Those of you who know me know that I don't typcially spend a lot of my time chasin' women. I am a bachelor, but work and my photography tend to keep me fairly occupied. So it may come as a surprise that on Saturday I spent basically the whole day to go see a lady over on Vancouver Island.

Then again, the world will seem normal again once I tell you that the lady I was going to see was a female Painted Bunting. This poor bird was far away from home; in North America, she's a bird of the southeast and south-central United States, and Mexico. The nearest part of her normal range is probably southern New Mexico. This was one lost bird. And she had been coming to a feeder in Brentwood Bay for the last week and a half or so.

I ended up not sleeping very well the night before, waking up at 1:30 and 4:30. After the 4:30 waking (geese were honking outdoors for some reason), I wasn't able to get back to sleep. So at 5:15 I decided to get up and take the 7:00 ferry; I had previously been planning on taking the 9:00 one.

I made it to the ferry terminal a little before 6:30, and had some coffee (decaf - I've given up caffeine) before boarding. Once on the boat, I bundled up and headed for the outside deck with my camera. It was dark, rainy, and miserable out, but I did get a few photos. My first decent subject was a Bald Eagle flying out across the water.

The ship started to sail, and I stayed outside, braving rain and quite a bit of wind. It wasn't very pleasant out there. Ah, but such are the demands of photography.

I found only a few birds as we went across the straight. The most interesting of these were a small flock of Buffleheads, which are not only cute little ducks, but also quite striking when in flight.

I reached Brentwood Bay around 9:20, and found the house with the feeder that the bird had been visiting. The instructions were to proceed up on their deck, and so I did just that. Once in view of the feeder, I set up my tripod and mounted my camera.

The area around the feeder seemed a really popular place. I found six species of sparrows there in the first ten minutes. First up was this House Sparrow.

As you can see in that photo, it was still raining. As you probably can't see, it was still cold, too. I was partly under a roof overhang, but the end of my lens was getting rained on. (I've always got a lens hood on the lens, and that kept the rain off of the glass.)

On the ground below the feeder, there was a Dark-eyed Junco poking around.

I think that he's molting his face feathers and that's why his face looks so mottled.

The other sparrows in the vicinity were Fox Sparrows and Song Sparrows. I didn't take too many photos of them, and with the gloomy day working against me, none of them turned out.

The sparrows didn't seem to like the feeder, and kept either to the trees around it or to the ground below. So I was a little startled when a bird actually went to the feeder. I swung my camera up and caught him as he looked right at me, recognizing as I did that he was a Bewick's Wren.

After about 45 minutes in the rain and cold, another birder arrived and set up his telescope next to my camera. Later, I learned that this fellow's name was Chris, he was from Vancouver, and he had been on the ferry with me. But we didn't say much at first, both hunkering down against the elements. I tired of standing, and sat down in a plastic patio chair, despite it having a wet seat cushion. I figured that my bottom might be a bit colder, but at least my legs would get a rest.

We waited on, with no buntings showing up. After about 30 minutes, another pair of birders arrived. As the damp got to me I began to wonder how long I should wait. Maybe the bird had moved on.

After another ten minutes or so, I stood up and got behind my camera. I waited.

Finally, around 11:00, after I had waited in the damp cold for over 90 minutes, Chris spotted the bird. She was near the base of the tree that was behind the feeder. Next, she flew up into the tree, and to the feeder. I caught her there.

Although this bird was striking, male Painted Buntings are even more so, with a bold blue head, red body, and yellow-green wings.

I got a number of shots of the bunting, but the distance wasn't that great and the low light levels meant that the camera had difficulty focussing and that the photos would turn out grainy. Despite those difficulties, I decided to put my 2x teleconverter on the camera, to try to compensate for the distance. The teleconverter throws away a bunch of light, so the exposures got longer and the photos I got turned out even more grainy. This was the best of the bunch.

That last shot was actually about a half an hour after the first one. Inbetween them the bunting had flown away: She had only been present for about ten minutes.

But in those ten minutes I had gotten about the best photos I could hope for, given the conditions. So I decided to move on, although first I chatted a bit with the others who had gathered there. Chris had come by bus, so I offered him a ride back to the ferry. We briefly thought about going out to Whistling Spit to look for a Say's Pheobe that had been spotted there, but decided not to when we found out that Whistling Spit was a fair drive south and west, away from the ferry.

On Vancouver Island, there is a small population of a mainly European bird, the Sky Lark, which was introduced some time back. It turned out that the daffodil field where I had stopped earlier in the morning was one of the best places to find this bird. A piece of good luck was that Chris was from England, where Sky Larks are very common, and he was adept at hearing them and spotting them. So on the way back to the ferry we stopped at the daffodil fields. On getting out of the car, Chris reported hearing larks.

Following Chris' ears, we walked a short way down a muddy track beside a small resevoir. In the resevoir were a pair of Ring-necked Ducks; I was hand-holding my camera now, but I still got a decent shot of the male.

I like Ring-neckeds, the white outline on the bill and between the grey and black parts is very neat and pleasing to my eyes. These particular ducks were fairly brave; all they did was paddle away to the other side of the rather small resevoir. Most Ring-neckeds that I've seen before didn't tolerate humans that close and would have flown away.

At the far end of the resevoir, Chris spotted a Yellow-Rumped Warbler. This was the first one that either of us had seen this year. This bird was of the Audubon's subspecies, which has a yellow throat.

According to all of my sources, finding a Sky Lark on the ground is a fairly rare event. They tend to stay, appropriately enough, in the sky. So I wasn't that surprised when Chris found the lark he was hearing in the sky above us. He pointed it out to me and, although it was a small dot way up there, I was able to get my binoculars on it and watch for a while. While I watched, the bird drifted a long way almost straight down, pausing once or twice to float in the air for a few seconds. According to Chris, this is very typical Sky Lark behaviour.

After watching another lark that Chris pointed out, and trying without success to get it focussed in my camera viewfinder, I figured we should be getting on to to the ferry and so we headed back to the car.

Along the road to the ferry we saw several Turkey Vultures overhead. I pulled over to take photos of one, but just then a Common Raven had started chasing it, and the two birds disappeared above some trees. So we made it to the ferry without me getting any more photos.

There was no interesting birding at the ferry terminal, and our next birding opportunity was from the passenger deck on the ferry. Thankfully, the rain had stopped a bit earlier, the cloud layer had lightened, and it had warmed up a bit. It was quite comfortable on deck.

Chris pointed out some Pigeon Guillemots off to the side of the ferry. These are a fairly common bird around these parts, but somehow I'd never seen any before. These birds have bright red feet.

Once the ferry was underway, we headed up to the bow, despite the wind over the water being a fair bit stronger than in the bay. It was nice having Chris with me, as he was pretty good at spotting birds out on the water, seeing things that I would have missed, due to either inexperience or concentration on taking pictures of something else. And I always enjoy hanging out with more experienced birders.

As we headed out, we passed a number of channel markers on our starboard. Here's one with a pair of cormorants on it: Pelagic Cormorant on the left, and Brandt's Cormorant on the right.

I'd never gotten such good views of Brandt's Cormorants before. But even better views were next.

The next marker we passed was a larger one, and it had seven or eight cormorants on it, mostly Brandt's. In the following photo, all but the rightmost bird are Brandt's. Brandt's Cormorants in breeding plumage have wispy white plumes that come out of the side of their head. In the photo, these plumes are most obvious on the bird just to the right of the front vertical red piece.

As the ferry headed on towards the gulf islands, we found that the port bow was less windy than the starboard, and so we kept watch from there. Chris soon found several Rhinocerous Auklets on the port side and pointed them out to me.

I was happy to see the Rhinos; they're a distinctive little bird. Here's a pair of them. These birds were already in breeding plumage, and show the little white vertical "horn" for which they are named on the side of their bills.

We were soon over relatively open water, so Chris and I ducked inside and waited there until we were close to land again. As the ferry approached Active Pass, we went back to the port bow. There I took this photo of a small island in the pass. Those whitish lumps are all Harbour Seals. On another day, I'd say that those seals were out sunning themselves; this time I guess they were out clouding themselves.

A little later, Chris pointed me at a flock of gulls. It was a mixed flock, with some Bonaparte's Gulls and some Mew Gulls. Of the four flying gulls in this photo, the rightmost one is a Mew, and the other three (including the rear one, with the black head) are Bonies. I can't remember having seen breeding-plumaged (black-headed) Bonaparte's before, so that was neat.

And the following is a flock of mostly if not all Bonaparte's Gulls. The contrast of their white-edged wings with the dark water made for quite a pretty sight.

As we left Active Pass, there was a loose-knit flock of loons off to starboard. They had smallish bills and a brightish smudge on the back of their head; this identified them as Pacific Loons. Here's a smudgy picture of a few of them.

I rode outside until we neared the Roberts Bank port and the ferry terminal. Once we were off the ferry, I dropped Chris at the Ladner bus loop and did some shopping before heading home.

Back at the condo, I got in a few more photos as I walked through the courtyard; a rain-speckled flower had caught my eye. I think it's a Rhododendron, but I don't know the variety. I liked the yellow-and-green leaves it had.

When I got back home, it was a little after 5:00, and I was very tired. I ended up crashing in bed before I even downloaded and checked my photos.

It had been worth it, though. It was a glorious start to the second quarter...and I didn't even have to suffer any April Fools' jokes.

Goin' where the rhinos go,
Tom