On the 28th and 29th of November, my department at work had a retreat on Bowen Island. The retreat was due to start at 10:30, but I decided to try to make the 8:00 ferry and try to get some photography in before the retreat started. As I was driving to the ferry, I was treated to an absolutely gorgeous sunrise with pink and purple sky over the very blue-and-green North Shore mountains. The day was quite crisp and the air was clear. I thought several times about stopping to take photos, but then I'd miss the ferry.

But things did not go as planned, anyhow. Almost at the ferry terminal, there was a 25-minute backup on the highway, caused by a crash where a red pickup truck had somehow gotten up high enough to straddle the concrete barrier in the middle of the highway, with two wheels in the eastbound fast lane and two wheels in the westbound. It was an interesting sight, but with morning rush hour it was too dangerous to try to stop and get photos.

I finally made it to the terminal around 8:35, and met up with several other folks from work in a little waiting lounge near the berth. Eventually, our ship came in and we boarded. Despite extreme chill (I was well-prepared), I stayed on the open car deck for the passage, finally getting some photos. Here's one of the first, a shot of another ferry (the Queen of Coquitlam) coming in, just as we were about to pull out. This ferry was much bigger than the one we were on.

It turned out that there wasn't much interesting out there on the water that morning. I didn't get any other noteworthy subjects until we had arrived on Bowen, sometime near 9:30. As I only had an hour before the retreat started, I drove to the retreat location (a lodge on Deep Bay) and walked down to the shoreline there.

The day was pretty grey and I knew I wasn't going to get very many good photos. I would have to use long exposure times, which makes birds all blurry. It was a bit disappointing, but such is life sometimes...I went looking for birds, anyway.

My next subject wasn't a bird, though; it was a ship. Across the bay, there was a two-master, and I started with shots of her.

There were a couple of rock jetties near where I was, and they looked like very good oystercatcher habitat. Sure enough, I soon heard and then saw a Black Oystercatcher on one of them. I looked around for more (they are often in small groups) but didn't find any. Here's one of my dark, blurry shots, which I liked because it shows the oystercatcher coming in for a landing. It's quite the dramatic moment.

I tried some more shots of the oystercatcher but he was too far away. I was also on a floating part of the pier, made a bit unstable by the walking of my colleagues who had followed me down to the water. It's not like that disturbed me at all, as it wasn't a day for good photos, anyway.

I pointed out the different ducks to them, and then we went over to the seaward jetty and walked out it a ways. There we found the spine of some fish who had been somebody's dinner last night. It had to have been a relatively big somebody, though, because this bone was between a third and a half of a meter long.

His pale pink legs were mostly hidden behind the rock, there.

It was about quarter after 10 when I saw some Canada Geese on the far side of the bay. Canada Geese are quite common, and I didn't give them much thought. That is, I didn't give them much thought until I saw that one of them just looked wrong. Then I gave them a lot of thought, and kept my binoculars glued to my eyes (they're slightly better at magnifying than my camera viewfinder) trying to make out what the difference was. The odd goose had a very light-colored neck. It made me think of my leucistic friend Lulu, but this goose had some black on the face where Lulu didn't, and the light on the neck was splotchy. That's about all I could tell, as the goose was at quite a distance. I took a few shots, and here's the best I could do with one of them. The odd goose is in the center of the photo.

After this, it was back to the lodge building for the retreat. A retreat is basically a very long meeting, and I wasn't really looking forward to that much. The afternoon session, which was about the part of the department that I am responsible for, turned out moderately okay, and I actually was paying careful attention to what was being said.

That's why it took me a little by surprise when the session ended and someone said that there were some geese in the yard. I hadn't even noticed.

Well, I turn around to look out the window, and right nearby there it was—a Canada Goose with white on some of the neck and head where black should be. She had crept up on me when I wasn't expecting it. I grabbed my camera and hurried outside and started taking photos. Here's how the goose looked close up. It wasn't at all like Lulu.

There's a guy I know (well, I've never met him, I just "know" him online) who really knows his geese. After getting back from the retreat, I asked about what causes this white mottling, and this guy gave me a very nice explanation. (Okay, you're probably tired of me calling him "this guy", so I should tell you his name. His name is—wait for it—Guy.) So Guy (the guy) said that this is a very common thing in our resident-type Canada Geese in coastal British Columbia.

So now, before proceeding, I should probably explain that we recognize two sorts of Canada Geese populations here. There are the resident-type geese, which hang out here all year 'round. Then there are the nonresident-type geese, which migrate through the province. Presumably, like other nonresident types, these geese must check with Canada Immigration when they land, unless they're just staying at the airport inbetween flights.

Anyhow, Guy said that the aberration is called partial albinism; this is a genetic disorder. It turns out that the resident-type Canada Geese that we have here were introduced; they're not native to the area. It's suspected that the initial number of birds introduced was fairly small, and that one (or more) of them had partial albinism, so in all of our resident geese it shows up quite freqeuently. Guy had recently completed a census of resident geese in his area, and said that most of the flocks that he saw during the census had at least one goose with this aberration.

Okay, let's go back to Bowen Island for a second here...I wasn't finished with the flock of geese on the lawn. It turned out that another goose in that flock caught my eye. It was the following fellow.

This was not a Canada Goose. Two years ago, he was a Canada Goose. But not any more. This goose is now a Cackling Goose.

In the world of birds, or more properly, in the world of humans thinking about birds, someone has to decide just exactly what constitutes a species and what constitutes a subspecies. For a while, the Canada Goose had eleven subspecies; each of these subspecies has its favorite breeding grounds and migration patterns. Each of them also has slightly different average physical characteristics. This is typical of subspecies of any bird.

But a year or so ago, the biological powers-that-be decided, on the basis of scientific research (they don't just do this for our amusement, sadly), that four of the subspecies of Canada Goose really should be grouped in a species separate from the other seven. So they created a species with the common name Cackling Goose (and the latin Branta hutchinsii). The subspecies that now compose Cackling Geese were on average smaller than the others, having shorter necks and bills, and they breed and nest in high arctic tundra (basically, around the north coast of the continent) rather than inland or in more southerly locales (where Canada Geese nest).

I knew about this "species split," and roughly what a Cackling Goose was supposed to look like. So, when I spotted that goose which was slightly smaller than a regular Canada Goose, with a short neck and a short bill, I was pretty sure I had a cackler. Telling Cackling from Canada is often a tricky business, though, and bird-identification authorities list it as one of the more difficult field identification problems. However, Guy the goose guy agreed with me, and thinks that this is an individual of the subspecies taverneri (Taverner's Cackling Goose), which is the subspecies about which the least is known. So there I was at a departmental retreat, standing on the frontier of ornithology. It was pretty exciting, even though the frontier of ornithology looked a lot like the line between the cement of the patio and the grass of the lawn.

I tried to convey that excitement to the folks back inside, but most of them just looked at me strangely, wondering why I had dashed outside in the bitter cold without my coat to take photos of what to them seemed to be very common geese. A few seemed to understand, though, or maybe they were just humoring me.

Anyhow, here's another shot of my subject; you can see how his neck isn't anywhere near long enough for him to graze on the ground without leaning forward substantially. You might want to compare that to the neck on the Canada Goose three photos ago.

This bird was the first Cackling Goose that I'd ever identified, so my life list grew by one that day.

And I had thought that the retreat would be boring...

Taking a good gander,
Tom