More Townsend's Warbler plus Ross's Goose

The Townsend's Warbler which was first noticed last Saturday (but quite likely had been around for awhile) continued into Monday. It looked quite content loosely hanging around with a small group of kinglets and chickadees. The crowd of searchers was not as large as on the weekend, but still, at least a dozen folks arrived and successfully saw the bird. Most were retirees, not surprisingly. Getting good photographs, however, was a different story. The bird was active and typically was in the upper half of any tree it was found in, sometimes right at the top. Combined with the bright overcast skies, the light and distance was challenging.

I used the 5D3 with the 1.4X converter on the 500mm lens this time, knowing that under poor light conditions it would perform much better than the crop sensor of the 7D2 which I used for photos taken on Saturday for the previous post. Even at that, I had to use a lot of tweaking of the high resolution RAW images to make the best of them. If I was adept at photoshop, I might have considered replacing the overexposed white sky for a more pleasing sky blue background, but taking the photos as natural as possible has always been my preference.

Up until this day, I had never seen the warbler in any tree but a coniferous one. That wasn't really surprising, since the bird's normal habitat is the coniferous forests of the Rocky Mountains, where it forages and nests in the upper reaches of conifers. So I was a little surprised to see this bird spend a few moments at the very top of this leafless deciduous tree. It certainly gave less obstructive views, but again, the over exposed sky did not help. For camera aficionados, this next photo was intentionally overexposed in the camera by 2 1/3 stops, and then had the contrast, etc adjusted on the computer just to get a bit of detail in the bird. It was a pretty drastic crop as well, going from 5760 pixels on the long side down to 1200 pixels, which resulted in going from a total of 22,118,400 pixels down to 960,000 pixels. That is a 96% crop

One of the other highlights of this rarity arriving here is to re-connect with folks I hadn't seen in years. Some of these included folks from the GTA while another one was a former prof of mine. I took a wildlife biology course from him back in about 1974, and had a few discussions with him at the time about the Rondeau deer herd. I hadn't seen him in more than 40 years, so it was interesting to chat for a bit.

While a few of us were watching and waiting for the Townsend's, we got word that a Ross's Goose was just out in the lake a short distance away. As it turns out, it was actually within the park boundary, associating with several hundred Canada Geese that were resting on the lake in a no hunting area.

When we first saw it, it was clearly a small goose.

Without seeing the head and facial characteristics, it would be difficult to separate this from a Ross's X Snow hybrid, which happens fairly regularly in the wild. After a bit, it did get its head up and looked around briefly.

In the second photo, the rounded head, the straight feather line at the base of the fairly stubby bill,  the lack of the grin patch and the bluish colour at the base of the bill all point towards it being a Ross's Goose, or at least if there are any Snow Goose genes in its make-up they are very minimal.

Ross's Goose has become a bit more regular throughout Ontario over the past couple of decades, and they seem to show up in Chatham-Kent annually now. However I think this is the first time I have seen a Ross's Goose within the park boundary.

Bird teaser....Nelson's Sparrow

My original topic for the next post has been pushed back.....by the occurrence today of the Nelson's Sparrow at St. Clair National Wildlife Area.

I got a text from Steve Charbonneau this morning at about the same time that Blake Mann posted on Ontbirds about the presence of a Nelson's Sparrow (NESP) that he (Blake) had found along the dike trail at SCNWA. Now anyone who has gone looking for a NESP knows that these little creatures are incredibly furtive, on the move most of the time, and difficult to see let alone photograph. I have seen several in Ontario over the years, but never photographed one. But today I decided to put other things on hold and scoot out to see.

Blake and Steve were there when I got there, but the bird had not been seen for probably an hour or more. The wind on the exposed trail did not make the likelihood of hearing any distinctive 'chip' notes very possible, at least to my aging ears. So we looked and looked, even as the cold wind made eyes water and looking more challenging. The occasional American Tree Sparrow, Song Sparrow or Swamp Sparrow caught our attention. It was probably 30 minutes or so after I arrived when one of the others definitively saw it scurrying around on the ice at the far edge of the grasses and cattails growing along the side of the trail. We caught very brief glimpses of it, but not the kind of views we wanted. It wasn't until it actually flew across the open stretch of ice when it briefly sat up in a slightly exposed posture that gave us our first relatively clear photo opportunities.

It sat there for a few seconds before dropping down into the cattails. Fortunately it then returned to the grassy/weedy/cattail edge closer to the trail where we were. And for the next 45 minutes or so, we experienced more of the highs and lows of birding and photography. Thus the reference to the bird 'teaser' in the title.

Looking through binoculars gave us our best looks. The human eye can adapt to various pieces of vegetation waving in front of the subject, and keep the subject in focus very quickly and easily.

Not so...the camera.

Any little bit of vegetation moving in front will grab the attention of the auto focus and send things way out of focus. These next two images were all too typical of my photographic attempts.

On other occasions, the focus might not have been thrown off, and a better shot was obtained, but nothing better than these next ones.

This bird, as is often the case with sparrows (other than Am Tree Sparrows), was constantly on the move. And I got a few shots like this:

Or something like this:

But occasionally things would work out, and in spite of the heavy overcast conditions requiring a high ISO and the wind blowing the lens slightly off requiring a higher shutter speed, a reasonable unobscured photo was obtained.

Towards the end of our time, it actually paused in one spot for more than a couple of seconds, allowing several shots to be taken quickly. This next one is one of my final shots.

Not as crystal clear as I would like, but given the high ISO (3200) and having to work with a shutter speed of only about 1/500, it was likely the best one I was going to get. And I had to remind myself that the conditions and actions of this bird was typical of what the species normally puts up with. They aren't there to satisfy the perfect photo opportunities we as photographers hope for. Seeing this furtive little fellow carry on busily in its effort to survive through the vegetation, sometimes scurrying like a mouse, was a real treat to see. Getting a decent record photo was a bonus!

Since this day is the first of the Count Week period for the upcoming SCNWA Christmas Bird Count, this species is now on our list for the first time. Hopefully it will still be around and observed on the day of the count. NESP nests as far north as the subarctic environment of the Hudson Bay Lowland, so hopefully it won't feel too out of place in the weather conditions of the next few days. There certainly is lots of habitat for this species along the thousands of acres of coastal and impounded wetlands along the Lake St. Clair shoreline, and most of that is within our count circle. There could be dozens of them out there!