Friday was the first of October, the day after I got to Steveston too late and missed the swans. It was a nice day out. In the afternoon, I couldn't stand it any more, so I left work early to try again in Steveston.

Well, I got to the town and went to the tourist-area docks and immediately found my quarry: five Mute Swans were in the water a few feet from the docks. They weren't in a hurry to get anywhere, so I took my time going down to the dock, where I sat down and started my little clickfest. Here's a basic head-and-neck shot of one of these magnificent birds.

But if you're not another swan, or someone taking their food, you're probably safe.

Most of the time, they got along just fine with one another, though, like these two.

The swans may have been mute, but their companion in the water, this young gull, was raising quite a ruckus.

Actually, Mute Swans aren't exactly mute. They do make various snorting and honking noises.

I did take a closer look at the Mute Swan entry in my guide book. In fact, I used my loupe (magnifying glass thingee) to look at it. I found that there is a small green dot on the Mute Swan map that is over northwest Washington state, near the border, and one purple dot almost right over Vancouver or Squamish. The green dot means rare occurances have been reported, and the purple dot means that they can be found year-round in that location. So maybe Mute Swans are known to be in the area after all. (The other interesting thing about the map is that aside from those two dots, the farthest west these birds have been reported is Missouri.) So I guess either you see Mute Swans here, or you travel quite a ways to see them.

Anyhow, after about half an hour or so, the swans in the present company swam a few tens of meters east, to where they were under the end of a restaurant-containing pier. There I caught this nice constrast of rusty pier support and long swan necks.

It was now about 5:30 in the evening, and I considered staying around to try to catch the sunset light on the swans, as my friend Tim had done, but I decided that would be too imitative, and got in my car and drove off to the Tsawassen ferry jetty instead.

On exiting my car on the jetty, I found this Greater Scaup paddling around in the water.

Nearby was this grebe; it's either a Clark's Grebe or a Western Grebe, but the photos I have are inconclusive on that. I lean towards Western, myself.

Well, two different types of grebes at the jetty...that was pretty cool.

But wait...there's more. Also out there was this Red-necked Grebe.

And that made a grebe hat trick for me.

As you can probably tell from the photos, the light was getting pretty low and pretty yellow. So I switched from birds to landscape. Here's a shot of the North Shore Mountains from the jetty.

And this is a shot to the west, including the Roberts Bank coal port. I like how the still water in the lagoon reflects the sky color, but the rough water behind it is blue.

This one is more tightly focussed on the port, with the foreground lagoon water yet a different color.

It was so neat to find this scene of peace and stillness beside the roaring highway of the ferry jetty. How many people went by without noticing?

Now feeling all still and relaxed,
Tom