As I discussed in June, things do change. Changes in wildlife habits have two main causes – human activities and wildlife adaptation. These changes explain, for example, why coyotes now live in most major southern Canadian cities. Let’s look at changes to human activity first. In agriculture, hand-picking corn cobs did not leave much waste….
I remember once walking as a boy with my father in some fields around our house. I was probably about nine years old. As we made our way, we came across a bird that fluttered and hopped on the ground. Its wing was bent and looked broken, and the bird appeared to be in distress….
My grandfather told me about shooting prairie chickens off the tops of oat shocks when he was a boy. By 2021, the prairie chicken count had fallen to 251 males. In the 1950s our family would drive two hours on a Sunday afternoon just to see Canadian geese. Today I need only arrive at a…
There are three small trees in my garden and none of them is large enough for a bird’s nest, but whenever there is a flutter, I find I freeze and hope because February brings blackbird weather and blackbird song. Growing up in Ontario, the first redwing blackbirds were an early sign of spring. I remember…
It was my sister-in-law who first pointed out to me that there is free food going to waste all over our neighbourhood. Every growing season, fruit trees hang over the fences of yards and spill into streets and alleyways. The neighbour who owns one of these trees tells me that the fruit is free for…
Long ago, I was sleeping in on a Saturday, half-listening to CBC radio when a folk song came on, “Thought I heard a red-winged blackbird / red-winged blackbird on my road.” This was repeated twice in the refrain. As the singer went on to sing a verse, then the same refrain, again and again, soon…
Not being from the UK, I wasn’t exactly sure what a “twitch” was, when I came across it in the following caption recently: “The Long-toed Stint generated one of the biggest twitches seen in Britain in years.” The photo was on a Bird News website, part of a post about a rare bird sighting in…
Small singing birds make me think of prayer. I’m not sure if it’s the metaphor of prayers as birds that attracts me or the thought that prayer and birdsong might be twinned. Which is more fitting?
Over the month of June, we’d been participating in the Wildlife Trusts 30 Days Wild Challenge. Each day, we committed to do – or see or find – something wild. It didn’t need to be ambitious; it could be something right on our doorstep. The point was to notice.
For so many years, I missed this annual wave of feathers and song. While I have always enjoyed watching common backyard birds (finches, cardinals, jays, juncos and chickadees), I assumed that beautiful, multi-colored birds were a unique preserve of more tropical regions.
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