East Is West

A really fun morning with the survey team at the University of British Columbia South Farm here in Vancouver.

There were lots of birds around on a fine spring-like morning, with migrants and summer arrivals well represented–from a Townsend’s Solitaire to numbers of nice bright Orange-crowned Warblers.

The “best” birds from my point of view, though, were two typically eastern phenomena: a fantastic male Slate-colored Junco and a bizarre Northern Flicker introgressant. The flicker, seen only on the ground in the grass (and thus its shafts never visible) had two well-developed red malar stripes, neither with any obvious black, and a somewhat thin but still complete red nuchal crescent. Both were reminders that British Columbia is huge–and that Slate-colored Juncos and Yellow-shafted Flickers both breed in the province, just, oh, several hundred miles north of Vancouver.