| The eighth
of November was a Monday and I had no obligations in the morning
at work. So I decided to extend my weekend a little and take a few
photos. I started by talking with the caretaker at my condo, who
told me of a bird's nest that he had found on one edge of the property.
He brought me over to see it, and I took a few photos. |
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After asking around,
I found out that this is a Bushtit nest. I hadn't seen any bushtits
near the nest, but I'm going to occassionally go back to visit
it every now and then to see if some show up.Maybe I just didn't
see the occupants while I was there, or maybe it was vacant and
somebody will move in later.
From sunny New Westminster,
I got in my car and drove south to South Delta in the Boundary
Bay area. I hit some fairly dense fog as I drove, and South Delta
was covered in it. I decided to spend some time taking rural landscapes
in the fog. Here's a farm field with a couple of spools of irrigation
line.
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| The fog's
density made it quite dark outside. The above photo looks a little
lighter than it was in real life, and the one below makes it look
a little darker. Here I found a tractor in wet plowed field next
to a big pile of cement pipe. |
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| And here's
a tanker of some sort. I hope it's water and not liquid fertilizer. |
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| At one foggy
farm, I even found a bird to photograph...a House Sparrow. |
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| And then
there was this wall, which is all that remains standing of what
probably used to be a barn. |
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I was happy with the
moodiness that I caught in these photos.
But eventually I tired
of the relatively birdless fog, and I headed westward past Ladner
to Reifel. There I found their flock of Snow Geese hanging out
in a field near the picnic area.
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| I was using
my zoom telephoto lens, not my wide-angle one. So I could zoom in
on some of the nearby geese in the flock. Here's an adult. |
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And this one, with
the darker plumage, is a juvenile.
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Here I caught a few
adults and a few juvies resting out on the water.
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I really had no plans
or ambitions at Reifel, so I started wandering through and eventually
decided to go see if the Mountain Chickadees were still around.
It turns out that there was at least one of them there; here he
is on the fence.
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In the wild, Mountain
Chickadees are quite timid and it would be difficult to get a
photo like the one above. However, at Reifel, they seem to have
become accustomed to the food handouts and have become quite tame.
You'd almost never get a Mountain Chickadee doing the following
in the wild.
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| That's a
sunflower seed in its mouth. For most chickadees, sunflower seeds
are the good stuff, and they'll pick through and ignore other birdseed
to get to the sunflower seeds. Of course, for some spoiled
chickadees, not just any sunflower seed will do. |
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On a serious note,
if ever a bird lands in your hand like this, do not try to catch
it. The last time this bird was seen, it had a broken leg, almost
certainly from someone trying to grab it. That leaves me with
a real bad feeling in the pit of my stomach...please be careful
and considerate, folks.
Anyhow, my extended
weekend was fast coming to a close and I had to scurry off to
work, so my photos of the day end here.
Prowling in the fog,
Tom
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