Wild Niagara

The new year in Western New York brings with it a few certainties – the days will be short, the nights long, and the temperatures cold. New Year’s resolutions will be made and then broken. It will snow… a lot. And, if you pay attention, you will see an incredible natural phenomenon unfold all around you; the massive winter migration of birds to and through our own backyard.

Birds, like people, know when it’s too cold, and it is cold in January in the northern hemisphere. Beginning in late fall and early winter, on masse they travel thousands of miles in huge flocks headed south, and of all places many chose to stay here. Why Western New York? Although we often forget, we are home to one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, Niagara Falls, and much of the world’s freshwater flows between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario through the Niagara River. This means that while almost every lake, pond, river, and stream north of us are frozen, the massive size and fast flow of the Niagara keeps it open all winter long. For most birds, open water is essential. We are like Florida to real “snow birds”; despite our own laments about blizzards and ice, these birds spend their days swimming, fishing, and relieving the stress of raising chicks from the now distant summer.

If you go to the river this month you will see scenes reminiscent of a National Geographic film; thousands of birds splashing, diving, squeaking and squawking through the water, blanketing the river from one country to the other.  In some places the water is calm and the birds float motionless, keeping warm, resting. Further from shore, large “rafts” of birds float slowly downstream with the ice. In still other places, closer to the brink of the falls, the birds and especially the gulls, inspired by the excitement of the rapids, surf up and down with the waves, quickly searching for food before lifting from the water to start over further upstream.

These birds always know when they’re being watched. Stop your car by the side of the road, roll down your window, and each sleeping bird will quickly waken, uncurl its head from its fluffed-up body, see you, instantly disappear beneath the water, or swim away, never losing sight of you from the corner of its eye. Birds resting on shore will rapidly waddle towards the water, half flying as they flap their wings in a panic, and crash into the water.

If you have a good pair of binoculars, you will see that there are many different species of waterfowl on the river between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, each a different size, shape and color. Some dive and resurface hundreds of feet away. Some seem to be alone, while others are lost in a sea of their own kind. All are beautiful and unique. These include but are not limited to Common and Red Breasted Mergansers, Goldeneyes, Greater and Lesser Scaup, Redheads, Canvasbacks, and the diminutive yet striking black and white Bufflehead. Arguably the most elegant bird that you will see, and the largest, is the Tundra Swan. All white with a slender, long, graceful neck, this swan is easily mistaken for a mound of soft powdery snow. Although you may see a few different kinds of swans, the Tundra Swan is distinguished by its black beak, and is Western New York’s only native swan, or one that has not been introduced from another continent or escaped from a zoo. As its name suggests, this swan spends its summers breeding and raising young on ponds in the tundra further north. In the winter, they can travel as far south as southern California and even Mexico.

But as you get nearer to the falls, be sure to keep your eyes on the sky. In the upper rapids, viewed from Goat Island or one of the overlooks on the Canadian side, you are likely to see massive flocks of gulls, flying in sync over the river. And when you see this, look back on the river – most of those ice flows are actually thousands of other gulls. As many as 19 different species of gulls can be seen on the Niagara River this time of year. They are not always easy to differentiate from each other, especially as they swim and fly quickly through a cloud of other gulls. But many gulls will be resting near shore on rocks, and you will start to notice that some are much larger than others, like Herring Gulls, and a few have jet black wings that cover their back when rested like Greater and Lesser Black Backed Gulls. The Iceland Gull is a large, very pale white gull that breeds as far away as Greenland but ironically not Iceland, and winters in our region.

If you have the time, warm clothes, and a sense of adventure, the trek down into the gorge north of the falls in parks on both sides of the river will be rewarding. Here, flocks of Bonaparte’s Gulls spend their day flying up and down the gorge, diving into the water to catch fish dazed by their tumble down the falls or one of the two hydroelectric dams. These gulls are smaller, mostly white with pale grey wings, and have a single black dot behind their eye, a remnant of their all-black head from the previous breeding season plumage.

This winter congregation of birds has allowed the Niagara River and its shores to be officially designated a globally significant important bird area, on par with the Galapagos Islands and the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for its environmental significance. Its protection has obvious ecological importance, but also economic importance. Because of Niagara Falls, our region attracts more tourists annually than the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park combined. Although little attention is paid to them, birdwatchers come from all over North America to witness this winter migration, and they spend money here. An estimated 7.8 million tourists visit Niagara Falls State Park on the U.S. side each year. If only a fraction of those visitors are here for the birds, that still means that they are spending millions of dollars in our region.

Unfortunately, although we are the only stewards of the Niagara River, we have not always been good stewards. We have channelized it for shipping, industrialized its shores, and diverted its flow to harness its massive power for our own. We even did the unthinkable once and simply turned Niagara Falls “off” just to study it. The recent Ken Burns documentary on the National Parks suggested that Niagara Falls was the inspiration for establishing our national park system, not because of its beauty, but because over a hundred years ago tourists and conservationists alike saw how we privatized it and turned it into an amusement park; they did not want the same fate for places like Yellowstone or the Everglades. As new monstrous hotels and casinos pop up on both shores, one has to wonder if we have learned anything from our mistakes.

Protecting the Niagara alone isn’t enough. It is part of the Great Lakes, the largest lake system in the world, and what happens in Chicago, or Detroit, or Cleveland, ends up here eventually. Pollution from the past lingers in our soils and leaches from Western New York’s numerous toxic waste dumps, some still active. Development, oil exploration, and climate change threaten the northern breeding grounds of most of our winter birds. Globally, we continue to lose bird species to extinction each year.

This isn’t to say the situation is hopeless – far from it. The Niagara is and will always be breathtaking, each and every season of the year. And like all things, change will come. Winter will soon be spring and a new variety of wildlife will come with it. Some birds that are common now may be rare in ten or twenty years. The falls themselves are only 12,000 years old, a sliver of geologic time. But if you do get a chance to see this awesome display of nature in this all-too-brief winter season of ours, you will know this – we have tried to tame the Niagara, but its heart is still wild.