The 20th of March was a Sunday, and it was a grey, drizzly, miserable day. The day before I had seen six lifers in various places in Delta, but I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to get good photos of one of them: the Boreal Owl. I decided to head back to Reifel to see if I might be able to do better this day.

As I was driving down the road on Westham Island towards the refuge, I found a flock of Snow Geese in a field beside the road. I stopped my car to take some photos.

I've been doing some reading about Snow Geese. They have to almost constantly eat, because their food isn't that nutritious. In a feeding flock like this, some birds, particularly around the edges, will be "sentinels." Sentinels watch for danger while the other birds feed.

Here are a few close-ups on some of the flock.

The white birds are adults, and the greyish ones are juveniles. The orange color on their face isn't a plumage color, and when they leave the arctic (where they breed), their faces are white. The orange is a stain they get from the mud around these parts, a consequence of their sticking their face down in that mud most of the day while eating.

Snow geese travel in families, and the families stay quite close together. So it's quite likely that the three in the previous photo are a parent with two of its children.

Here's a shot of a juvenile.

As I said, it was a pretty dark, grey day.

I headed on to Reifel, and talked with John (the manager) on arrival. He had relocated both the Boreal and the Northern Saw-whet owls, and told me their location. Unfortunately, the Boreal was in an even worse position than the day before, and I wasn't able to get any photos of it. However, the saw-whet was sort-of visible, and I did get some photos of that bird. They weren't great, though.

Then John told me that there was another much more accessible Northern Saw-whet further in the refuge. I packed my gear into a bag to help keep the rain off of it, and went off in search of this owl. He was easy to find because there was another photographer there taking photos of him. (It's amazing how owls attract photographers.)

Anyhow, this owl wasn't in much better light, and the other photog was using his flash. I'm a little hesitant to use flash on an owl, but this was during the day and the owl was just sitting there. In other words, it wasn't going to blind him and/or he wasn't going to fly into something if he was blinded. (In general, camera flash is too quick for most bird pupils to respond to...but owls may be an exception to that.) So when I got to photographing the bird, I did end up taking some flash photos. Here's the best non-flash photo I got of the little owl.

Saw-whets will stay perched in the same spot for most if not all of a day. When I left, he was still perched there, and seemed none the worse for having had the flash directed at him.

Anyhow, I think small owls are pretty cute. Savage, but cute.

The rain was enough to discourage me from any further explorations of Reifel, and I went back to my car and headed home. I was again disappointed in not getting good photos of the Boreal Owl. So on the way home, I was scheming about ways of going out to Reifel the next day instead of going to work. But just as I got home, my train of thought was derailed by something.

I later learned that the derailment had happened the day before, and that there was a lot of cleanup action then that I had missed.

The derailment happened right where the line that comes across the Queensborough Rail Bridge joins the rail yard. Most of the asian import cars for western Canada come across that bridge, and this could've held them up, so it might have been a pretty costly derailment. Then again, maybe it happened during a slow time.

Anyhow, the rail folk (Canada Pacific Rail) didn't seem particularly hard-pressed to work in the evening, and in fact they appeared o be wrapping up their operations for the day. They had a crane there, and were locking up the hook on the front of it.

That crane looks to be a hi-rail Pettibone 260 RRC, which has a 130-ton lifiting capacity. When a crane has that many lengths of cable between pulleys, you know its heavy-duty.

I wandered on back down the street and took a few photos of the Murano, which is the development that they're constructing on the lot between my place and the road. It's actually a couple of buildings, in different states of construction. Here's the part farthest from my place, with the concrete still exposed. I opted for a darker version of this photo, which seemed to suit the grey-day and concrete theme.

After that, I was done for the day...although I was still trying to figure out a way to get back to that Boreal Owl.

Toot toot,
Tom