Northerners

There’s no place like southeast Arizona (piae memoriae) for roadside raptors, but our drive across southern British Columbia yesterday made me pine the less.

We stopped in Osoyoos to meet up with David and Valerie, then headed north along the lake to look for the recent Yellow-billed Loon. We found a single Common Loon among the waterbirds scattered up and down the lake, but nothing large, pale, or light-billed. As we turned to leave our last vantage point, a sharp, dark shape flashed into a tree above our heads: a female Merlin. Another flew past Alison’s parents’ living room here in Nelson this afternoon, making that most dashing of small raptors an everyday bird–it really will be every day this summer, when a pair nests, as they do most years, in the neighbors’ pine.

Merlins are nice, but even nicer was the chunky brown bird on the wire on our way back out to the highway.

I’m lucky to see a single Northern Shrike in a year–usually on a spring visit to Nebraska–but I think that 2010 may just be an exception. As we watched this first-cycle bird, it dropped from its high perch to haze the birds on the ground beneath, then dived into a tangle after some tiny passerine that had sought shelter there. No luck, and as we drove off, the shrike was back on the wire, hopeful still.

A couple of miles farther on, another wire, another shape.

Northern Pygmy-Owls are common enough in the forests across southern British Columbia, and a day’s drive anywhere usually produces one or two. This one gawked at us for a moment, then twisted to resume his rodent lookout over the snowy roadside.