Thursday was the 19th of August. Being between semesters, I decided to take the day and go shoot some birdies (with my camera, of course). I went out to Boundary Bay, hoping to see the shorebirds that people were reporting there, and not just the mud.

I arrived around 9:30, donned my boots and hat, and ventured forth unto the mudflats. I was greeted by a number of shorebirds close to the dyke; they were wading through some puddles but were quite far from the actual waterline.

These are Baird's Sandpipers. Baird's are small sandpipers and often classed as a "peep" or "large peep". Peeps are the small sandpipers in the genus Calidris; they are often quite difficult to tell apart. The three most common North American peeps are the Western Sandpiper, the Semipalmated Sandpiper, and the Least Sandpiper, which all are 6 to 6.5 inches long. Baird's Sandpipers average 7.5 inches, so they're just a little bigger.

Peep and large peep plumage is all quite similar, but basically Baird's have less rufous (red-brown) coloration, their wings are longer compared to their body, and they prefer drier habitat than the small peeps. That's why they're near the dyke and not near the ocean.

Anyhow, do you see the lovely blue color of the water in the photo above? Well, the puddle was not that color. It was brownish, with a whitish reflection. Notice how the white parts of the sandpipers are also blue? On Wednesday night I had been experimenting with my camera, and I changed the White Balance setting on it to Tungsten Lighting. Tungsten lighting (the light from your ordinary incandescent household light bulb) is very orange, so the camera compensates by adjusting all of the colors towards blue. This gives a more-natural looking photo if you're actually using tungsten lighting, but in sunlight, it gives photos that look very blue. Very very blue. So all but 10 of the 650 or so photos I took on this expedition turned out very blue

I've tried to adjust many of them in Photoshop, so you won't be as assaulted by the blue as I was. Some of it will leak through, though. Color normally helps to distinguish between some sandpipers, but the horrid blue makes color in these photos unreliable, making identification harder. That's a big bummer, because I do like to identify the birds I get photos of.

So here's another picture of Baird's Sandpipers, up on dry land, with less blue. Their plumage is quite good camoflage.

By the way, these are juvenile Baird's Sandpipers. The plumage on adults is slightly different.

As I walked out towards the waterline, I encountered a few birds in the long zone between the "near-the-dyke" zone and the "near-the-waterline" zone. Here's one of those birds; by its size and its shape and its bill, it's a Western Sandpiper (yes, it's a peep!). Note how the bill is long and sorta thick and curves downward.

Westerns have some variation in bill size; the one above has one of the longer ones. The shorter Western bills are more like the bills on the Baird's. I encountered a few groups of Western Sandpipers, from isolated birds to flocks of eighty or a hundred or so. I could see even larger flocks in the distance.

Also in the intermediate zone, I caught this Semipalmated Plover making an elegant landing.

The adjective "semipalmated" in the names Semipalmated Sandpiper and Semipalmated Plover refers to the webbing on the birds' feet. It means that the webbing extends only partway out the toes, not all of the way.

Anyhow, here's a later shot of this guy, where he's showing textbook field marks, including the single black stripe across the top of the chest, which is not as evident in the above photo.

All the Semipalmated Plovers I saw were loners.

Also in the intermediate zone, I found the following shells. This photo shows that the snails (the two conical shells) are leaving trails in the mud. I had been wondering what caused the lines that I had been seeing all over the place, and here I found out.

Well, that was pretty interesting. Now that I was clued in to the snails, I had to see if the trails were just because they were dragged by the tide or if they were because of the snails' own powered movement. So I started watching the snails.

And some of them were actually moving. Not fast, mind you. They were, as you might expect, moving at a snail's pace.

Looking around, I found a cluster of five snails that were all going roughly the same way: it was a snail race. Here's five photos from the snail race; the elapsed time between the top photo and the bottom one is nineteen seconds.

I figure these snails were each about 2cm long. The laggard is about 1/4 in the photo in the first frame, and all the way in the photo on the last frame. That means that in 19 (let's say 20) seconds, it's moved about 15mm. That is 0.75mm/sec, which works out to 45mm/min or 2700mm/hr. That's 2.7 meters in an hour! Zoooooom!

Well, didn't you always want to know just how fast a snail's pace is?

I turned my attention back to the birds and in about five minutes or so came upon a medium-sized group of peeps who weren't too afraid of me. They let me get reasonably close. Here's a group shot, which shows no detail of the birds, but does show what a typical group looks like out on the flats. These guys, like most of the peeps out there, were Western Sandpipers.

I zoomed my camera in on them from where I was standing, but either they got antsy about me or something else startled them, because they all flew away.

It's neat how even a big flock can all take off within a second or so.

I walked along near the waterline for a while, trying to get closer to some bigger shorebirds that were hanging out right on the line. Once I was close enough, I could see that the big guys were Black-bellied Plovers. Here's one of them.

Here's a shot from a little later, showing a good size comparison between the Great Blue Heron, the Black-bellied Plovers, and the peeps. The photo also illustrates what I mean when I say that image quality degrades when I use my 2x teleconverter; the image looks grainy and a lot like it was viewed through heat haze.

Around this time, I found myself in very liquid mud, with my boots sinking in several inches on each step. I guess the tide was coming in. Pulling my foot out for each step that I took was a slow process; I was making one step every 20 or 30 seconds. I thought about the snails. I also thought about a newspaper article I had read about someone who had gone out on a tidal flat in Britain somewhere and encountered quicksand-like conditions; they got stuck and didn't make it out. Well, comparing my mud to theirs was probably a bit dramatic, but getting stuck in the mud or caught by the tide are real dangers on tidal flats.

I do know basic quicksand-extrication techniques, and I did have a fairly long pole (a.k.a. my tripod) with me. So you needn't worry 'bout me.

It took ten or fifteen minutes for me to extricate myself from the gloppy mud, and I decided to head back in. It was hot outside, and I had been on the flats for about three and a half hours already, so I was getting tired and hungry.

On my way back in, I saw some more Westerns, some Ring-Billed Gulls, and more Baird's. Here's one of the gulls.

I'll leave you with that one.

Questing for good photos, whatever color the day may be,
Tom