Winter Birding

Snowy Owls only visit in the winter

Winter is a tough season for Birding if you live in Canada, or any other place above 40° North Latitude*. Besides the fact that it's obviously very cold, there’s also about half the amount of species that you’re likely to see on any given day in the summer. On paper, these two factors would make winter birding look like a pretty boring affair. That said, I still manage to get myself outdoors on the trail before sunrise on a Saturday morning in February. I also find that I'm rarely alone out there. I see birders and photographers all over the place. I would go as far as saying that depending how random the location is, we even outnumber the dog-walkers and runners. My guess is that although it looks painful from the outside, the people that love going out on those especially cold and windy days in the winter, have discovered there's a certain magic to be found when birding in the winter. 

I still feel cold whenever I look at this picture

Let’s start with the overall vegetation, or really lack thereof. Except for the Evergreens, all of the leaves are down and the trees are bare. While this may not be the prettiest landscape, it means you can see much further into the forest than you can at any other time of the year. Of course that also means that there are probably less birds in the same patch of forest, but at least you're not left wondering! How many times have I spent a summer afternoon staring at bushes, wondering if there were birds hiding in it, or if I was losing my mind. In the winter at least I have some confidence that the bush is empty, and can move along on my way without worrying too much about what I might be missing.

Next, there’s the matter of snow. It's beautiful, white, and except for birds that are especially evolved to hide, it creates a solid backdrop against which you can clearly identify a bird.** This makes it easy to pick out birds at much longer ranges than you normally can. Given the white backdrop, judging general impressions of size and shape (GISS) across a frozen lake, makes for some long distance “hero identifications” to add to your list. In January I was able to pick out a Common Raven from several hundred yards away. Of course on the same trip I also spent a few minutes debating with my wife and mother-in-Law whether or not a small lump of earth was a bird, so you have to take the good and the bad (my wife and mother-in-law together constitute 50% of the readership of this blog, so I want to be clear that it was a VERY suspicious lump of earth and I’m VERY glad we spent the time to thoroughly vet it. Also I love you both).

Another fun part of winter birding is that it starts at a more civilized hour than summer birding. Sunrise is after 7am up here in Canada, which means I have plenty of time to grab a coffee and doughnut on my way to the park. To catch the peak bird calling hours in the summer means that I’m usually wrapping up by 7am, after being out before 5am. I ask you to run the pro’s and con’s on this one: more birds at 5am in the summer, or less birds in the winter but you can start at 7am? I only made it to pre-calculus in high school so I don’t know the right answer, but winter birding sure does sound enlightened.

So go ahead and laugh at us winter birders, seemingly doomed to see very few birds and freeze our body parts off in the process. We’ll enjoy the frozen sunrises with hot coffee, ice-locked rafts of waterfowl too dense to count, and spotting the few arctic visitors like Glaucous Gulls and King Eiders.*** And when we get back to the car after a morning of winter birding, if our hands aren’t too frozen to work the handle, you’ll see big smiles start to form on our faces as they thaw out. That's because any day is a good day to be out birding, even if its a little cold!

*I suppose 40° is a good benchmark. That seems like a good dividing line for where Winter gets cold in my opinion. Of course it will be to the South of 40° in the mountains and north of 40° in southern Italy.  Rome is 42° north and it can go 30 years without snow!

**Birds that evolved to hide in the snow would be the Snowy Owl, Snow Bunting, Snow Goose, and perhaps a Hoary Redpoll. Although you might think the Snowy Egret would qualify, I believe it to be a mis-nomer, for their migration maps would suggest they really do prefer a warmer climate.

*** To be clear I have never seen a Glaucous Gull or a King Eider, but thats what keeps me coming back!

However good you think your down jacket is, it can’t compete with the waterfowl