Maybe not all year long, but certainly in the breeding season, the beautiful marshes and woodlands of southeastern British Columbia are full of sights and sounds that remind me more of New England and the Midwest than the Rockies.

Alison and I stopped briefly Friday morning on our way out of mapleland; rolling down the windows as we turned off the highway, our ears were filled with the caroling of Red-eyed Vireos and the homely chirping of Least Flycatchers. A Nashville Warbler sang from the slope, and the roadsides were haunted by elegantly plumed, electric-voiced Eastern Kingbirds.

Best of all? The song par excellence of New England bogs, the rich, low-pitched, gurgling chant of Northern Waterthrush.

Click the image to hear the song.

To Alison’s slight disappointment, we never so much as glimpsed the singers, but just hearing them was enough to prove that we’d left the true west behind–and so on to Arizona.

I was eight hours late arriving in Vancouver Friday morning, a circumstance that combined with the drizzle to more or less put paid to our plans to bird the Okanagan that day. Instead, we drooped in at our motel in Osoyoos and had a good night’s sleep before starting out early the next morning for Nelson.

We’d seen a couple of black bears in Manning Park on Friday, but not until nearly Castlegar did we glimpse another dark shape on the roadside Saturday afternoon. Alison: “That’s a … !” And so it was, a great mother grizzly bear daintily carrying the better part of a deer across the highway, her big shaggy cubs right behind her.

They settled in right on the edge of the forest, the mother keeping watchful eye on the watchful humans as the yearlings gorged on venison.

When we arrived in Nelson that evening, we casually showed Walter and David the photos of “a couple of bears” we’d encountered–and enjoyed their widened eyes almost as much as the sight of the grizzlies itself.

But nothing could match the first notable bird of the day.

On a tip from David, we headed straight to Burnaby Mountain. Within a couple of minutes of leaving the parking lot, we heard it: the almost inaudibly low-pitched hooting of a male Sooty Grouse. Walking along the clifftop, we knew that we were not only close to the bird–close enough to tell when it moved its head–but perhaps even at something like the same elevation; but long minutes passed as we stared into the dark tree tops.

Just as we were about to resign ourselves to yet another purely aural encounter, a rush of wings announced the arrival of the bird on a bare broken branch just yards away. It looked around a couple of times, then started to boom–five, sometimes six deep, owl-like hoots, softer and louder as the bird directed its voice towards us, then away.

It was obviously a matter of great exertion to make such a sound. The bird leaned slightly forward, puffed out its belly, then its breast, and the tail vibrated with each emanation. The combs were visible, but the neck sacs remained almost entirely covered by feathers the entire time.

After nearly half an hour of watching, I muttered something about not even wishing for a better look. The grouse took my speaking as its cue to fly towards and between us, landing on the green lawn and strolling a couple of feet into–get this–a bed of daffodils, where it plucked at the flowers for a few seconds before something, probably an introduced eastern gray squirrel, flushed it; it flew back across the fence and down the cliff, landing somewhere out of sight.

This was the first Sooty Grouse I’d ever actually seen, and to watch it boom and perch and fly and feed was almost overwhelming–and a wonderful way to say goodbye to Vancouver.

This lovely couple was perched in the middle of one of the impoundments at British Columbia’s Reifel Refuge yesterday afternoon. Even as I admired them–the rainbow-colored drake almost as much as the Cleopatra-eyed duck–I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them: what did these gorgeous birds ever do to deserve so humdrum an English name as Wood Duck?

Over the centuries since its discovery, this species has also been known, much more evocatively, as “summer duck” (they’re highly migratory), “acorn duck” (they eat a lot of mast), “tree duck” (they nest in tree cavities), and “Carolina duck” (they’re still most abundant in the eastern deciduous forest). But ever since Audubon codified it in the Ornithological Biography, we’ve been stuck–the bird has been stuck–with that blandest of possible names, the earliest use of which Latham appears to attribute to a certain “James Brown” (certainly not this James Brown, the friend and collaborator of Nuttall).

Fortunately, this duck’s scientific name does it more justice. The tenth, authoritative edition of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae describes the male Wood Duck under the name Anas sponsa, while apparently assigning the female (defined as “a gray duck, living in America, with a somewhat crested head and black and white spotted underparts”) to a different species, Anas arborea, the “tree duck.”

The name Linnaeus gave the male, sponsa, is much more interesting. The Latin word for “bride” is cognate with the English word “spouse” and the French “époux/se” and similar labels; they all come from the Latin verb “to promise,” which also gives us such words as “sponsor,” one who undertakes to make a promise on behalf of another.

Why did Linnaeus use the female term “bride” for a male duck, rather than the obvious sponsus, meaning “bridegroom”? This has been a source of confusion and embarrassment for some etymologers, but it’s actually simple: the genus name Anas, under which Linnaeus’s original description is included, is grammatically–if not necessarily biologically–feminine, and so, logically, is the species epithet, too.

Linnaeus’s Anas was a catch-all genus, including many waterfowl now assigned elsewhere. The German ornithologist Friedrich Boie’s 1828 revision of the anatids removed sponsa (and its closest relative, the Mandarin Duck) from Anas and created a new genus, Aix. In a footnote, Boie credits the name to Aristotle, who included the otherwise mysterious creature “aix” in his group of solid birds with webbed feet. Coincidentally or not, it is possible to read this passage in the De animalibus as suggesting that the aix breeds in trees–making the modern scientific name Aix sponsa a fine combination of the English “wood duck” and Linnaeus’s Latin “bridal duck.” In a neat twist, the German vernacular name for our Wood Duck is Brautente, a direct translation of Linnaeus’s old “Anas sponsa.”

The Yellow-rumped Warbler deluge shows no sign of receding, and Jericho Park is pretty much crawling with chipping, singing, flycatching Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers again today.

It’s important–well, I think it’s important–to remember that both Audubon’s and Myrtle are polytypic; thus, it’s incorrect to speak of “the Audubon’s subspecies” or “the Myrtle subspecies” of Yellow-rumped Warbler, unless, of course, you’re using the word in the plural. The Myrtle Warblers we see here in Vancouver, the breeding race of northern British Columbia, are Dendroica coronata hooveri, differing in measurements and in some plumage characters from their eastern, nominate-race cousins.

This subspecies was described in 1899 by Richard C. McGregor, an adoptive Californian who would later become famous as the doyen of Philippine ornithology. He named his subsp. nov. after his college friend Theodore J. Hoover, collector of the type specimen and the older brother of Herbert.

In preparing his original description, McGregor also used specimens taken by Henry Ward Carriger, an early California oologist. I don’t know much about Carriger–fill me in if you do–but I was greatly impressed to read that as early as 1898, he had recognized the differences in the call notes of Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers, a distinction that even today not all birders are aware of.

The Californians were out in front even then.

That’s an insidious “but,” of course, suggesting as it does that Yellow-rumped Warbler is somehow lesser than the other possible parulids. It is indeed much more abundant than any other, but that doesn’t make this species any less interesting. Or these species.

The birding world is abuzz with anticipation of a re-split of the yellow-rumped warblers, which were lumped almost 40 years ago in the great taxonomic massacre of the 1973 AOU Supplement. Now the Check-list Committee is evaluating a proposal to recognize at least two separate species in Dendroica coronata as now construed (and to correct the genus name to Setophaga–but that’s another story).

Both white-throated Myrtle Warblers and yellow-throated Audubon’s Warblers breed in British Columbia, and both are common migrants here in the Vancouver area, with the latter taxon generally the more abundant. Apparent hybrids and intergrades are easy to find if you look; one bird this afternoon had the yellow throat of an Audubon’s and the white malars and reduced white on the greater coverts of a Myrtle–I’m not sure I ever heard it chip, unfortunately.

The AOU Committee doesn’t much care what a birder wants, but still I hope for the split. And if it comes, I think we’ll all start paying attention again to what have for too long been “just yellow-rumps.”

I suspect this would eventually be a problem on a wooden mast.

They’re appealing at any season, but perhaps at the very height of their beauty right now, with the pale feather edges almost worn away and the bill turning black. This bird should be irresistible when he arrives far, far uphill on the breeding grounds!

I’d gone in hopes of passerine migrants, and there were plenty of Audubon’s (and a couple of Myrtle) Warblers and Golden-crowned and Ruby-crowned Kinglets around. But the best bird of the morning was a falcon, a tiny male American Kestrel that floated south through the bunny theater, sending the Golden-crowned and White-crowned Sparrows scampering off into the brush.

Bigger raptors were easy to find, of course: just listen to the Northwestern Crows.

I was standing underneath this adult Bald Eagle, trying unsuccessfully to read the band on its right tarsus, when a tiny woman on a bicycle paused to tell me that if I wanted to see an eagle, I should try Spanish Banks.

I might have stammered a little as I thanked her, but by now, after a year and a bit in Vancouver, I’m pretty much used to it. People here know that there are eagles around, they know it’s a big deal, but not one in a hundred has ever seen one–even when they’re looking straight at them.

I have no idea how many occupied nests are within easy walking distance of our apartment, but just offhand I can think of three; birds from those aeries and unattached non-breeders are in the sky pretty much constantly, visible and often audible from even the busiest Vancouver street.

It’s no great surprise that most Vancouverites don’t notice them, big and noisy as they (the eagles!) are. But the fact that they still talk about them, that they assume that anyone with binoculars must be out looking for eagles, speaks volumes about the cultural weight of these birds. Just knowing they’re out there really matters to the locals, whether they know what they look like or not.