The 15th of August was a Sunday, and a warm one at that. I just hung around home in the morning and went out with my camera in the late afternoon, around 5:30. I headed down to Ladner Trunk Road and Boundary Bay.

On one of the roads between the dyke and Ladner Trunk Road, I was stopped by a passing freight train. This is one of the unit trains that takes coal down to the Roberts Bank superport; here it is returning, empty, to the coal mines.

A unit train is a train that hauls only one type of cargo.

A little later I was back out on Ladner Trunk Road and saw a hawk hovering over a field. It was a Northern Harrier (a.k.a. Marsh Hawk). Their white rump is fairly distinctive.

The harrier flew along and landed in the field a few times, and I gave chase in my car. Here's the last takeoff I saw him do; after this he headed straight away from the road before disappearing behind a hedge.

Heading towards the dyke on the next road I encountered, I found a couple of sheep on a berm beside the road.

A horse was in the same little fenced-off piece of land.

As is quite common in this area, there were many European Starlings perched on the power and telephone wires. It may be a common bird, but I like the starling's markings.

Since I was relatively near the ferry jetty, I headed on over to it, hoping to find the birds that I didn't find the day before. I parked at "windsurfer's corner", a little parking lot before the main ferry terminal entrance. As I set my tripod up there, I saw a bird on the water that I thought was a cormorant of some sort. I've seen cormorants from the ferry jetty before. I took a few photos of the bird as it drifted away towards shore, occasionally diving after some food. Its dives didn't look like the usual cormorant dives.

When I got a chance to look at the photos at home, I saw that the neck and bill were wrong for a cormorant, and what I had seen was a Common Loon. The Common Loon is, well, relatively common, but I had never seen one before...it was a lifer for me. ("Lifer" is a term used by birders to denote the first bird of a species that one ever sees; it comes from the fact that many birders keep a "life list", which is a list of all of the birds that they've seen in their life. A lifer is then a bird that you can add to your life list.) Here's my lifer loon.

He was just at the range of what my camera optics will pull in, so it's not a very clear shot.

I watched a kildeer run down the beach through my binoculars, and then headed off the other direction to the Compensation Lagoon. When I got there, I went a couple of paces from the road and set up next to a big pole that holds a traffic sign over the road. The birds are accustomed to the pole (and its large concrete base) being there, and if I'm behind it I don't look so obviously big and human and threatening. This means there's less stress on the birds and better pictures for me, because they're less likely to fly away.

The Caspian Tern flock that was there the day before was there again.

As I was taking pictures of the terns, I was approached by another birder. I had been concentrating on taking photos and didn't hear or see his approach, so it startled me when he talked.

He had come over to me from where he was (a little further up the road) to point out some interesting birds; he was afraid that I would have left without seeing them. He was probably right in this fear.

First he showed me a Franklin's Gull that was in amongst the other gulls and terns. The Franklin's Gull was a lifer for me. Then he turned his spotting scope to the side and pointed it at a little mound, where there were a Whimbrel and three Marbled Godwits. Both of those were lifers for me, too. So in the space of a minute, he showed me three lifers that I probably would have missed. Cool!

Once he showed them to me on his scope, I was able to find them in my camera (although the image was not as magnified as he got with his scope). Here's the Franklin's Gull. He's the one just right of center with the black face and white ring around the eye. His mantle is a little darker than the other gulls, and his tail does not extend as far back. He's in his winter (nonbreeding) plumage; in the summer the front part of his face would be black, too.

The big shorebirds (Whimbrel and Marbled Godwits) were a lot further off and harder to photograph. I had to put a teleconverter on the camera to increase the magnification; this gives worse image quality in the best of situations, but here wasn't the best. It had started to get dark, and teleconverters eat light for breakfast. It all works out to grainy pictures of the shorebirds. Anyway, here's a group shot; the Whimbrel is on the left, with wings outstretched. The Marbled Godwits are the three resting birds to the right.

Whimbrels have a fairly long bill that has quite a downward curve to it. They also have a striped head, as you can see. It's quite a neat bird.

Here's another photo of the group, when two of the godwits are awake and peering about.

Marbled Godwits have fairly long bill with a slight upward curve to it. They have a lighter overall color than the Whimbrel. They're supposed to be quite pretty in flight, with a light-cinnamon-colored underwing and an orange wing top. Unfortunately, these guys just sat there while I took pictures of them in the gathering gloom.

So when enough gloom had gathered to render my efforts useless, I packed up and headed home. I thought about staying and shooting the sunset again, but I was tired and figured I wouldn't get anything much different from what I got the day before.

All in all, though, a pretty darned good day. Four lifers, all within a space of about 15 minutes. Sometimes it's good to meet up with more experienced birders...especially ones with good optics.

Your Whimbrel-lovin' fool,
Tom