Rainbows are the result of some interesting physics. Basically, the effect is due to light hitting the front of a rain droplet, going into it, bouncing off the back edge of the droplet, and coming back out the front. Each droplet acts as both a prism (bending the light as it enters or leaves the droplet) and a mirror (bouncing the light back towards the side it came in on). The curved shape of a droplet (which, by the way, is a very good approximation of a sphere, not the "teardrop" shape most people imagine) ensures that the entrance and exit bends (refractions) don't cancel each other out, as they do in a glass-covered mirror.

There's more to the explanation than that, but I don't want to overwhelm anyone with technical details. Besides which, there are birds to get to.

I arrived at Iona and headed for the inner ponds. There were many shorebirds there, and I quickly found all three common peeps. Here is a photo with a Semipalmated Sandpiper on the left and a Least Sandpiper on the right.

The Semipalmated has a much greyer color overall and black legs where the Least has yellow. That last bit may be a little hard to tell from the photo here, but in the full-resolution one, the leg colors are a bit more obvious.

The third common peep is the Western Sandpiper. Here's one of these guys. Like the Semipalmated, he's got black legs, but like the Least, he's got that red-brown color. The bill shape and white breast are different from the others, too. In fact, the clean breast and red color means that this one's a juvenile. The other peeps were likely juveniles, too.

Also in the area were plenty of Pectoral Sandpipers. Pectorals look like a big version of the Least Sandpiper. It's sometimes difficult in photos to tell which one you've got, unless there is some clue to the size of the bird. On the other hand, sometimes it's easy to tell--the Pectoral Sandpiper has an orange bill, where the Last Sandpiper has a black one. In this photo (as is often the case in life), both Pectorals have their bill covered in mud, making a color determination difficult.

A little ways along the jetty, I found an old upturned tree stump with a Savannah Sparrow on it. Here's the sparrow in the process of taking off.

All he did was fly up to the top of it, though.

He didn't stay long before flitting off to the pilings on the side of the jetty.

North of the jetty, in the shallow bay, there was a neat-looking Great Blue Heron. He's all dark and windwept. The different colors--black, white, rust--were nice on a bird that's often mainly a dull gray. I think this is a juvenile, and that's part of the reason for the interesting plumage.

There were also a few gulls north of the jetty. Here's a Ring-billed Gull.

About three or three-and-a-half kilometers out the jetty, I saw some small shorebirds on a dry part of the bay just north of the jetty. I climbed down the rock pilings on the side of the jetty to get onto a nearby sand bar. As I was going down, I noticed a shiny thing out on the sand.

Closer inspection revealed that it was a jellyfish. Well, that was cool!

Obviously, this jelly had been caught too far in the bay when the tide went out, and it got beached. I have no idea if it was alive or dead. Would it just go on with life when the tide came in again?

These jellies are actually fairly nasty things to encounter; their sting is quite bad. In my scuba training, they said that if you've seen one of these guys (the local red jellyfish) while underwater, then when you get out, both you and your partner must check each other all over for jellyfish tentacles stuck to your diving suit. They trail long sometimes invisible tentacles in the water, and you can swim through them without noticing (because you have your suit on--if you didn't, you'd notice!).. We also had to carry vinegar (which neutralizes the jellyfish's sting) in our diving kits, because of these guys. At Boundary Bay, I've seen posters warning people not to touch any beached jellyfish.

There are other kinds of jellyfish that we get out here, such as Moon Jellyfish, but they don't pose the hazard that these red guys do.

So I was psyched about finding a jellyfish. I noticed a few circular holes in the sand, and wondered what causes them. Probably some critter or 'nuther. Maybe someone out there will enlighten me.

In the excitement of finding the jelly, I didn't forget about why I had come down off the pipe in the first place--there were some whitish, small shorebirds here.

These are Sanderlings, and that's a lifer for me. Sanderlings are just a little bigger than the Least Sandpipers and other peeps. Sanderlings will chase waves on a beach, going in and out with each wave. I've yet to see this behavior myself; it was not a day for waves. The tide was just slowly creeping in.

After taking a bunch of Sanderling photos, I climbed back up onto the jetty pipe. On the other (south) side of the jetty, there was a structure made of some piles with tilted members and a cross member. On top of this structure were a bunch of Double-crested Cormorants.

Well, the scoters made my day and I walked the 4km back down the jetty a happy man. I didn't encounter too much different wildlife on my way back, and I was pretty bagged when I got to my car.

On my way home, I stopped at a store in Queensborough, just across the river from where I live. There I noticed a beautiful sky--there was a softly-color-modulating layer of clouds in the background, with a few backlit clouds in front. I snapped a few photos of the effect before calling it a day.

Ya gotta love those backlit clouds--they can turn even a mainly grey sky into something interesting.

Your funky-duck finder,
Tom