On Sunday the 18th, the weather was nice, and I went down to Mud Bay in south Surrey to try to find a shorebird that I'd never seen before, an American Avocet. This particular bird has been a regular visitor to this area over the last few years, but I hadn't heard about it until my friend Carlo mentioned seeing it in the week before. Mud Bay is not one of my real regular haunts; I'd only been there a couple of times before.

The bird's favorite place is not in Mud Bay park proper, but rather on the other side of a rail trestle in the mouth of the Serpentine River, or The Serp (as Carlo calls it). I walked across the tracks and up onto a dyke that runs along the river bank. On the dyke, I was treated to a view of a few thousand ducks and shorebirds gathered in the direct sunlight. There were birds everywhere on the water and on the shore. I instantly thought "how am I going to find one shorebird that I've never seen before in the midst of this crowd?" Shorebirds, like sandpipers, dowitchers, and godwits, are notoriiously difficult birds to identify. Avocets were supposed to be fairly distinctive—a large white shorebird with black-and-white wings and an upturned bill—but even well-marked shorebirds have this nasty habit of hunkering down and tucking their bill under their wing, making identification difficult.

Anyhow, I resigned myself to my task of looking through all of these birds for my target, and I took another glance at the mob, whereupon one bird in the middle distance stood out like a sore thumb. It was a big whitish bird that was about duck-sized, but was clearly walking through the water rather than floating on it. It was also moving about three times as fast as the other birds out there, moving its bill and head around in a quick but rather shorebird-ish way. It was a shorebird on speed. It was the avocet.

I watched him through my binoculars for a while, and then set up my tripod and camera. He was at about the end of camera range, but I still got very clearly identifiable photos. In this first one, you can see the way his bill curls upward at the end.

I waited around for him to come closer so that I could get better shots, but he never did. Eventually he flew over to the other side of the trestle, where I was unable to relocate him.

While I waited for the avocet to come closer, I took a few shots of some of the other birds that were there, like this Green-winged Teal. The Green-winged Teal has a green speculum, or colored patch on the wings. Interestingly enough, that speculum turns blue in the right kind of lighting, as I captured in this photo. The lighting also turned this guy's head patch from green to blue-black.

And soon thereafter, a Bald Eagle passed almost right overhead, heading the other way. Baldies have about six fairly distinctive plumages, for juveniles, one- through four-year-olds, and adult birds. This one is, a three-year-old, but it appears to have had a slow molt, meaning that it didn't replace as many feathers in the last year as the average eagle does. This has left it with a ragged trailing edge to its wing, caused by the longer (older) feathers alongside the shorter (newer) ones.

I recently acquired a book with a lot of detail on raptor molting patterns, so I could go on into a lot more detail about eagle molting, but I'm sure you'd rather I just get on with the pictures rather than give a detailed ornithology lesson.

I crossed the rail tracks by going under the trestle, but as I said earlier, I wasn't able to relocate the Avocet once I did. I circumnavigatied a fence by crawling on some beach rocks and thereby made it back to the grounds of Mud Bay Park. In the bay there were only a few birds, mostly dabbling ducks and a few Greater Yellowlegs, like this fellow.

After this, I reached a place where I had to choose between heading back towards my car or heading away from it (I had been, roughly, circling it) and I headed back to the car, despite a good adult-Bald-Eagle-perched-in-a-tree opportunity the other direction. It was getting to be eagle-in-tree season, anyhow, and I'd already had a nice, close, eagle fly-by. Besides which, I wanted to go see some Snowy Owls, and the days are awful short this time of year.

Once in my car, I headed across Delta and Ladner to Brunswick Point, partly just to find Snowies in a location other than at the foot of 72nd Street. I walked along the path at Brunswick, and saw a few Northern Harriers out hunting over the foreshore. None of them came close enough for a good portrait, but they did present some nice silhouettes.

Some hunters on the foreshore behind me shot at something, and it seemed quite loud and near. It made me jump a little and it really spooked the owl. Whereas before he had been ignoring me, he now became quite wary and I wasn't able to advance any closer. There's no way I would've gotten as close as I was if the shot had occurred earlier.

So I contented myself with the viewpoint I had, and took a few more photos as the sun was really starting to go down. Here I caught him watching another bird fly by.

Eventually, the owl's attention turned to something further along the foreshore, and after peering in that direction for a while, he flew over to investigate. I took that opportunity to retreat from the icy mud I was on back to the main trail. I got a few more shots of him at his new perch on the foreshore, but the earlier shots were better.

He then flew off from this perch, to somewhere far on the foreshore where I lost sight of him. As the sun was almost gone now, and it was getting quite chilly, I headed back towards my car.

I encountered the owl once more, though. Or at least, I encountered a Snowy Owl; I think it was the same one, but I'm not certain. This owl was perched in the top of a tree by the path. This was interesting for me because I've always seen them on low perches (logs or rocks on the foreshore, mainly), but apparently up north they're known for perching on power poles and other high up places like this.

Anyhow, he presented an excellent opportunity for a very Vancouver photo: a snowy owl with (Grouse Mountain?) ski slopes in the background. I took this shot at around 4:30, which was after the sun went down. This meant that it was a moderately long exposure (1/6 of a second), so it's a good thing that owl wasn't moving much.

That ended a chilly, all-too-short, but otherwise very nice day that held my lifer American Avocet and some quality time with a Snowy Owl

Dreaming of long summer days,
Tom