Tree Swallows have been back in Vancouver for the better part of a week now (others had seen them even earlier), and yesterday at Iona Beach they were in pitched battle for ownership of the nest boxes.

I know that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, but the chitters and alternating blue and white flashes of Tree Swallows surely make a beautiful spring afternoon.

Birding is famously good for developing one’s sense of geography: how many non-birders do you know who have a clue about the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Davis Mountains, or Grayling, Michigan?

All the same, I still fall into the trap of thinking that just because I’m north, or west, or south, or east of usual, all “northern” or “western,” etc., species should be present and common. That’s not the case here in the Pacific Northwest, of course, where classic “western” birds like Lazuli Bunting or even Western Kingbird are most easily found be heading east, to the drier country on the other side of the coastal ranges.

A long-tailed little sparrow that flashed past me this afternoon at Iona Beach drove the lesson home once again. The reddish aspect and long, dark tail screamed American Tree Sparrow, and sure enough, a little patience gave good looks at the first member of that familiar species I’d seen for a long, long time.

American Tree Sparrow, Iona Beach.

It’s a common winter bird over much of the northern half of the US–but not on the Pacific Coast, for some reason, where they are relatively scarce; indeed, this was the first one I’d ever seen in Vancouver. Tree Sparrows actually breed in northern British Columbia (this is one big province!), but apparently they avoid the shoreline as they move north with the spring.

It doesn’t happen very often, but the end of last week was bright and clear and almost warm. Alison and I spent a quick late afternoon hour at Jericho Park, enjoying the lingering Eurasian Wigeon drake and admiring in spite of ourselves the Bald Eagles overhead.

There are two nests at the west end of Jericho Beach, and the bird is otherwise so common that no one here really pays it any attention–except to sic their dogs on them when they’re patrolling the shoreline at low tide. Given its splendid recovery in the last couple of decades, Bald Eagle really isn’t a “birder’s bird” anymore, either, with but still I find them impossible to ignore, whether they’re passing our window over breakfast or wheeling high against that rarest of sights in Vancouver, a deep blue sky.