The joy of finding beauty in everyday items — and clouds

cirrus clouds

Ashbridge’s Bay on March 30 under sunny clear skies with a few brushes of wispy cirrus clouds.  © BCP 2011

Today’s quote (read it by clicking here) comes from an interview with Gavin Pretor-Pinney that appeared in the Tuesday Science section (March 29, 2011) of the The New York Times. You can read the whole article by clicking here.

Pretor-Pinney is the author of The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, a book written for nonscientists that is exactly what its title suggests. As Times journalist Cornelia Dean writes, the book is “a serious yet charming field guide to clouds. The book teaches readers how to identify clouds they have seen and gives them a place to record the sightings, just the way birders create life lists of the birds they have spotted.”

I was taken with the article, and the whole idea of being more conscious of weather and how it affects the natural world, and came away from reading it most inspired.

It’s not that I’ve never been aware of clouds, or even that I didn’t know my cumulonimbus from my cirrus.  (I forget in which grade that was taught, but the learning stayed with me.) It’s just that for some reason I never really put the whole subject of clouds into my mental hopper when considering the natural world I try to observe daily. When you think about it, it’s obvious that clouds are a necessary and and important of our environment. They’re made of water, after all, and as we all know, everything in nature starts with water and the sun. (Oh, and a few carbon atoms.)

I’m going to get The Cloud Collector’s Handbook with a gift certificate I recently received, and vow to pay much more attention to clouds from here on in. It should be challenging and fun, all at the same time, to add a new dimension to my study of our natural world.

Which brings me to today’s entry.

As I was walking through Ashbridge’s Bay Park to look for signs of spring (a dandelion coming up, perhaps?) I noticed that there were only a few wispy clouds, which I took to be cirrus clouds, in the sky. A quick check with Wiki told me that cirrus clouds tend to occur at altitudes of about  20,000 ft. above sea level. Their name comes from cirrus, Latin for curl, as they do often appear curly. As they are so high in the sky, the water they are made of is in the form of tiny ice crystals.

A tree at Ashbridge’s loses the last of the casing of ice it wore for most of the winter. © BCP 2011

Back on earth, along the trail, I came upon an usual sight. Under the warming late March sun, a weatherbeaten tree facing the open lake was losing the last of the coating of ice it bore for much of the winter — one tiny drip of water at a time. Down the rocks, into Lake Ontario.

I paused to take a picture as the scene captured for me the very essence of the water cycle. Drip, drip, drip, back into the lake.

Eventually to become rain and even beautiful clouds once again.

The late March sun works its magic on ice encasing a tree branch, returning drips to the aquamarine water of Lake Ontario in the background. © BCP 2011

There was a serendipity to me reading about the cloud guide this week. Another facet of the endlessly amazing natural world we are a part of, and so often ignore.

© BCP 2011

Grebes on the waterfront

A horned grebe (Podiceps auritus) makes a rare appearance at Ashbridge’s Bay last week. © BCP

It’s taken me a while to find the time to post my most recent images of some delightful creatures I saw last weekend, but here they are, finally.

Above is a grebe, of course, but what kind?

When I saw it last weekend, diving about at Ashbridge’s Bay, I was startled and simultaneously thrilled. I visit the park often and only rarely have I seen a grebe there. Since I do see them so infrequently, my knowledge of these ducklike divers (known as podicipeds) is negligible. When I saw this pint-sized diver and his mate (at least I surmised it was his mate), I was unsure. Did his golden ear patch and blazing red eyes mean he was an eared grebe? Or did his red neck make him a — what else? — a red-necked grebe?

Consulting my guides at home, it was immediately obvious. My unknown diver was neither an eared grebe (Podiceps nigricollis) nor a red-necked grebe (Podiceps grisegena), but a horned grebe (Podiceps auritus). Only one species of grebe in my books had all three characteristics of my specimen: red eyes, red neck and and golden ear patch. It had to be a horned grebe. Oh. One other thing. Eared grebes and red-necked  grebes have completely black bills. My specimen had a black bill tipped with white.

To begin to fill in my knowledge gaps about grebes, I had to do a wee bit of reading.

Grebes belong to the avian order Podicipediformes (and family Podicipedidae).  I read somewhere online that the their order and family names derive from Latin roots meaning “feet at the rear.” But before accepting this holus bolus — we all know how one piece of misinformation can get passed along so many times online that it can become indistinguishable from the truth — I decided to do more research. I searched up and down the Internet’s Latin translators, trying to establish the veracity of the claim. Certainly, I already knew that the “ped” in the name came from the Latin “pes” for foot. But what about “podici”?

The feet of a horned grebe, way way at the back of his body, showing the toes. © BCP 2011

I spent some time riffling through a Latin/English dictionary — a large, dusty tome that looked like it might have last been used when Julius Caesar was a boy. No dice. I mean, no “podici.” I found nothing that looked a bit like the Latin “podici” to explain this bird’s order.

But then I tried a staggeringly huge English-only dictionary (it’s as big as a bar frig and as dusty as the one that’s been in your garage unused for the past 20 years). And there I found the explanation I was looking for: Podiciped, from the Latin “podex” for rump and “pes” for foot. An order of birds with their feet at the rump or rear of their bodies.

Casting a glance at the photo at the left, you can see how far set back the grebe’s feet are. And those feet! They’re large, with lobed toes that look like paddles.

Grebe anatomy makes them fantastic divers. . . but terrible walkers. On land, they can fall over because their feet are so far back they’re off balance. And one other thing: they can’t take off from land. If they land by mistake on the ground, and can’t get to water, they’re stuck.

This is actually more of a problem than it seems. Grebes — known as poor and reluctant fliers — fly almost solely when migrating, and then almost solely at night. Sometimes, in the dark, a grebe can mistake a nice, big black flat  piece of parking lot for the shiny black of a nice inviting lake to land on. Uh oh. That bird can become a dead duck, er, grebe. (I am reliably informed that on these occasions, some lucky grebes are rescued by dogooder wildlife rehabbers.)

But I digress. I was so excited by the grebe pair at Ashbridge’s Bay that I went back the next day. They were still there. I then trucked over to Col. Sam Smith Park because I had heard from some birders from the Toronto Field Naturalists that there were some American coots there. It apparently wasn’t my day for coots, young or old. But. . . I did see two more grebes. With entirely different colouration than the pair at Ashbridge’s.

At first I thought I was seeing an entirely different species of grebe. This was pretty great for an amateur bird lover. Two days, two different grebe species on the waterfront.

Back at home, a quick look in one of my guides showed me my error. The black-and-white grebes I watched at Col. Sam Smith turned out to be two more horned grebes in non-breeding plumage. Too young to breed? Or the non-breeding variant shown in my Peterson’s guide? I don’t know.

But what a great weekend of birding. How lucky are we, here in this huge noisy city in the middle of the continent, to be on the flyway of so many beautiful waterfowl.

© BCP 2011

A horned grebe in nonbreeding plumage at Col. Sam Smith Park last weekend. © BCP 2011

An editorial about robins from the New York Times

One of the first robins (Turdus migratorius) to return to Ashbridge’s Bay, early March 2009. © BCP 2011

I was delighted to open up my New York Times yesterday morning and find an editorial about robins. It gave me a smile so I decided to share it here. (Hope that’s legal.)

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

Reconsidering the Robin

Published: March 20, 2011

Emily Dickinson may have “dreaded that first robin so,” but she speaks for herself alone. To the rest of us, robins bring a mixture of joy and relief, the sign of a natural cycle still intact. The snow withdraws, and returning robins follow it across newly open ground like shorebirds tracing a falling tide. Their movement is almost as distinctive as their call: hasten and pause, hasten and pause. Once the ground is thoroughly thawed, there they are, tugging on earthworms as though they were the hawsers of the S.S. Earth.

And yet it’s only the first few robins in spring that really stand out. Soon we overlook them — because they’re so common and so open in manner, always in plain sight, flying low, nesting just out of reach above us. We see the familiarity as much as the bird itself, which wears, as always, a morning coat of gray and a waistcoat of the most understated red.

Give it a breast as vivid as the shoulder patches on a red-winged blackbird and the robin would never seem to recede the way it does as spring rushes onward, out-colored and out-sung by the birds of summer.

Somehow the robin stands for all the birds migrating now, the great V’s of geese heading north, the catbirds that will show up surreptitiously in a month. It also stands for the surprise of spring itself, which we had begun to fear would not arrive. We have all been keeping watch, as though one morning it might come sailing over the horizon. And now it’s here — the air a bit softer, snowdrops and winter aconites blooming, the bees doing their cleaning and the robins building their nests again.

Thanks, New York Times. You said it so well.

I’m going to ignore the fact that the weather forecasters are calling for snow — enough to accumulate! I choose, instead, to think of snowdrops and aconites.

© BCP 2011

A post for Libby — A long-tailed duck up close and personal

A male long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis) surfaces with food — a zebra mussel, perhaps? — after a deep dive in the inner bay Saturday at Ashbridge’s. © BCP 2011.

There are still huge numbers of long-tailed ducks in the inner bay at Ashbridge’s Park, enjoying their winter vacation down south. South for them, at least. For the long-tails (Clangula hyemalis) are actually Arctic ducks, and it won’t be too much longer before they hit the migration trail to return to their breeding grounds in Alaska, Nunavut and the North West Territories.

Despite the dramatic two-tone paint job of the male above, he is not in his breeding plumage. This is his winter attire; when he returns to his breeding grounds up north he will have a much less dramatic appearance (more like the drab winter female), and he’ll lose the distinctive pinky-orange colouration from his beak.

I’m not sure what our fine feathered friend in the photo above has in his beak. Long-tails eat primarily mollusks, crustaceans and some small fish and, since the introduction of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) into the Great Lakes in the 1980s, have become voracious consumers of same. The population of long-tails in the Great Lakes has, in fact, risen with the explosion of these unwanted invasive invertebrates. More proof, as if any were needed, that changing one thing in an ecosystem can have profound — and unexpected — results.

One more interesting thing about these beautiful ducks. Their common name, oldsquaw, was officially changed to long-tail in 2000. There had been concern in some quarters that the word squaw could be considered offensive. Here’s what Wiki says about the name change: “The American Ornithologists’ Union (2000) stated that “political correctness” was not sufficient to change the name, but “to conform with English usage in other parts of the world”, it officially adopted the name Long-tailed Duck.”

As far as I’m concerned, this duck could be called “old sock” and I would still think he was one of the most gorgeous birds to grace our inland waterways.

© BCP 2010

A walk in the Lower Don with the Toronto Field Naturalists

A red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) hunts for lunch near the banks of the Lower Don River Saturday, Mar. 19/11 © BCP 2011

What a glorious morning for a spring walk in the Don Valley.

Starting out at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, there was sunshine — all the more dazzling for its recent rarity — and more than a nip in the air. It was just about freezing, and I was glad for my hat, gloves (a warmer pair than I first had in mind) and my down coat.

The assembled gang, all members of the Toronto Field Naturalists group and a few stray guests like me, were eager to get going with our guide, Margaret McRae, who led us down Pottery Rd.’s steep hill to the start of our walk in the Todmorden Mills wildflower sanctuary. There we tromped about in the mushy marshy bottom lands, (we were well advised prior to wear rubber boots) where we all had a good look at the eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) Margaret pointed out to us.

Once we knew what we were looking for, we saw it everywhere. There were so many skunk cabbages we had to be watchful putting each foot down, to ensure we didn’t step on any.

The skunk cabbage’s claim to fame, aside from its foul odour? It’s one of the very first plants to come up in spring.

Along the wildflower path someone in our group pointed out an old residence: the hanging nest of a baltimore oriole.

At  Todmorden Mills, our group saw  — and heard — cardinals, a downy woodpecker, a kingfisher, robin, red-winged blackbirds, and the highlight, a very low-soaring red-tailed hawk. Catnip for birders, indeed.

An eastern chipmunk pauses (Tamias striatus) in his search for food to look at the humans going by. © BCP 2010

Passing under the Don Valley Parkway on Pottery Rd., our group hung a left to follow the river south. Along the route, we all got a spectacular look at a red-tailed hawk (at least I was so informed by birders much more knowledgeable than I) that was patiently waiting to catch lunch — a mouse? a vole? Or maybe one of the eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus) we saw nearby?

Our group began to straggle a bit as we headed southward, the birders wanting to spend more time watching the hawk, and the walkers preferring to take a little faster pace.

But eventually we all arrived at Chester’s Marsh, where our guide, Margaret, pointed out some of the details of the Don Watershed for us.

There were areas where we saw some fast-flowing water, even some small rapids, thanks to all the rain we have had lately. It almost looked like there would be enough water in the river to paddle it.

Someone in our group asked if people could paddle down the river, and Margaret said, “Sure. At Paddle the Don. First Sunday in May for the past 19 years.”

(Paddle the Don is on May 1st this year. To see a brief slide show from my blog posting of the event last year, click here.

A woodpecker we saw on our walk in the Lower Don.

As we continued along our walk, we noticed another woodpecker working away on a tree on the bank of the river, but we were unable to discern if she was a downy or a hairy, as she (and it was a she) had her back to us. You really need to be able to see the bill of these birds to be able to say with any certainty which is which.

Our walk continued south until we came to a small steel bridge that got us over the river to the western bank, where we continued until the steep set of stairs that would get us over the highway and to the west side of Riverdale Park.

Some of us continued up to Riverdale Farm, where we got coffee and some delicious banana bread. (Good thing, too, as my stomach alarm for lunch had long since gone off. . . .) And some of our diminishing group turned around and went back the way we had come. The route times two, for them.

I asked if anyone knew how far we had walked, and one participant, who was wearing a pedometer, said it was 5 kilometres. Only seemed like half that, we were having such a good time.

A big thankyou to Margaret McRae, and all of the Toronto Field Naturalists, who let members of the public go on their walks gratis.

(After the great time I had today, though, I’m going to sign up for a year’s membership. Likely to be the best 40 bucks I ever spent!)

Hope to see you on the trail.

© BCP 2011

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