Final Count

Finishing up the Great Backyard Bird Count 2023 — thanks to all the backyards I borrowed.

A tan and cream coloured house sparrow perches on a branch, and looks inquisitively at the photographer.

A house sparrow on the Etobicoke Creek Trail, let me know it was there by song, and then stuck around for a portrait.

According to Birds Canada, the 2023 Great Backyard Bird Count was a huge success. The count took place worldwide over four days around last weekend, February 17-20. Through the Cornell Lab’s two birding apps, eBird and Merlin Bird ID over 290,500 lists of birds were registered (and I assume accepted) over GBBC2023, and over 361,000 individual bird IDs were recorded. Combined, all of that bird-spotting identified a total of 7,291 species.

Knowing that the world’s bird population has been in serious decline for over five decades, it is wonderful to see such large numbers attached to GBBC. There is, clearly, so much work to be done to bring population levels back, but an event like the Great Backyard Bird Count is heartening. See this article on the Cornell site that lists seven simple things you can do to help take the strain off bird populations, and maybe even start to turn these numbers around. Note that just watching and being interested in birds is one of the simple things.

A Bufflehead getting ready to dive into frigid Lake Ontario.

My own GBBC2023 list numbers 21 species, and for winter in Canada I’ll count that as a big win. I managed to see, photograph and/or ID by song the following birds – some individually, and some in large groupings. Based on my eBird lists, I managed to hang out with several hundred birds over the weekend:

Canada goose — Dark-eyed junco — Northern cardinal — Hairy woodpecker — Mallard — Mute swan — Herring gull — House sparrow — Chickadee — Long-tailed duck — Bufflehead — Greater scaup — White-breasted nuthatch — Carolina wren — Song sparrow — Merlin falcon — Rock pigeon — American crow — House finch — Red-tailed hawk — Downy woodpecker.

An American robin from one of my early morning walks through Etobicoke streets.

Next up, the spring migrations. Looking forward to seeing bunches of visitors resting and foraging on the northern shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Huron after their long flights over water. Stay tuned as well for a conversation I’m having with a birder who helped me get stuck in to this delightful obsession. Sign up with your email below to get more bird content from me directly into your in-box.

Join the Great Backyard Bird Count!

You don’t need to have a backyard.

A northern cardinal, hiding from a hawk on an Etobicoke street.

Just a super quick posting here to encourage everyone and anyone to join in on this year’s Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) this coming weekend — February 17th to 20th, 2023.

The GBBC is organized jointly by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York), the US National Audubon Society, and Birds Canada. This is literally just watching for birds in a chosen location, identifying them (plenty of online tools available for that part), and then reporting them to Cornell through their eBird platform (available either as an app or website). This annual event provides the scientists at Cornell with crucial data about bird populations and movement all over the world. And when Cornell gets this data, they turn it into analytical species maps and expert reports that keep us all informed about what’s happening with birds.

A black-capped chickadee in my northern backyard.

All the details you need to participate in the GBBC this year are here at the GBBC site, but these are the basic three steps:

Step 1: Decide where you will watch birds.

That could be through a window or outside, in your own back yard, in a local park, on the street… whatever works for you.

Step 2: Watch birds for 15 minutes or more, at least once over the four days, February 17-20, 2023.

Fifteen minutes is all you need, but obviously more is welcome.

Step 3: Identify all the birds you see or hear within your planned time/location and use the best tool for sharing your bird sightings.

Cornell’s Merlin app will get you there for both sight and sound IDs.

This super bird-nerdy podcast from Birds Canada is helpful for understanding the event, and its impact.

I will be counting birds this weekend. Hope you can too.

A white-breasted nuthatch in my urban backyard — the park down the road.

 

Do Crows Know They’re Not Ravens?

I can barely tell them apart. Can they?

This bird, while a big’un, looks by the tail feathers to be a crow.

My northern Ontario town of Thessalon contains a lot of large, shouty, glossy-black birds. On winter birding walks (often as cold as -30C), they can be the only super-active fliers, and depending on whether I’m hearing croaking or cawing, I get either a warning or a mocking vibe from them. I have guessed (and my Merlin birdcall app confirms) that the croakers are Common Ravens (Corvus corax) and the cawers are American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). You can check out the difference in their calls at the Cornell Lab taxonomy page on Corvidae.

I know they’re Corvids, and that with both of them belonging to the genus Corvus they are closer to each other, family-wise, than they are to other Corvidae such as the Blue Jay (also often encountered on extremely cold days on Lake Huron’s north shore). I find crows and ravens so bafflingly similar, in fact, I generally don’t make an ID until they open those formidable black beaks and speak to me. “Ah, the portentous croak of the raven,” I’m wont to say (no… I’m not wont to say that… that’s pretentious).

I made note of my confusion the other day on social media, and a northern neighbour helpfully weighed in. Author and artist, Elizabeth Creith, who I’m guessing has drawn and/or painted her share of Corvids, wrote:

Ravens have heavier beaks, with a more pronounced curve on the top. Longer beard bristles and throat feathers - the neck looks shaggier. Ravens are often in pairs, crows in larger groups. Ravens have wedge-shaped tails (longer feathers in the centre) and crows' tails are fan-shaped.

Met this honkin’ big raven at a truck stop (above the French River).

So now I will watch for the longer centre feathers in flight, and be more aware of numbers and beaks. Thanks Elizabeth.

I used to be super lazy with these IDs, and just assumed that if I saw a black bird south of Ontario’s French River, it was a crow, and any large black flier above the French River would be a raven. I have it in my head that ravens prefer the north, perhaps because of my wanderings around Whitehorse, Yukon years ago, and encounters there with massive, croaky ravens unlike anything I’ve seen or heard since. Ravens… husky, hardy wilderness-dwellers, picking at roadkill between stands of dense boreal forest; crows… sophisticated urbanites, making fun of humans for leaving so much good, tasty garbage lying about.

But another friend on the socials, Joyce Byrne, let me know the ravens have come (or come back) to Toronto:

We have ravens in Parkdale now, which is pretty amazing. I used to see them down in Liberty Village too, I think it may be the same bird(s). I'm obsessed with corvids so I spot them and get all excited. When I did some research about urban corvids I found out that the population in Toronto was really decimated by SARS in the 2000s. (And that there haven't been ravens in several decades). But I guess the bigger birds are moving their hunting south. Maybe all the garbage strikes have had a positive environmental impact.

Do Corvids like garbage? It seems likely.

Thanks Joyce. I was very intrigued by your factoid about SARS, given that you and I were both working in the magazine business when SARS ripped through Toronto in 2003. Rough times. I note as well in this posting from the Toronto Ornithological Club, that the West Nile Virus outbreak a decade earlier than SARS took out a lot of southern Ontario crows as well.

So, okay, to the careful observer, crows and ravens are fairly easily distinguished from each other, and the old north/south rule-of-thumb no longer applies. But all that still leaves me hesitant to say with any authority what that big black bird is over there.

And this got me wondering… can crows and ravens tell the difference between ravens and crows?  

I mean, the populations seem to co-exist very well in Thessalon. You don’t see a lot of Corvid rumbles on Main Street, and everybody seems to get the refuse and roadkill they need. You’ll see both birds in the Tim Hortons parking lot of a breakfast-time, with a real “Mornin’ Ralph; Mornin’ Sam” feel to the whole interaction.

Do these birds know they are completely different species? Are they aware they’re actually pretty far apart on the hereditary charts? Do they ever… you know… make a pretty big mistake, species-wise, and create little ravenows… cute little cravens?

Somebody call a scientist!

Enter Dr. Kaeli Swift, visiting lecturer at the University of Washington (Go Huskies!), who has written a fascinating contemplation of just this question, using actual science and proper terminology. Can crows and ravens hybridize? proves once again that I am a very lazy observer of birds, because while I see peaceful co-existence in my town’s Corvids, crows and ravens do actually spat quite a bit. As Dr. Swift puts it, “come breeding time, crows will be most anxious to evict ravens, not bed them.” This is because ravens have a nasty habit of feeding on crow eggs. Oh, Nature!

On the other hand, we learn from Dr. Swift that crow/raven procreation, while very unlikely, is not impossible. In fact, a crow/raven pairing was closely observed in… drumroll, Joyce Byrne… Toronto, Canada in the early 1990s. Did the Torontonian raven and crow sense how endangered they were from airborne and pest-carried viruses, and so reach out desperately across the species-divide to ward off elimination? I’m no bird scientist, but I like a good romance.

So, yes, that’s exactly what happened.

You can follow my blog more closely by subscribing to my birding newsletter below, and you can get real bird science by subscribing to Dr. Swift’s Corvid Research blog.

A crow … almost at the very top of a tree.

Bonus for blog readers who made it this far.

My love and fascination for Corvids in particular is longstanding. Here is a poem from my collection Killing Things, published in 2002 (Pedlar Press).