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My plan for Christmas
was to go and visit with my friends the Snowy Owls down at Boundary
Bay, and then head to a human friend's home for a nice dinner.
Christmas turned out to be relatively cloudy, but there was still
plenty of light and after some gift-unwrapping and phone calls
I got in my car and headed south.
Soon I had turned off
onto 112th Street and found a field with a few dozen Trumpeter
Swans in it. The white swans contrasted nicely with the brown
earth, and I stopped to watch and take a few photos.
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I hadn't been expecting
the swans, so they were a lovely surprise.
I started the car back
up and turned onto Hornby Drive, which parallels the Boundary
Bay dyke. As I drove past 104th, I noticed a pair of German Shepherds
that had gotten loose and were running around on the side of the
road. As I came upon the big greenhouse, I found a Great Blue
Heron perched atop one of the gables.
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I took my time with
the heron, taking a lot of photos.When I was ready to get moving
again, the shepherds had passed me by and were frolicking in a
ditch a little ways in front of me.
There were two of the
dogs, and they had quite different personalities. The first was
a playful, bouncy, brown fellow, who was always running around.
This shot was taken as he was running over to check me out; and
I feel it does a good job of capturing his energy.
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After that shot, he
came over and put his paws up on my car's windowsill to say hi
and give me a sniff. I touched one of his paws in greeting, and
then he nodded and went bouncing back over to his pal.
His pal was a much
more solid and serious dog, although he was clearly playing around,
too. He was quite wet from having been down in the ditch, which
obviously had a fair amount of water in it.
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| The dogs
went running back towards 104th and with a laugh at their antics,
I pressed onwards. My next stop was near 96th, where I found a Bald
Eagle standing in a field. |
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I only took a few shots
of him, as eagles are all around nowadays. I headed down to 72nd
Street, where I turned towards the bay. Partway down, I stopped
to observe a chicken party.
Now, I drive down this
road quite often, and I've never seen this quantity of chickens
out and about in this yard (or any other yard) before. These birds
were obviously aware that it was Christmas, one of the two days
in the year when they can come out and celebrate. It's good to
be a chicken on Christmas.
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| This lady
concurs, and she sure wasn't afraid to strut her stuff. |
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Of course, the flip
side of Christmas for the birds is that it's bad to be a turkey
on Christmas. And I'll note that I didn't see any turkeys running
out in the open on the whole day. I bet they were all in their
best hiding places.
Once I got to the end
of 72nd, I parked and headed to the dyke. As soon as I was up
on the dyke, I noticed a few sparrows on the ground and in the
bushes to my right. They were White-crowned Sparrows.
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| That guy
above with the dirt all over his face is a juvenile, and the slightly-more-kempt
one below is an adult. |
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I headed left and soon
spotted a Snowy Owl out on the salt marsh. I decided to try to
get a little closer to him, and went out onto the logs that litter
the foreshore. As I was walking around on them, I had to watch
where I was stepping fairly closely to avoid slipping and hurting
myself. As a result, I found a lot of interesting things down
on the logs.
First amongst them
were these white-fringed brown mushrooms. Just from the coloration,
I'd guess that these are a mushroom called Resinous Polypore,
but that's just a guess. I didn't take time to carefully examine
them, and I'm nowhere near an expert on fungus.
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| This following
stuff, which I found coating a few logs, is a hair lichen of some
sort. |
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| One of the
things I found between logs was the carcass of an American Wigeon.
Here's a spider on the late duck's back. |
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| And here's
the guy I went out to see. He enjoyed having his picture taken,
and even turned so that I would get a photo of his "good side." |
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I was happy to have
on my hiking boots, because getting out there involved going through
puddles that would've soaked my feet if I had had any of my usual
shoes on. And there's nothing worse than cold, wet feet on Christmas.
After getting some
shots of the owl, I headed back to the dyke. Again I found some
interesting stuff on the logs. Here's some little orange blobby
growth, perhaps an early stage of the fungus called Orange Jelly.
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| Closer to
the dyke, I found this log, with what looks to be three different
lichens on it. There's some sort of crust lichen, causing some bits
of the log to look green, as in the lower-right corner. There's
a leaf lichen, most probably Waxpaper Lichen, in the center and
the lower left. Then there's the round shrubby ones, darker yellow-green.
These I think are Green Starburst, another leaf lichen. It was pretty
cool to see all of that on one log. |
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| Once I got
back up on the dyke, I continued east. After a short walk I found
a spot where several snowy owls were hanging out. It turns out that
there were at least eight of them at that spot. At least, I managed
to get eight into this photo. You can click on it to see a larger
version, and one with the owls circled. |
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| I went a
ways out towards the owls. It took some a while to get out there,
and by the time I was set up there were three owls on the big log:
a juvenile (dark one) facing away, with two adults behind. |
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| As I was
taking photos of the owls, something in the foreground seemed to
move. I looked for a while before I spotted the cause: a Northern
Flicker had flown over onto the front log. Her grey and brown colors
blended into her surroundings quite well. |
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| It was a
little bit chilly out, but I was bundled up pretty well against
the cold. My hands and face were cold, though. I was beginning to
notice that I had cold toes, too, when I heard a lovely sound: the
juvenile owl had started singing Ode to Joy. |
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"Freude, schöner
Götterfunken...
It was a beautiful
moment.
Eventually, his sanfter
Flügel weilted,
and he did some sort of hunchback thing...maybe it was his scrooge
or grinch imitation.
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| It would
soon be getting dark, so I headed on back to the dyke. Once I was
there, I watched a Snowy Owl version of Christmas Dinner (that'll
be in my next entry) and then headed back towards my car. I didn't
get far before an owl flew in and perched in the top of a tree on
the land side of the dyke. |
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| He didn't
stay there long before flying back behind me to another tree, weilting
(lighting) on a branch that looked way too thin to hold him. |
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| Indeed,
the branch bent down under his weight and he had to flap and fly
off. |
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| At this
point of the dyke, there's a golf course on the landward side. There
was only one golfer out there, a rather diminutive fellow, this
Christmas day. |
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He had landed in the
rough on the 17th, but he was still looking for a birdie.
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He didn't seem too
happy about the tree that was in his way, though, and he gave
it a mean glare.
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After watching the
golfer and talking with some other birders who were out enjoying
the owls, I started again towards my car. I stopped for a few
shots when I saw another owl fairly close in on the foreshore,
perched on the end of a timber.
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Back over the golf
course, I spotted an owl of a different sort: a Short-eared Owl.
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| Here's the
same photo, cropped closer in. |
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And finally, another
shot, showing his wings up and legs down. He was trying to catch
something, but came up empty on this run.
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Mr. Short-ears was
my last Christmas subject. After this I headed home to shower
before going over to my friend Ram's place for a glorious Christmas
dinner. Dinner included a rather tasty turkey, one whose best
hiding place obviously wasn't quite good enough.
And to all a good night,
Tom
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