The 24th of October was a Sunday, and that day I went down to 72nd Street by Boundary Bay to see if I could find the Ash-throated Flycatcher that had been reported there. As I was crossing the railroad tracks on 72nd, I spotted Ilya and Jeff, two birders I know, surveying the gulls. I joined them, and we scanned the gulls for a while. Well, to be honest, what really happened is that Jeff and Ilya scanned the gulls, and I watched them. My binoculars just didn't have the power to compete with the (tele)scopes that they were using.

Earlier that day, someone had reported seeing an Iceland Gull in the flock we were looking at. We didn't find it, so we went down to the hedgerow, looking for Bohemian Waxwings, another bird reported from the area. We didn't find them. Some other birders arrived, and reported that they had seen the Iceland Gull in the crowd of gulls we had been looking at. So we walked back to the tracks and Ilya managed to pull the Iceland Gull out of the flock for us. It probably wasn't a genetically-pure Iceland; more likely it was some Thayers-Iceland hybrid. Anyway, it was too far for a good photo, so I didn't even try.

We had been joined by a couple from Squamish, Grant and Marcia, whom I had met before out on the tip of the Iona jetty. We all headed back to the hedgerow and went looking for the Ash-throated Flycatcher. On our way, we came across the partial skeleton of a bird that had recently been somebody's meal. It was a fresh skeleton, even though it was picked pretty clean. (I came back a few days later and the bones were dirtier and all strewn about.)

One of our troupe noticed a funnel forming between cloud layers nearby. This is unusual for this area, but it didn't form a tornado or amount to much of anything, really.

The weather wasn't anywhere near as bad as it looks in that photo, though. I think it drizzled on us a little, but that was it.

We did eventually locate the Ash-throated Flycatcher. I got a few shots of him then, but he was always backlit. I hadn't wanted to go to the sunward side of him while everyone was watching, as the path passed close to his perch and I didn't want him to fly away. After the other folks left, I started searching from the south, and managed to relocate him a few times, both from the road side and the hedge side, but I never caught a good photo of him in decent light.

But here's the best I was able to do. In this one, I caught some of his red wing color. Check out the little hairs around the base of his bill--those are called rictal bristles. They help the bird catch insects in midair.

I went on to the dyke by the bay for a little bit afterwards, but there wasn't much going on so I called it a day.

Being awful short,
Tom the intrepid flycatcher hunter.