Winged winter wonders
By Moira Farr
If you’re an avian admirer, consider flocking to one of Ontario’s birding hot spots this winter
Anyone looking for a mid-winter birdwatching getaway in
Ontario could do much worse than to head to Amherst Island
in Lake Ontario, near Kingston. There’s something almost magical
about this place on a February morning - cold, yes, but windless.
My Sorels and I plunge across a field of snow like frosty
meringue, my face lifted to soak up a precious bath of bedazzling
winter sunlight. Graceful shadows cast by solitary fronds of
golden grass etch the sparkling snow, the cool bluish clefts of the
drifts’ undersides stretching into the distance. In the cloudless
sky, perfectly sculpted against cerulean blue, a bald eagle soars.
I stop in my calf-deep tracks and enjoy the deliriously beautiful
sight, the lovely silence of winter.
Now I slip into the "owl woods" for a different sort of enchantment.
As my eyes adjust to the sudden darkness of this compact
spruce forest amid the centuries-old farm fields, I look up,
waaay up the trunks and into the branches of the conifers that
surround me.
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Well, not that far up, it turns out, on this occasion. The creature’s
form is unmistakable: diminutive as owls go, plump and round,
brown- and white-speckled head feathers funnelling into a deep
widow’s peak between yellow eyes blinking down at me, black
pupils fully dilated. Hooked beak dead centre of the feathered
disc on its face, vertical brown and white chest feathers ending at
taloned feet encircling a branch, snugly abutting the trunk.
At rest, the boreal owl (Aegolius funereus) is fairy-tale sweet
to look at and, like all owl species, doesn’t list Homo sapiens
among its predators. It is poignantly willing to stay put and let
me get within metres of its perch. I resist the temptation to
squeeze it and tuck it in my pocket. This glimpse is the extent
of my privilege.
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