Archive for December, 2010
Some Images of the 2010 Nelson CBC
Posted by: | CommentsIt was cold. It was snowy. It was anything but birdy. But it was great to be out for a day with Alison in the beautiful Kootenays.
Dip!
Posted by: | CommentsWe’re big on traditions, Alison and I, and one of the practices we most enjoy perpetuating is the Christmas-time Dipper walk in Nelson. There’s a reliable spot on Cottonwood Creek where we had our engagement photos made a dozen years ago–and where American Dippers are nearly can’t-miss in the snowy season.
We were bundled up from head to toe when we set out yesterday, but the cold doesn’t seem to bother the birds at all.
That water is right at 32 degrees F, and you can bet I wasn’t dipping my toes in, much less dunking my face.
It must pay off, though, with caddis fly larvae and other little bugs enough to keep a bird going on even the coldest days of winter.
What’s really interesting is that over the dozen or so winters Alison and I have bene watching American Dippers at this selfsame location, they’ve almost always been birds of the year–just like this one, aged by the white tipping on secondaries, tertials, and greater coverts. Cottonwood Creek is obviously not the primest of cinclid real estate.
New Every Time
Posted by: | CommentsBirding as most of us practice it is about nothing so much as novelty: we’re always, aren’t we, on the lookout for the new and the next, and in our worst moments, we’re quite capable of ignoring some really spectacular birds just because we’ve seen them before.
Logically, that would make the happy birder the forgetful birder. But I find, illogically, that it’s memory that lets me experience novelty again and again, that it’s my birding past that makes the present so exciting–even when that present is full of the familiar and the old.
Take Greater Scaup, for example.
As I think about it, I’ve now probably seen far more Greaters than Lessers in my life, and I’ve probably spent more time scanning flocks of the former for individuals of the latter than the other way ’round. And though I’d never claim that every individual scaup in every different circumstance is “easy,” I’m still quite happy to say that it’s a familiar bird I’ve come to know reasonably well over the years.
But it wasn’t always so. As a young birder in eastern Nebraska, I remember looking and looking for what we still thought of as the rare Greater Scaup every year–looking, it must be recalled, back in the days before many of the reliable field characters were widely known.
Click here if you haven't seen both species in the photo.
Nowadays I see lots of Greater Scaup–even in Nebraska, if I’m there at the right season–and I’m good enough, I think, at picking out at least the most obvious individuals of “the other” species in a mixed flock.
But the excitement still comes back, predictably and invariably, whenever I set up to look at an Aythya flock. It has nothing to do with scarcity or abundance, nothing with challenge or ease; and it has everything to do with my memories of a twelve-year-old self sorting ducks a generation ago.
Kootenay Lake
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The Aimophimobile had a well-deserved rest last night after delivering us safely from Vancouver to Nelson yesterday. Not so sure it was happy to wake up under a blanket of new snow, but that’s winter in the mountains!
After breakfast, Walter and Alison and I took Gellert for a swim in the lake, the water temperature of which must have matched the air temperature almost exactly. Didn’t matter to the dog, of course, who thinks water is fun even if it is threatening to enter a solid state at any moment.
I figured out long ago that the farther I throw the floating toy, the longer I’ll have to sort through the birds. Today’s tosses gave me a chance to look at a nice flock of three dozen American Goldfinches and Pine Siskins, and the waterfowl–only a couple of hundred birds, but as always, close in and beautiful–included lots of Greater and a very few Lesser Scaup and the first Redheads I’d seen in what seemed like months.
More birding tomorrow, I hope!
Vancouver Christmas Count 2010
Posted by: | CommentsWhat a great day out with Mike and Alison! We birded in Burnaby, the city immediately east of Vancouver, and spent most of the day along the Fraser River, with some forest birding in the afternoon.
It was chilly and sprinkly (and dark!) when we started shortly before 8:00, but the weather just got better and better as the day wore on, as you can see in those funny blue spaces–oh yeah, the sky!–in the photo of one of our two Pileated Woodpeckers.
We spent the morning right along the river, birding a narrow strip of parkland between the Fraser and the encroaching “industrial parks” (a real contradictio in adjecto, as Mike pointed out).
The landscape wasn’t all that appealing for most of the stretch, but the birding was good. Golden-crowned Kinglets and Pacific Wrens were with us always, and a lingering Hermit Thrush was a nice sight. Hairy Woodpecker is a species I rarely see in Vancouver for some reason, and the wonderful looks at a black-winged female feeding, uncharacteristically, on the ground, probably made that species “bird of the day” for me.
Bird of the day from the perspective of the count was a male American Kestrel on a wire at the “swinging bridge,” a great massive structure that pivots to let tugboats and barges pass up and down the river. Sadly, kestrels are rare to the point of vanishing in the Vancouver area, and the sight of that little falcon pumping his tail on the line, still so familiar in the midwest and southwest, was a novelty for us today.
It wasn’t all urban wasteland. After lunch with Brian, Janice, and Mary, we set off uphill to bird “the ravines,” a series of beautifully forested canyons cutting down through Burnaby’s south slope to the floodplain.
It was here that we found our two big woodpeckers and Alison picked up the day’s only Varied Thrushes; the Pacific coast forest in the afternoon isn’t exactly the birdiest place in the world, but the scenery was well worth the walk, especially considering how hyper-developed the surroundings.
We ended the day in Burnaby’s Central Park, a wonderful revelation in the late afternoon sunshine.
While Alison walked Gellert (he’d been very patient in the car all day), Mike and I watched the Sunday afternoon park-goers feeding Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees from the hand, and sorted through the 166 (I counted ‘em) Glaucous-winged-type Gulls to find a slightly darkish Western x Glaucous-winged Gull hybrid (or introgressant).
It's really not that good, is it? But it was the darkest bird we had good looks at all day.
We also found a single Thayer’s Gull, a pretty adult.
And that was the last new species for us on a wonderful day afield. Tomorrow to the Kootenays!
