Birders bent on seeing lots of neotropical migrants at Ruthven would have been disappointed….again. The woods were largely empty. We encountered 14 species but most were in one’s and two’s.

I was contemplating the pictures of the Canada Warbler and Magnolia Warbler that we caught this morning and I was struck by the similarity of the bright yellow breast studded with “beads” of black. I wonder what it is about this combination that has caused it to evolve. You also see variations of it in Kirtland’s, Cape May, and Prairie Warblers.


Despite the empty woods, we did have a pretty respectable species count for the day tallying 78 species. This included a couple of firsts for the year: Black-billed Cuckoo and Common Nighthawk. The precipitous decline in nighthawk numbers perturbs me. This was a bird of my youth…..growing up in Hamilton’s east end I would watch them, many of them, reeling and diving in the sky at dusk and would listen to them well into the night before I fell asleep, their nasal peent a soothing lullaby of sorts. Now I consider myself lucky if I just see one in the course of a year. What a shame.


An avian drama unfolded over the course of the morning. On the evening of the 11th or early morning of the 12th, the 4 Killdeer eggs hatched and we became aware of 4 little feather puffs scooting around on skinny stilts. Fearful for their lives in the sometimes busy parking lot, we blocked off the upper part to give them a chance to feed and grow. But….we knew that either this afternoon or tomorrow morning we would have to usher them into the Butterfly Meadow as the upper parking lot would be needed for an event on Saturday. For the past two days the parents have been anxious for their chicks and anytime one of us moved in their general direction (on a net round for example), one would give an alarm call and fly in front of the “intruder” where it would begin to give its broken wing display and try to draw us off. To make the bird feel better I always followed it until I was well out of the way and the adult could return to its chicks smug in the knowledge that it had tricked that pesky human…..again. But this morning both parents were even more vigilant, jumpy even. You could sense a stronger anxiety. At one point one of the parents scurried all the way down from the upper parking lot along the path to the banding lab picnic tables where we were sitting and began its broken-wing ruse. Hmmm….strange. And then shortly after, we couldn’t find them in the parking lot at all. They were already, 4 chicks and 2 parents, down the path below net 8 on their way to the river. The adults had waited until the coast was clear (all the school kids had left the area) and then hurried – really hurried – their chicks toward the water. Every now and again the young ones would seek shelter close to a parent and crowd in underneath giving a multi-legged look to the adult.


Banded 22:
1 Hairy Woodpecker
1 Least Flycatcher
1 Blue Jay
1 Veery
2 American Robins
1 Tennessee Warbler
2 Magnolia Warblers
1 Yellow-rumped Warbler
2 Black and White Warblers
1 Canada Warbler
2 American Redstarts
2 Common Yellowthroats
1 Northern Cardinal
1 Brown-headed Cowbird
1 Baltimore Oriole
1 American Goldfinch
1 House Sparrow

Species Count: 78 spp.

Rick