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Thursday is the day
that I normally go to my Burnaby office, and Thursday the 21st
of April I did just that. On my way out to the car after work,
I stopped and talked with some students, one of whom had green
hair and several piercings. An odd fad, that.
On the way home, I
dropped by Piper Spit on Burnaby Lake. Now, I can deal with all
the funny colors and body piercings on young folks, but I really
think it's gone too far when the wildlife starts getting pierced.
Even if it is just an ear, like on this Douglas's Squirrel
that greeted me at the base of the spit. (And I'm not even
going to show you the tattoo on his hindquarters.)
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And generally I like
Douglas's Squirrels; they're such cute little fellows. *sigh*
From the squirrel,
I looked out towards the spit and saw a family of Canada Geese
coming my way. The goslings were pretty small, so they must be
relatively freshly hatched. It's amazing how quickly they grow.
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| When
you have a camera, the sun glistening on gosling down is a hard
thing to pass up. |
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| Further
along, I sat down on a bench by the water and took a few photos
of the ducks that were around. Here's a colorful male Green-winged
Teal. |
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| And on a
tree limb over the water were a pair of male Wood Ducks. I've seen
Wood Ducks on this limb several times before; they seem to like
to rest while perched in trees, rather than while floating (like
most other ducks). Both of these guys are resting, with their bills
tucked under; the guy on the left even has his eyes closed. |
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| A female
Greater Scaup also paddled up. |
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| I didn't
see any other goodies floating around, so I turned my attention
to the gound near my feet, and found this female Brewer's Blackbird
confidently strutting along. |
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| She just
kept right on struttin', though, headed away from me. I got up and
went out a little further along the spit, but stopped when I noticed
a pair of goslings who were really tuckered out. I took several
shots of them before continuing on; they were just too cute. |
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Once I was out on the
boardwalk and reached some of the floating bits, I sat down and
started taking photos of some of the birds flying around. I shot
a few ducks, and then I turned my attention to the swallows.
When swallows are in
town, there are always plenty of them at the spit. Today it was
mainly Tree Swallows. Usually swallows fly very fast and acrobatically,
and when I try to get photos of them flying I get a whole lot
of blurry and missed shots. But on this day, something different
happened and I got some okay flight shots. Better than that, I
caught two Tree Swallows chasing each other around the sky.
I don't know if this
chasing behaviour is agression, play, courtship, or something
else. However, it sure looks like the lower one is biting the
upper one in this photo.
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I managed to keep the
swallows in frame and relatively focussed for a sequence of several
shots. Here we have the two of them executing a very tight turn.
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| I'm pretty
sure that there was more than one reversal of who was chasing whom... |
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| ...such
as in this part of the sequence, where the top bird is being chased |
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| and then
becomes one doing the chasing. |
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| It's a great
lot of fun to watch swallows chase each other, because they push
their flying a lot harder in these encounters. They go faster and
turn sharper than they typically do when flying around hunting bugs. |
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| Here's one
final shot from the sequence. Often, these chases can last several
minutes, and I think I've seen some that were going on for fifteen
or twenty minutes or more. (But swallows are almost impossible to
tell apart, so it could be that I witnessed several different pairs
chasing one another in a span of twenty minutes and thought that
it was one pair. I'm going to have to be more careful and keep my
eyes glued to a single pair sometime to see.) |
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I've checked all of
my books, and none of them even mention this chasing behaviour
of swallows. I'm going to have to do a little research to figure
out what it is all about. In the meantime, though, I will still
enjoy their flying prowess.
While I was sitting,
a male Red-winged Blackbird flew over to perch on a post that
was maybe a meter from me. He had flown right towards me, which
gave a nice view of the red on the wings, but the focus on my
camera wasn't quick enough to get any clear flight shots. I had
to make do with perched shots.
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| That gentleman
had a female friend hanging out on a nearby plant. |
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| After
watching the blackbirds a while, I walked back in from the boardwalk.
I walked the trail near the spit briefly, but in about fifteen minutes
of walking, the only decent bird I found was the Brown Creeper shown
below, so I cut my walk a little short and headed back. |
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| I thought
that would be it for the day, but as I was leaving the parking lot,
I had to stop at the train tracks because a train coming was by.
I jumped out of my car and took a few shots into the sun as the
train, an Amtrak passenger train, went by. I liked the really-hot-day
feel and the lens flare in this one. |
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Lens flare (those round
colored spots) are caused by sunlight bouncing off of parts of
the lens. Different lenses will give different flare patterns.
Most of the time, I keep a lens hood on my lens, which
is a cylindrical extension of the barrel whose only purpose is
to shade the front of the lens from the sun (thus preventing lens
flare). In this shot, I was pointing the lens almost directly
towards the sun (and the reflection of the sun off of the top
of the engine), so the hood wasn't able to block it. That was
fine by me, because it gave a nice effect.
Keeping my hindquarters
far away from the tattoo parlours,
Tom
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