Etobicoke, Canada, where I’ve lived for twenty years, is blessed with wild, rocky, rugged beaches sculpted by Lake Ontario’s often ferocious battering. While I find far too much trash when I beachcomb (come on, people, carry your Tim Hortons cups to a trash can!), I’ve also picked up several crinoids, brachiopods, cephalopods, and trilobite fossils just sort of lying there for a few hundred million years, inexplicably unfound by any other curious human.
One of my finds from Lake Ontario. A crinoid with some small brachiopods embedded nearby.
I was walking my dog, Birdy, on one of these beaches last weekend, and though I’d brought my camera kit with me, I was none too focused on birding. Dog-walking and birding are activities that don’t generally pair well. Birdy has a perfectly doglike habit of lunging at Common Grackles and Red-winged Blackbirds when they land on nearby ground. Makes it tricky to grab a snapshot when my camera-steadiers (as I call my arms) are being wrenched about wildly by the leash.
Not my dog, Birdy, but a reasonable facsimile of her mood on this very same beach.
So, my eyes were more attuned to interesting rocks and sea glass than to anything in flight. But it was hard not to notice the sheer volume of other birders in the park. And these were not casual spotters with binoculars and thermoses of tea. These were the full camo-suited, camo-lensed crew, and they were clearly on the hunt for something special. At one point, there were maybe a dozen of them mobbed near where the trail dropped off onto my beach. So, keeping Birdy on a close hold, I ambled over as quietly as possible, caught the eye of one of the stragglers from the mob, nodded the fellow birder’s silent recognition and whispered “What are we all looking at this morning?”
“It’s a Hoary Redpoll,” she said, her smile a mile wide with exhilaration.
“And is that a good thing?”
“It’s EXTREMELY rare!”
I’ve watched Antiques Roadshow. I understand the thrill captured in the words “extremely rare.” I led Birdy to the very back of the pack of long lenses, and stood watching for a few minutes. A tiny finch hopped into the air from a branch and glided to the ground, where it foraged around, seemingly oblivious to the rapid shutter sounds all around it. Knowing I’d never get through the crowd for a crisp shot — not with Birdy in tow — I fired off a few distant shots just so I could get an ID later. Wandering by the same spot about half an hour later, there were even more crouching and snapping photogs, and the little Redpoll remained carefree in its extreme rareness.
So, is the Hoary Redpoll “EXTREMELY rare”?
Yes… if you never leave Etobicoke, Ontario.
Hoary Redpoll range map courtesy allaboutbirds.org
Back home, I made my official ID to eBird, and then checked out Cornell University’s info page on the Hoary Redpoll. First of all, “hoary” is because of the little bird’s frosted-looking breast, one of the features that distinguishes it from the Common Redpoll. It is undoubtedly a very pretty bird. The one I saw appears to have been a juvenile female.
Another slightly blurry shot of the Hoary Redpoll, showing its distinctive tiny beak, frosty front, and red splotch.
This pretty bird’s rarity, though, is very subjective. Cornell informs us that the global population of the Hoary Redpoll is estimated at 28 million, and that it is scored “low” in terms of conservation concern. There are, in fact, a LOT of Hoary Redpolls about. They just happen to be about in places where there are not a lot of people. You can see by the range map that Hoary Redpolls don’t really get south of the boreal forest, and spend most of their time in the arctic. The rareness of this particular specimen was not because it hardly exists, but rather that it rarely shows up anywhere near all those long lenses. Every few years, though, the little Hoary will make what is known as an irruptive flight outside its usual territory. Clearly, 2023 is an irruptive year for Hoaries.
I spend a lot of my time in Northern Ontario, just within the standard range for the Hoary Redpoll, which means I’ll be keeping my eyes open for these beauties quite often. At my little house on Lake Huron’s north channel, the vastness of the Hoary home country spreads north into the Arctic.
“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”