Birding Friends, Friends Birding

Have you noticed, too, that wherever you go, there are friendly birders? These past couple of gray damp days in Nelson have been considerably brightened by time afield with new friends and old, seeing a few birds and enjoying a few places.

On Tuesday, Dorothy and Alistair invited me to their beautiful place on the shores of  Kootenay Lake, just down from Kokanee Creek Provincial Park. A good walk, a good talk, and some good birds, among them Pileated Woodpecker and Bald Eagle.

We didn’t see the woodpecker but this time, but Alistair showed me one of the most impressive bits of picid sculpture I’ve ever seen, a large tree, still standing but nearly hammered in two by the delicate ministrations of the local Pileateds.

This morning I drove out to the orthographically odd Shoreacres to see Rita, who with Larry is our most steadfast Nelson birding contact–we’d last seen each other in Arizona a few years ago, and I hadn’t seen their new and wonderful straw bale house yet, so this was a triple pleasure: new place, new birds, old friends.

The Slocan Pool had the usual Common Goldeneye, Buffleheads, and Common Mergansers, plus a bonus pair of Trumpeter Swans.

If you think that photo is a bit sub-par, wait for the next one. Rita and I were walking along talking about the Blue Jay that showed up in the neighborhood last fall when out of the mist came the unmistakable and unmistakably beautiful pump-handle squeak of, yes indeed, a Blue Jay. And there it is:

Blue Jays are apparently much more frequent than I’d thought in southeast British Columbia, but this one was still very exciting and, though distant, very obliging as it called for a nearly a minute before swooping off across the pool.