Counting Birds in the ‘Breathing Lands’

from Mountain Life – Blue Mountains – Spring-Summer 2023

Reconciliation Trail

Field notes from an ambitious project to tally Ontario’s avian populations

words :: Conor Mihell

The Ogoki River is flowing fast, breaching shoreline cedars and boiling around Canadian Shield granite. Our laden canoes feel like bits of driftwood in the swollen torrent. On such a big river you only have one chance to pick the safest line to run rapids. With the canoe bobbing in a tiny piece of still water, I use my binoculars to study the whitewater ahead, searching for a route through the froth. And so we tiptoe down the belligerent river.

It’s the third day of a two-week expedition as part of the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas. Whitewater thrills aside, the primary goal of this journey is scientific: We’re here to survey songbirds, raptors, waterfowl, shorebirds, owls and other avian species in a remote pocket of Ontario’s Far North, part of a larger endeavour—now it its third iteration—to tally bird populations across the entire province.

The project recurs every 20 years, to track changes over time. Citizen scientists and professional biologists are summoned to observe and quantify breeding bird behaviour in assigned survey squares, which measure one square kilometre in southern and central areas and 100 square kilometres in the north, over a period of five field seasons. Our mission is to examine a small chunk of the James Bay Lowlands, a subarctic wetland of sphagnum and spruce that’s home to remarkable biodiversity—and some of Canada’s wildest rivers.

My three trip mates include a Ph.D. ornithologist, a government biologist and a lifelong obsessive naturalist—all with expert birding skills and plenty of field experience on similar projects. It was obvious that I was recruited as the canoe guide. I assumed canoeing would be the easy part; as an aspiring birder, I was excited by the opportunity to fasttrack my bird ID skills and add some new northern species to my life list in the company of professionals.

To catch the birds’ morning chorus, we rise before dawn, guzzle coffee and navigate solo to preassigned GPS coordinates away from the river to conduct standardized “point counts.” These counts consist of listing the species observed (generally identified by their unique songs) in a five-minute span, as well as unique breeding behaviour such as nesting and adult birds transporting food to young. We also keep a running tally of general observations as we travel downriver to our next campsite.

Point counts offer the most robust data, and trekking up to eight kilometres through bogs and thickets is hard work. We’re each lucky to complete half a dozen counts during our morning time window. It’s no coincidence that the breeding cycle of Ontario’s migratory birds aligns with peak mosquito and blackfly season; clouds of blood-thirsty insects make our point counts feel like self-inflicted torture.

Bugs aside, as a rookie field scientist I’m astounded at how quickly I come to recognize the distinctive trills and melodies of various warblers, flycatchers, sparrows and thrushes. Our group tallied 105 species, including rarities like Connecticut and Canada warblers, rusty blackbirds, olive-sided flycatchers, great grey owls and boreal owls—species that depend on untouched habitat for survival and are infrequently observed elsewhere.

The Ogoki eventually merges with the Albany River, Ontario’s longest waterway, which flows like a treadmill across the James Bay Lowlands. This vast landscape is subtle in its topography yet astounding in the way it supports immense biological diversity. The Audubon Society of Canada describes the area as the summer home for millions of breeding birds. Indigenous people, whose remote communities comprise the only human settlements in the Far North, refer to their home as the “Breathing Lands.” There’s no better description of a place that supports an immense array of life (including wolverine, woodland caribou and, farther north, polar bear) and whose peatlands make huge contributions toward regulating the planet’s climate by sucking carbon from the atmosphere and vaulting it away.

It’s a revelation for me to paddle and trek across this landscape by ear, recognizing that every subtle change in habitat has its own distinct soundtrack of birds. Equally stark is the realization that this place may soon change in the rush to extract “critical minerals” from the so-called Ring of Fire deposits, located just north of our route. I wonder if in 20 years, when birders return to repeat our surveys, they’ll encounter the same incredible abundance we observed.