar to Tundras, can be distinguished by their heavily sloped foreheads and loud, trumpeting calls.  A closer look may reveal more subtle field marks: a line of pink is sometimes visible along the edge of the mandible, and Trumpeters lack the yellow lores found on most adult Tundras.  Identifying them at any distance can be a challenge, and you can find a more in-depth discussion on the Sibley Guides site.

A common criticism of evolutionary theory by those who seek to discredit it is that its selective mechanism of ’survival of the fittest’ inevitably leads to racism and eugenics.  Darwin was a passionate opponent of slavery (which he referred to as “that greatest curse on Earth”), and he applied his theory to demonstrate that all human beings were of one species and one ancestry — countering prevalent opinions about differing origins and racial superiority.  Nonetheless, evolution denialists continue to make attempts to tar evolution by associating it with various eugenic policies and rationalizations.

The Nazis did not target the Jews because, upon examining the Theory of Evolution, it became evident to them that Jews were ‘less evolved,’ and hence inferior. The idea is patently ridiculous, and you’d require a very twisted, backward and ignorant understanding of both history and natural selection to argue such.  Darwin’s explanation was distorted and abused for this purpose, as was the rest of the mythology invented to justify the Nazis’ Final Solution to an appalling question.

To suggest that the Theory of Evolution, with it’s catchphrase of ’survival of the fittest,’ is an argument for eugenics is bogus.  If, in spite of fierce competition for resources in an unforgiving environment, human beings still managed to acquire traits like compassion and cooperation, then natural selection becomes a very good reason to defend these qualities.  Behavioural traits with such obvious disadvantages to a tooth-and-nail survivalist must endow their possessor with a far greater reward if it is to persist in populations.

And yet, even if one could find no support from natural selection for such ideas, it really wouldn’t matter in the slightest.  One should not look to natural processes for guidance on the subject of ethics.  Is in no way implies ought, and it certainly doesn’t imply mandate.  Cannibalism, infanticide and incest were observed in nature long before Darwin came along, but such observations did not then cause these behaviours to become rampant in human society.  We need not (and should not) make the limitations of natural selection our own.