Manning Park: Bird Blitz 2010

This weekend was the Manning Park Bird Blitz, an event held for the past 28 years in one of British Columbia’s–indeed, Canada’s–most beautiful wild parks.

Alison and I arrived Friday evening with a little time to bird Strawberry Flats; a Dusky Grouse hooted the whole time we were there, and a pair of Pine Grosbeaks was a nice start to the weekend.

That evening was registration. For nearly three decades, the blitz has focused on 17 sites within the park where all birds are counted in a single day, eventually creating a record with few parallels anywhere on the continent. We signed up to bird Twenty-minute Lake and the Frosty Mountain Trail, an area Alison had seen before–but entirely new to me.

We were a group of seven: Cat, Alison, Jennie, Ben, Angie, Lorne, and me, good company all (well, maybe I wasn’t). We spent the first couple of hours around the lake, scoring Common Goldeneye ducklings, a pair of Evening Grosbeaks, and a surprisingly Yellow-headed Blackbird, before heading up the trail on a beautiful sunny morning.

Swainson’s Thrushes and Golden-crowned Kinglets were all around us, for the most part as invisible as the abundant Townsend’s Warblers buzzing from every tree. We ran into another Pine Grosbeak, a bird I can never see enough of, and a couple of kilometers up the trail we lucked across one of the day’s major targets.

American Three-toed Woodpecker is a common but reclusive resident of Manning’s boreal forests, and we were very happy indeed to see this female quietly flaking bark right next to the trail. Look hard and you can count the toes on the left foot–I didn’t check, but I imagine that the right foot had the same number.

By the time we reached the first snow on Frosty, activity had slowed considerably, and we had lunch and then descended to take a couple of hours off in the late afternoon. Alison and I spent our time watching the Clark’s Nutcrackers bathing on the lawn at the lodge.

That evening was the barbecue, a convivial affair around what was by then a very welcome campfire.

We were amazed once again at how loud the song of Golden-crowned Kinglet is: not even the happy chatter of 60 hungry birders could drown out those insistent whispers.

My talk went well enough, I think, and the discussion afterwards was vigorous and thought-provoking–and continued this morning over breakfast, which I found enormously gratifying.

Thanks to all involved in keeping this great event running over the years! We’ll be back.