Photojournal - 13 November 2005

Ooey


On Sunday the 13th I headed southwards with two destinations in mind: the Tsawassen ferry jetty and Blackie Spit. Someone had reported a Horned Lark on the jetty, and I wanted to see if I could get some more time in with the Bar-tailed Godwit out at the spit.

My first stop was the jetty, were I drove along the gravel road beside the ferry terminal road. I went out to the end, which was where the lark had been seen, but twenty to thirty minutes of searching yielded no lark, no shorebirds, and pretty much nothing on the jetty itself. Just off the jetty, there were a few ducks, and a lone Snow Goose. It's unusual for me to see just one of these beauties; generally I see 'em in flocks of thousands (or in flights of from eight to two hundred or so headed between flocks of thousands). So I took a few photos of it just floating there.

 

The orange on the front of its face comes from rootin' around in the soil; it's not the color of its plumage.

Lacking the lark, I headed on to Blackie Spit. I checked at the base of the spit, where I had found the Bar-tailed Godwit the time before. It wasn't there. I went a little further out the spit, and although I didn't find the Bar-tailed, I did find a Black-bellied Plover. Looking at him, though, you'd never guess that he's called Black-bellied.

 

If you wait a few months, though, his belly will turn black. I thought about doing that, but decided instead to carry on and see what else was out on the spit.

Just a few steps away, I found an interesting duck. It was a drake Eurasian Wigeon. I thought, "Wow! Ooey!"

 

The birders amongst you may understand my thought, but I should explain for the rest of you. I've written about the four-letter codes that birders use before; these are standard codes used by the Bird Banding Laboratory to record bandings and sightings. Mostly, they are abbreviations of the common names of birds. For birds with two words in their common name, the code is most often the first two letters of each word. So, the code for American Wigeon is AMWI, and the code for Eurasian Wigeon is EUWI.

So really, I didn't think "Wow! Ooey!" but rather "Wow! EUWI!" and I decided to spell it more like I think of it. And I think of EUWI as rhyming with "gooey."

To add to my (and your) mental confusion, I have a colleague named Uwe, which is a fine German male name. So I'm tempted to call this duck Uwe, or maybe "Uwe the ooey EUWI". But I'm not sure if that would be disrespectful to my colleague. To me, this is a pretty distinguished duck, and it would be an honor to have him named after me, but I don't know if Uwe would see it that way.

Regardless of his name, he's an uncommon but not completely rare character around here. We get loads of American Wigeon, and in the American Wigeon flocks there are sometimes one or two of the Eurasians mixed in. Americans look similar, but have a lot of green and light brown on their head where the Eurasian is rufous. Both have a buffy crown stripe. There are a few Americans on the left two photos down.

Here's another shot of my wigeon, this time holding his headfeathers in a funny way, making the back of his head seem dented.

 

That was pretty cool, and I was happy at this point, because that's the closest I've ever gotten to an EUWI, and I knew I'd have clearly recognizable photos. So I carried on, and eventually came across some godwits.

Unfortunately, they were the Marbled Godwits, and the Bar-tailed Godwit wasn't with them. They were resting, and had their bills tucked in under the wing. In this posture, they can easily be mistaken for a female duck. Here's a photo with two Marbled Godwits, one in the middle and the other rear right.

 
I waited around a while, and a small flock of Long-billed Dowitchers flew in. Then something alerted the birds, and I got a shot with everyone looking around.  

The dark overcast sky was making it difficult to get decent photos, so with no Bar-tailed to be found, I decided to call it a day.

With less hooey than usual,
Tom

 

 

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