Winter sights

I’m not a huge fan of birding by car –over two summers I spent months driving to find birds in a land of bad radio. I do like to keep a look out when I’m in a car anyway. I notice a lot of raptors; mostly red-tails perched in trees near the road but sometimes a smaller hawk or even a northern harrier floating over rolling hills. In a couple of months kestrels will be impersonating mourning doves on telephone wires, or hovering high above some unlucky meadow vole (or grasshopper).

Kestrels are still here, although in reduced numbers. Our winter bird population is poor in species because the ones we keep are outnumbered by those we lose to milder climes. Some of these areas might dispute that description this year with all the snowstorms, but chance weather events are a danger which birds cannot completely avoid. Migrating can make the long-term chance of catastrophic weather events much less. Fortunately for those of us feeling the February blues, migration gives us a few surprises from the depths of the arctic that don’t involve ice and snow.

Snow buntings littered the edge of the field as I drove down our road last week. Come spring, these creamy white and brown birds will trade our forest-edged fields and beaches for the tree-less tundra of the high arctic. Males will wear down the tips of their feathers to expose pretty black and white birds beneath the bland façade we see. No need to be striking (and more exposed to predators) when they’re not interested in carving out territories on our lands.

Predators can better afford to be striking year-round. On a recent drive up to Snowstorm City, a hawk soaring just above the highway struck me as more patterned than the red-tail I was expecting. She alighted onto a nearby tree and her dark patches revealed that she was a rough-legged hawk, another arctic visitor. Both of these species have benefited from the increase in open land created in this area through European settlement, but the mammal-eating rough-legged hawk has been hurt more by the conversion of grassland to cropland. Maybe she’s feeling her own version of the February blues. Maybe it will be a relief to get away from the land of snow and ice to what she experiences as a land of grass, flowers and skittering mammals. Just as it will be a relief to me to go back to birding on foot.