On Saturday the 4th of September, I headed back to Queen Elizabeth Park. There was a pretty bird I had talked to when I had been there on the 1st, and I wanted to see if she was there again.

But since I was going to the park, I did take my camera along. The day turned out as grey and overcast as Wednesday had been, so I didn't get any standout photos.

First up was this warbler, who isn't definitively identified. I thought maybe it's a Wilson's Warbler, but my friend Ilya (who is vastly more experienced than I in these matters) thinks it's more probably a Yellow Warbler.

Even those photos didn't turn out too great, though. I didn't get clear focus on the bird's head, and sharpening didn't help it all that much.

I found a few flycatchers. First there was this one, which looks to be of genus Empidonax. Often the only way to tell which Empidonax flycatcher one has is by their song. Unfortunately, I'm not schooled enough in recognition by sound to have picked out which species this was. I don't even know if the bird made any sound. Anyway, he was really in the dark and so the photo turned out pretty noisy and grainy. I cleaned it up some in Photoshop, but it's still pretty rough. This guy's eye-ring is pretty prominent.

The other Contopus flycatcher that we get in these parts is the Olive-sided Flycatcher. In my last photojournal entry, the flycatchers in the first two photos are Olive-sided Flycatchers. Ilya pointed this out to me when he saw the photos (thanks!). The Olive-sided is bigger and bulkier than the Western Wood-Pewee, and its bill is proportionally much larger, too.

I had seen a number of pale-morph Western Tanagers around the park, and had tried at various times to get decent photos of them. I had no such luck...but here's one of the better ones.

I hadn't found that particularly pretty bird I had been looking for. The lack of light and lack of birds got discouraging, so I packed it in and headed tomy favorite camera store..There I picked up a flash unit that was designed for use with my camera. Heading home from there, I found my usual route blocked off by a police car. I went a little further and again the route was blocked by a police car.

Well, this was too much for me; I had to find out what was going on. So I parked at the next convenient location. I found that the police had stopped traffic on several blocks of Kingsway (a major street in Burnaby) near Metrotown Mall (a particularly big and popular mall). It was strange to see this part of this road with no traffic.

Well, I proceeded to the other side of the Korean restaurant whose sign is poking into the picture on the left, and found myself in the middle of a group of eight or ten reporters and photographers. I blended into them, and decided to play freelance.

I was standing in the street you see coming in from the left above, just behind the (red) mailbox). There was a policeman there in the street, too, keeping people from going too close to Kingsway.

Soon, an RCMP spokesman arrived, consulted with a few people, straightened his tie, and came over to talk to us.

The story was this: at some time in the morning, a guy had breakfast at the Knight and Day restaurant, and then handed his waitress a note saying that he had a bomb. He'd been in the restaurant ever since, although he let most of the other people there out. A police negotiator had established contact with him. He claimed to have a bomb made with C-4, a military explosive, but police had not been able to ascertain whether or not this was true. They were taking him seriously, and had evacuated the nearby buildings and set up a cordon. They were negotiating to try to get the bomber to surrender. The man had made no demands, was not thought to be a terrorist, and his motivations were unclear.

The spokesman himself had only limited information about what had happened, and to most questions had to answer that he didn't know. As I lost interest in the reporters' questions, I looked around and noticed some activity around a brown van in the parking lot behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken (which was directly across from the Knight and Day).

The brown van is the RCMP Emergency Response Team (ERT) van. The guy on the left, I believe, is the team leader. The guy on the right (if the patches on his shirt are accurate) is named Elwood and he's an explosives expert. I'm not sure if Elwood is normally employed in creating and using explosives for the ERT, or in handling and disposing of explosives made by others.

An RCMP helicopter appeared overhead for a while, and I got a few photos of it. But just then, a sniper appeared and started to get in position.

The Knight and Day (the restaurant containing the bomber) is the building across the street with its entrance above the sniper's head in that photo.

The sniper, keeping his head low, went to the corner and tried a few different positions in and on a brick planter, before settling on a prone position behind it. I don't think it was a great sniper position, because he had to look around the corner of the planter quite a bit to see the door to the restaurant.

Unfortunately, the windows to the restaurant were quite darkly tinted, so (at least without special vision equipment) one couldn't see what was going on inside. I tried taking some photos through the windows, but they just turned out black.

Next, the ERT unloaded a robot from the back of their van. The woman in the photo is just a random pedestrian; the police didn't seem to have their operational area completely secured.

They parked the robot beside the van. I don't know if they were just moving it out of the way to get to something behind it, or if they were prepping it in case it had to be used.

All of the reporters, photographers, and videographers around seemed to know each other. One of the them was elected to find out who I was, or more more importantly, who I was working for. When I said I was freelance, they seemed to lose interest, although they still accepted or tolerated me in their midst.

From what I could tell, most everyone was shooting digital. None of them seemed as trigger-happy as me, though.

The next thing I know, there's a plain-clothes guy hustling across the street with a generator or amplifier in their hand.

What were the police up to? Soon it became clear.

Another ERT member made his way towards the sniper. This guy was more heavily armored. He had his semiautomatic weapon in one hand, and guitar case in the other. Amplifier and guitar: the plan was obviously to make music until the guy gave up or blew up.

The armored constable set the guitar case down and laid down beside the sniper to cover the same angle. The sniper then turned around and opened the case.

Then he retrieved his instrument.

Okay, maybe I was wrong about the whole music thing. That looks more like a rifle than a guitar. The sniper got back in position with this new weapon and his roadie went across Kingsway and around the side of a building near the restaurant. He was probably headed to the rear of the restaurant, but I couldn't see where he ended up.

The next ERT member out seemed to have even bulkier armor than the last. He seemed a bit less polished and more tentative than the sniper and his roadie.

In fact, as this one crossed Kingsway, he dropped an ammo clip in the street and had to retrieve it. Oops!

There was no action for a few minutes. Then, the real photo-op of the day arrived. A juvenile gull had landed on the restaurant containing the bomber. He had a long bill, which seemed mainly black but perhaps a little pink or orange at the tip. His head seemed a bit flat, and his legs sorta grey. His plumage was grey with very few markings. Based mainly on the bill and smooth plumage, I think he's a juvenile Glaucous-winged Gull. My bird book says that "the relatively unpatterned and low-contrast plumage [of Glaucous-winged Gulls is] distinctive."

The police outside were all packed up and there looked to me no more action, so I headed on to my usual Saturday lunch group at the Golden Pita. What had started as a relatively unphotographic day had turned out quite differently.

Photojournalist for a day,
Tom