I went further in to the park, and encountered Grant and Marcia, my hosts from the day before in Squamish. They were out looking for Swamp and American Tree Sparrows with some friends. I wasn't able to relocate the American Tree for them, sadly.

G and M told me a couple of interesting things. First, there is a Great Horned Owl resident at Brunswick Point. They had their scope set up on him, but he just appeared as a dark oval. The second thing they told me was that there was another nearby park with a pair of resident Great Horned Owls--Beach Grove Park in Tsawassen. They gave me directions there and said that they often end each of their Vancouver-area birding days with a visit to Beach Grove. They invited me to show up there later in the day.

Well, they headed out of the park as I headed further in. Like last time in this park, I sat near some bushes on the foreshore side of the path to wait for Swamp Sparrows.

While waiting and hoping, I was visited by the usual Golden-crowned Sparrows.

But alas, I found no Swamp Sparrow that day. I spend some time at a few different places near the foreshore, but with no luck.

I headed back towards the entrance and took a little detour to see if I could get a closer shot at the Great Horned Owl than was possible from the main path. I ended up in a mini-clearing consisting of one apple tree surrounded by a lot of berry brambles. I was pretty tired at this point, having lugged my equipment around for most of the weekend. So I sat under the apple tree, clearing a few apples from the ground so I wouldn't sit on them. I kept my camera at the ready and got a few more pictures of common sparrows.

There was a plentiful supply of fallen apples around me. They were starting to decay and emitting a strong, sickly-sweet apple scent into the air. No birds seemed attracted to the apples, but there were a few flies around. I amused myself for a little while taking photos of one of them. I'm not so good with flies, but I think this is an ordinary House Fly (Musca domestica)—he looks right and he's eating the right kind of stuff. I know of a few similar-looking flies, but they tend to be meat-eaters, not plant-eaters.

After recrossing the stream and re-emerging onto the main trail, I was treated to some nice views of Mount Baker, and I took a few photos of it above the nearby cornfields. Here's two of them.

It was now a little after 1:00 and I hadn't eaten, so I headed over to Tsawassen for a nice sit-down lunch where I could rest and warm up. I chose restaurants poorly and didn't really enjoy the lunch, but I stayed for a while because the seats were fairly comfortable and my coffee kept getting refilled. Around 3:30 I headed back out, over to the park that Grant and Marcia had told me about: Beach Grove Park. This park is near the shore on the Boundary Bay side of Tsawassen. Public access to the dyke which I have walked so many times around Boundary Bay seems to start right near this park. The park proper seems a pretty small place; it's a grass-with-trees-take-your-kids-and-dog-to-the-park kind of park. However, there's some private land between it and the dyke that is more densely wooded and is used as a de facto extension of the park.

I wandered around the grassy part for a while. I was out in a part with no canopy when a Great Blue Heron flew over at a pretty low altitude. I caught a few shots of him as he went by.

Lacking other avian subjects, I took a few shots of the mountains to the north. Here there is a cloud layer rolling in, and most of the bottom third of the photo is covered in cloud...Although it's fairly indistinct, it really made the foreground stand out from the back.

I was looking around to see if I could find the Great Horned Owls, but it was getting dark and I had little photographic time left. I took a few shots of some interesting tree branches that were making nice silhouettes. Here's one of them. Originally, this was a color photo, and I converted it to black-and-white and then applied the green color in Photoshop. The original background was a more boring blue-grey.

It got too dark for photography so I put my camera in the car, but since my eyes were still functional, I decided to spend some more time looking for the owls. I did eventually find them, in the private piece of land. They hooted a little and one of them swooped from one tree to another, passing directly over me in the process.

I was vaguely heading back towards my car when Grant and Marcia showed up. I hung around with them a while, and we were treated to both of the Great Horneds flying around the trees around us as the light faded. (Marcia seems to do a good mouse squeal imitation, which gets the owls all interested.) They also spotted a Barn Owl that had just emerged from a nest box and I got a vague dim look at him, too.

The light had really all fled, so we parted ways and I started driving back home. As I got out on one of the major roads, though, the moon was coming up, so I stopped and hauled out my tripod and took pictures of the moonrise over the mountains. Here's my favorite shot; I promise you that round thing is the moon, not the sun.

Here's a shot I got when it was a little further up. It still looks like it's made of cheddar, but with less exposure it's more distinctively lunar.

It was pretty cold outside when I was taking these photos, and I was glad to be operating the camera with my remote shutter release. The remote has a big button that I can press while wearing thick gloves, whereas the camera itself has delicate controls that require more dexterity than those thick gloves afford.

I've since tried several glove systems and settled on a thin pair of Thinsulate gloves and some fingerless ragg wool gloves to wear over them. My fingertips still get a little cold but the rest of my hand is kept pretty warm.

Always treating my digits right,
Tom