What 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!