New Year... New Birds

Slowly building my life list

I’ve been meaning to get off a quick post here to finish out 2024, but holiday madness took over, and here we are in 2025 already. Let me start us off then with a little video greeting — I purchased myself some new equipment over the winter break, and hopefully now it will be much easier to incorporate quality video and sound content into this ongoing personal exploration of birds (and books).

I promise I will learn on the job and get much better at framing shots, and not running out of battery power in crucial moments. Still, for a quick first attempt at shooting and editing video, I think this went well. Enjoy.

Hey, look at that. There’s my dog, Birdy, in the lower right on that opening shot. She’s so constantly my companion, I didn’t even notice her there until now.

I’m realizing I promised you that Whimbrel Point is beautiful, and then all you saw was most of me in the cold. Here are a few shots from the last three years:

The point from a distance, with two birders standing by the Fred Bodsworth bench.

Early morning at the point.

The view from beside the directional pole.

There is often a gull perched atop the pole. This here is a Ring-billed (Larus delawarensis).

And here are a few shots of the birds I saw in the last couple of months. I took a very brief work trip to Guadalajara, Mexico for their world famous book fair, and then was off to the Puget Sounds near Seattle for a week of family holiday fun.

An Inca Dove (Columbina inca) in a park fountain in Guadalajara, Mexico.

One of many Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) keeping Guadalajara noisy.

This Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) may just have dropped this tree by now. Gig Harbor, Washington.

Early morning Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna). Gig Harbor, Washington.

“The odd survivor still flies the long and perilous migration from the wintering grounds of Argentine’s Patagonia, to seek a mate of its kind on the sodden tundra plains which slope to the arctic sea. But the arctic is vast. Usually they seek in vain. The last of a dying race, they now fly alone.”

from The Last of the Curlews, by Fred Bodsworth

Recent Round Up

Busy times. Busy, busy times.

A Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) asleep in the sunshine and unseasonal heat. Grimsby, Ontario. All images, unless otherwise noted, are © John Degen.

When work keeps me from getting out into nature, I really feel it. This fall has so far kept me mostly in southern Ontario, with a brief, blissful visit to Sudbury for the annual Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival. I was reminded of the massive size of this country when, having left unseasonably warm weather in the south, I parked my car at the Sudbury Radisson in an intense snow flurry.

My bird count for 2024 stands at 154 species, fully 41 behind this day last year. Not only is that an indication of how little I’ve been able to get out there and track down the flying creatures, but it’s also a sign that I’ve been sat for too long in my own country. By this time last year, I’d enjoyed a couple of weeks in England and Iceland, padding my count with birds that just don’t make it to my own neighbourhood.

I’d hoped a spring journey to New York might bring me some coastal birds. Alas, that trip was cut short before I could really take advantage of the territory.

Glorious Central Park in April… alas no new birds for my list.

Nevertheless, the joy of spotting a beautiful bird cannot be reduced to mere counting. If I don’t manage to beat last year’s 202 species count, I will still have many, many photographs and memories to console me. There is a quick work trip to the Guadalajara Book Fair in central Mexico coming up in a couple of weeks. It seems doubtful I’ll manage the several dozen extra birds I need from the limited free time I’ll have there, but you can bet I’m taking my camera and bird guides with me. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are some of my favourite shots from recent weeks when I did manage to get myself out the door. I’ve been experimenting with manual settings on my camera, rather than just staying on auto-mode and letting the camera determine shutter, lens, and light sensitivity for me. These are skills I used to have with my old-school film camera back in the 80s and 90s, so I’m looking forward to rebuilding those muscles.

I love the rich tones of this Green-winged Teal (Anas crecca). I did see the Cinnamon Teal (Spatula cyanoptera) that visited Grimsby, but didn’t manage a usable photo.

The long lenses of Etobicoke were out recently for this Purple Sandpiper (Calidris maritima) far from its coastal Atlantic home.

A Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) hunts a pond on Lake Ontario’s north shore.

This Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) gave me all the time I needed for my manual settings.

A fly-by of Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator).

A red Fox Sparrow (Passerella iliaca) on my northern feeder early in the year.

Read the full poem here. If you so desire.

The Centrality of the Park

The birds care not for our worries... and that's a good thing

Attentive followers of my birding adventures will recall I spent an idyllic morning in New York City’s Central Park early last April. It was sunny, warm, and full of blossoms, happy wanderers and, of course, birds.

In the center of Central Park is The Ramble. image courtesy CentralPark.org — all other images, unless otherwise noted, are © John Degen 2024.

I alluded to some family trouble in that post, and while I won’t go into too much detail, I can say that I’ve had very few idyllic mornings since that one in Manhattan. The very next day, while on my way to what was supposed to be the first of many work meetings in New York and Washington, I received the news that my son was in hospital back in Toronto.

That was the day of the eclipse, and I experienced that natural phenomenon somewhat ignobly, at the departures gates in Newark airport, waiting to board my emergency flight home. Crisis followed crisis for the next few months — the kind of rollercoaster unique to the luncheon-meat portion of the sandwich generation — and I am only now emerging from a dense fog of emotional turmoil and stress-induced sleeplessness. The family has been through a lot in 2024.

A female Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), rambling last April.

This all comes up for me today because this morning I was lucky to enjoy a happy couple of hours walking a favourite lakeshore park with my dog, Birdy. On our wanderings, I documented several migrating birds making brief stops on the north shore of Lake Ontario before heading over into New York State and points much farther south. The cold weather is coming.

White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) in Etobicoke after six months in the north… ready for a winter down south.

These fall-migrating birds have built a bridge for me back to spring in Central Park. I remember so well my delight that New York morning spotting White-throated sparrows, knowing they were likely at the northernmost point of their spring migration to date, and wouldn’t be crossing into Canada for another week or so.

Was this morning’s sparrow the exact same one I saw in Central Park, on the return leg? Will it be back in The Ramble next week, taking advantage of the abundant feeders and nights moderated by proximity to the ocean and the ambient heat of Manhattan? I like to think it is, even if the yellow eye-patches have faded a bit over time. Happens to us all.

Same (?) bird in Central Park, taking a long last look south before flying north.

How were your last six months, sparrow? You look as tired as I am. It’s been a kick in the ass, no?

I recall especially my April excitement at spotting a Golden-crowned Kinglet in The Ramble, and actually being able to score usable photos of this most flittiest of tiny birds. I hear a LOT of kinglets in both spring and fall, but they do love to bury themselves deep in dense brush and, when they are out in the open, they almost never stop moving long enough for even the most responsive autofocus lens — witness my attempt at a Ruby-crowned Kinglet this morning. I managed to de-blur its speed enough to catch the telltale light eye make-up, but that was about it.

A Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Corthylio calendula) hiding in Etobicoke.

My Central Park kinglet photos remain the best record I have of these creatures.

The Ruby-crowned’s Golden-crowned cousin (Regulus satrapa) in Central Park.

So much has happened since that sunny morning in Manhattan. My son is much better… thank you for asking. My folks are trucking along, and the whole family will be together next weekend for Canadian Thanksgiving, with much for which to be grateful.

Migrating birds included.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

— Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush

Bonus photo:

A Palm Warbler (Setophaga palmarum) in Etobicoke, making plans for Cuba and points south.

Pretty Bird as Formidable Touchstone

The Goldfinch in Nature, Art, and Fiction.

An American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) on the shore of Lake Ontario, July 2024. Unless otherwise noted, all images here are © John Degen

Back in early 2014, if you weren’t shifting a copy of Donna Tart’s soon to be Pulitzer-awarded novel, The Goldfinch, around your living space, you most definitely did not live in a bookish home. At over 750 pages in length, this bulky brick of paper was a reliable anchor for anything the wind might disturb, and its clever cover tearaway revealing a small painted bird drew the eye and intrigued the curiosity.

Image courtesy Little, Brown.

2014 was long before I got into birding, but I was hooked by that image nevertheless, and I remember looking up the referenced painting before I even opened the pages for the first time. What the cover carefully does not reveal is that the goldfinch in question is a prisoner. This is no wild goldfinch perched ever so briefly on an outside wall. It is chained and kept indoors as a pet. Now go read close to 800 pages if you wish to find out why that symbol is appropriate to Tartt’s story. No spoilers here.

The 1654 painting Het puttertje is by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, and rather importantly was involved in a deadly explosion and then lost to the world for a period of time before being rediscovered far from where it was last seen. Again, read the book. It’s a smart pastiche of history in fiction.

Het puttertje, by Carel Fabritius, image courtesy the Mauritshuis.

What’s compelling to me about Tartt’s novel is her use of the bird-as-object to stand as multi-purpose and often oppositional touchstone. The bird is both joy and deep grief. It is at once freedom and confinement. At the hand of a master storyteller, this one creature has almost too many meanings. Or perhaps that’s just one reader’s meandering thought.

I am always gladdened at the sound of goldfinch calls on my birding walks, because they send me right back to 2014 when this little bird-on-a-book was an everyday sight in my life. 2014 was a good year. That was, for me, the last good year before “the troubles,” and so the sound of this bird is a moment of welcome emotional transportation.

I love how these beautiful finches twist themselves to get at the fruit of pinecones, and how the darkness of their feather base shows through the gold. Photo from 2023 in Etobicoke, Canada.

In the frigid early weeks of 2015, my small family became suddenly homeless when a huge water tank failed on the roof of our condo building in Etobicoke. Three quarters of the building’s suites were flooded out, including ours, and we were forced to store all our belongings and live for months in a downtown rental while insurance made the repairs. 2016 brought a serious and frightening health crisis to our family, followed year upon year by another and yet another, culminating, of course, in the great enshittening of the world in early 2020.

So, I hear a goldfinch and I am able to leap through time — but not in a simplistic, nostalgic way. More profoundly, back and forth, landing first back in 2014 and then squarely in a present where I have somehow come to terms with this last tumultuous decade, and can look to the future with something resembling optimistic acceptance.

The wild version of Fabritius’s bird. Captured, 2023 in Etobicoke, Canada.

Seeing a wild goldfinch is even more powerful for me. I find these birds ridiculously difficult to photograph. Flitty, nervous, and stand-offish, they are usually too far away, too protected by twigs and branches or simply moving too damn fast. I have MANY blurs of gold to admire in my collection, and quite a few very nice shots of where the damn bird was moments before I clicked the shutter. That flash of yellow through the branches is an avatar of both hope and deliverance for me, and when I actually manage to freeze it in my frame, I feel a little bit like I’ve captured a myth.

And these days, whenever I see a goldfinch I am almost always in the company of my little dog, Birdy. Talk about avatars of hope and deliverance. Really, one of the only good things to come out of the troubles was this perfect creature. Arriving in our house after the flood damage was repaired, and just weeks before the first terrifying diagnosis, Birdy the puppy demanded an emotional steadiness and physical thereness that might otherwise have been impossible to muster. In that way, she saved us. Golden.

The dog who arrived just in time to take on the troubles.

“And isn’t the whole point of things — beautiful things — that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
                                                     ― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

It’s also a movie!