| The 15th
of November was a sunny but cold Monday. After working for most
of the day, I couldn't stand it any more and decided to go down
to Boundary Bay to look for the pair of Gyrfalcons that people had
been seeing down there during the past week. I got to the dyke by
the bay at 72nd street around four o'clock, and started walking
east. On the land side of the dyke, there were are some fields and
farms, and I took a few landscapes. |
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| On the water
side of the dyke, I spotted a few raptors cavorting. I was hopeful
it was the Gyrfalcons but it was a pair of Northern Harriers instead. |
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| At this
time of year, even four o'clock is getting late, and sundown was
nearing. Here I caught one of the harriers closer to the ground,
with the orange sunset lighting up his already orangish underside.
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I hurried along, thinking
that in the dying light I probably wasn't going to find the Gyrfalcons,
and if I did, I wouldn't be able to get decent photographs. After
a few minutes' walk, I looked up at the utility poles by the dyke--the
falcons had frequently been seen on these poles.
On the two poles closest
to me, I saw some things that I thought were some sort of attachment
to the poles. A second check through my binoculars told a different
story–both "attachments" were actually falcons!
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| There had
been two Gyrfalcons reported, one dark-plumaged, and one gray-plumaged.
I thought that these must be the birds I was seeing. So I was a
little surprised when the first one turned out to be a Peregrine
Falcon, not a Gyrfalcon. |
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| The sunset
is what is making him that orange. I walked towards the pole, but
he didn't really like that, and took off. I got a few photos of
him in flight. |
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He went to say hi to
the falcon on the other pole, almost landing on him. The perched
falcon stood his ground, and so the flying one went around and
settled one pole west of where I was. I continued east to check
out the other falcon.
This falcon was a Gyrfalcon,
and a lifer for me. He was even more shy than the Peregrine, and
so I wasn't able to get as close. Here you can see the Gyrfalcon's
more angular pose.
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The Gyrfalcon is a
fair bit bigger than the Peregrine, although you might not be
able to tell very well from these photos. Gyrfalcons are the biggest
falcons that we get out here, and Peregrines the next-biggest.
We also occasionally get Prairie Falcons, which are the same size
as the Peregrines.
Here's a couple of
close-ups on the big guy.
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This is the gray-phase
Gyrfalcon; I didn't see the dark-phase one.
Soon he tired of the
attention that I was paying him, and he took off.
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He headed back inland
a ways, and I couldn't follow, so I headed back west towards my
car. When I passed the pole with the Peregrine, I took a few more
photos.
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When I did that, I
ended up facing back eastward so as to get the most light on the
bird. I noticed that the sunset was turning the eastern sky an
interesting mix of dark blue and light pink, and decided to see
how much of it I could capture. Here I get the one pink sunlit
cloud on top, over the Alex Fraser Bridge.
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| From the
same spot, this was the view southwards towards White Rock and Crescent
Beach. |
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And here is the view
back down the road on the dyke.
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For my final landscape,
I shortened the zoom lens as much as I could to get a wider view
across the fields and farms.
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I took just a few more
photos as the light fled the sky. Continuing westward, I heard
a coyote howl behind me. And then I heard another. And another,
and then some others. There were a bunch of coyotes out there.
I thought that maybe they were trailing me (I've had a coyote
or two trailing me across the bay before), and was happy that
I'm not anywhere near the size of your average coyote meal. It
was very dark by the time I got back to the car. There were no
street lights and so only light was from the moon, which I stopped
to photograph after pulling my tripod out of the trunk. Maybe
this is what the coyotes were howling at.
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It was quite chilly
out, so I didn't spend too long with the moon before I jumped
in the car to get warm and head home.
Your falcon
tracker,
Tom
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