Photojournal
- 28 November
2005
Standing at the frontier
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.
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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.
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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.
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I walked
out the pier that the lodge maintains, and from the end of it, I
was able to spot several ducks: a Red-breasted Merganser, a couple
of pairs of Bufflehead, some Barrow's Goldeneyes, and this fellow,
a Common Goldeneye. |
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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.
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I headed
back to the other jetty, which is where the oystercatcher had flown
to. I tried to get close to the bird by walking out the jetty, but
he spooked pretty quickly. Here's one of the closest shots I was
able to get. (I'm about half the distance to the bird here that
I was in the landing shot above; I just haven't cropped the photo
as tightly as I did that one.) |
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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.
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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 wasa 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.
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As you can
see, this goose has splotchy white on the black "sock"
of the neck. The white is very white, much whiter than the
white on the bird's cheeks. |
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Here's
a close-up of that last shot, where you can see how the black and
white is distributed between the feathers. |
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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 iswait for itGuy.) 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.
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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.
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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
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