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There had been some
recent reports of Snowy Owls around town, so on Sunday I decided
to go down to Boundary Bay, which was a Snowy hotspot. I had gotten
some photos of Snowies last year, but the weather forecast was
calling for fog in the morning, and I wanted to try to get some
shots of owls in the fog.
As I headed down 72nd
Street towards the bay, I stopped across from a turf farm there
and took a few photos. This one is of a few gulls on the turf
farm itself. At this point, the fog wasn't that thick, as you
can probably tell.
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| Both the
turf farm and the little trail across the road from it are good
birding locations, and I've been there many times. There's a ditch
between the road and the trail, and while I was walking along the
road I found a little section of the ditch with a sandbag wall that
attracted me. |
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| But I wasn't
there to bird the trail, so I got back in the car and headed the
rest of the way down to the dyke. As I started out along the dyke,
I took a few photos out over the foreshore. Here the fog was a lot
thicker, giving the whole place a little bit of an eerie feel. |
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| That stump
above looked like a good owl perch, but there weren't any owls on
it. I didn't have to worry, though, because about 100 meters further
along, there was another piece of driftwood sticking up near the
dyke...this one with a Snowy Owl on it. Soon after I started taking
photos of him, he leaned forward to clean his right claw. |
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This was a fairly dark
Snowy Owl, with lots of brown in his plumage.This meant he was
a first-year bird; the adults have much less brown on them.
I got a great shot
as he peered forward while bent over. He was quite alert—that's
as wide as I've ever seen their eyes go.
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| What follows
is the same photo, but without any parts cropped off. This approximates
what I was seeing through my binoculars. |
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| A little
later he flew a short ways down the foreshore, disappearing into
the fog. I headed in that direction, and after a while came upon
him again. After I observed and photographed him for awhile, he
flew yet again, this time landing very close to the dyke,
near where I had first spotted him. I got some more photos of him
there. |
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I was to the east of
the bird on the dyke, and some other birders had set up a scope
to the west. All of us got great views.
The Snowy Owls don't
seem to be wanting for food in these parts; one local veteran
birder went out to some of their perches and found remains from
ducks, shorebirds, and rodents. He even found what appeared to
be a hawk carcass. So these owls have been eating anything and
everything, it seems.
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Finally a jogger came
along. He went past me, and as he drew close to the owl, it took
flight. He ended up flying quite far out on the foreshore, near
the water. The fog had thinned a little and the other birders
and I could still see him, but just bared. All he was was a silhouette.
I had gotten about
200 photos of the bird, and I didn't feel up to looking for others,
so I decided to head on. I took a few more foggy landscapes first,
though. Here's the nicest of the bunch, a view of the foreshore
right in front of the 72nd Street parking lot..
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| As I drove
back down 72nd, I stopped once for photos when I saw this tractor
in a field. |
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Then I decided to head
north along the highway, without a real destination in mind. I
was headed north to escape the fog; it seems pretty common that
the area around Boundary Bay is socked in while further north
it's sunny.
Heading north from
Delta and Ladner meant getting on the highway, and the highway
goes near the airport, so I found myself heading back out to Iona,
where I had been the day before. My plan was to join anyone who
was at the inner ponds looking for the Swamp Sparrow, and also
to go to the outer ponds.
When I got there, no-one
was at the inner ponds, so I drove straight to the parking lot.
I decided that I would try to get better duck shots than I had
on Saturday, which meant being better concealed than I had been
on Saturday, so I grabbed some camouflage sheets out of my trunk
and headed over. I set my tripod up and draped my camera and my
head with camouflage, sitting in front of a bush so that it would
further mask my outline. The disguise seemed to pay off, as quite
soon ducks were coming a lot closer to me than they had the previous
day. The ducks out there that day included the following Greater
Scaup: two adult females in front, with a juvenile behind.
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| There were
also, like the day before, Ring-necked Ducks, like these two males
who steamed towards me for a ways. |
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| These are
the same two, after they took a left turn. |
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| As I was
following those two Ring-Necked, an American Coot popped up from
underwater behind them. The coot was holding something tasty in
his mouth, and soon swallowed it. Coots are plant-eaters, so it
wasn't a fish. |
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| My next
find was this fellow. Yesterday, I had seen three species in the
genus Aythya in this pond: Greater Scaup, Ring-necked Duck,
and Canvasback. Today there were no Canvasbacks out there, but this
fellow is a Lesser Scaup, another Aythya species. It's usually
quite hard to tell these ducks apart from Greater Scaup, but I was
lucky here: I got a good shot of this bird's bill, which shows that
it is much smaller than the bill of a Greater Scaup. |
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| After getting
that Lesser, I took some more Ringed-neck Duck photos. I was following
a pair of them, the front one male and the back one female, when
the female twisted her head all funny and looked at me. |
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| Well, I
must've had a pretty funny reaction to that, because she sure got
a good laugh out of it. |
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| Later I
was lining up for a photo of just her when she suddenly took off
and flew across the pond. This shot turned out blurry but I like
the implication of motion that it gives. |
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| I peered
out through the holes in my camouflage and saw that all of the ducks
had left the area. I soon found out why. |
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There was a Northern
River Otter out there. And it looked like he was holding a snack
of some sort; maybe it was a fish.
Soon I noticed that
there was more than one otter. Here one has just gone underwater
as the other approached.
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| If you've
never heard an otter, they have a whistly, sing-songy voice, and
sometimes chatter and grunt. As this one came towards me, I could
hear it making a whistling sort of song. It seemed to be singing
something like "All I want for Chrithmath ith my ..."
but I couldn't make out the rest. My hearing just isn't that good. |
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| Anyhow,
it turned out that there was a family of four or five of them out
there. |
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| They swam
this way and that across the pond, sometimes in a big group and
sometimes just one or two of them. But they always seemed to be
interacting with one another. For instance, here, the one on the
right crawled up on the log to look around, and the middle one swam
back to get a little bit of a vantage point itself. The left one
kept going, but was soon rejoined by the other two. |
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| And here,
two that had swam over closer to me went zooming back to meet up
with another. |
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After the otters swam
to where I couldn't see them, I called it a day. Seeing them had
been delightful, and a fitting end to a way-too-short (but quite
photogenic) December day.
Feeling like Christmas
came early,
Tom
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