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Friday the 19th of
May was an odd sort of day for me. My back had been giving me
serious problems in the morning but around 1pm it started settling
down. I had already told the folks at work that I wasn't coming
in, so I decided to head out birding before all the rain showers
that were predicted for the weekend showed up. My destination
was my other favorite spit, Blackie Spit. I had hopes of seeing
a Whimbrel and maybe some Purple Martins; both species had been
recently reported from there.
I arrived at the spit
around 2:15; it was overcast and the tide was pretty low. There
were a bunch of film production vehicles in the first part of
the parking lot, so I parked right next to the gate leading to
the spit. As I walked out, I didn't see much except a few sparrows.
As I suspected, they were Savannahs, my first ones of the year.
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| The more
I looked, the more Savannahs I saw. |
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| I didn't
see much else out there, though, so I turned around and went back
to where I had parked. An immature gull was sitting on the fence
by my car. I think this is a Glaucous-winged, but I'm not so good
at gull i.d., so I could very well be wrong. |
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| He allowed
a very close approach. |
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| Next I walked
over to the Savenye Area. When I reached its northern tip, I noticed
motion out on the mudflats. I couldn't make the source out with
my eyes, but my binoculars told me it was a foraging Whimbrel. |
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| At this
point I was pretty happy with having found this handsome but cryptic
bird so quickly. I watched and waited, hoping that it would come
in closer so that I could get better photos. After a while, I noticed
some other motion a bit to the north, and found a group of three
other Whimbrels there. |
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I scanned around the
mudflat and was able to count six Whimbrels in all. This was very
nice, as I'd never used the plural of Whimbrel before.
Before leaving my spot,
I took a few photos of the stuff around me at the edge of the
mudflat. Apparently, it was not a very good day to be a crab.
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| I then continued
around the Savenye Area, and at the tip overlooking the old pilings,
I saw an indescript brown bird fly into a bush. My thoughts were
that it was a female Brewer's Blackbird, but my friend Ilya corrected
me; it's a female Brown-headed Cowbird. |
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| Next I left
the Savenye Area and stopped at the fence just outside it. Directly
below me, on the near side of the slough, was this bird, who appears
to be a first-year Red-winged Blackbird. He was flapping his wings
and twisting quite a bit, so most of the photos I got of him were
quite blurred. I was happy to find that one of my photos caught
him in a still moment. |
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| I next walked
towards the Dunsmuir Gardens. As I got near the slough, I saw a
lot of swallows flying around and thought that maybe there'd be
a Purple Martin in amongst them. I didn't find any, though. But
in the meantime, I did take some swallow flight photos. The overcast
skies meant that the lighting wasn't good, and the photos weren't
all that great, but I caught what is clearly a Barn Swallow and
a Tree Swallow. |
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| In the slough,
there were several families of Mallards, and I took a few photos
of some of their ducklings. |
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| The color
of some nearby lupine distracted me from the birds for a moment. |
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But only for a moment.
I was now on a dyke
that has sloughs on both sides. Across one of them, I saw a bird
fly up into a tree. When it flew in, I thought it was a sparrow,
but in my viewfinder I quickly recognized him as a Bewick's Wren.
He made some wren noises and hung around in the trees for two
or three minutes before flying off.
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| Hearing
some shorebirdy sounds, I looked down from where the wren had been
and found a chatty Killdeer on the ground beside the water in the
slough. He was quite close. |
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| After I
had gone a little farther on, some people came up the path behind
me, talking loudly. They flushed the Killdeer, and as he circled
the area, I managed to get several shots of him flying. |
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| At the end
of the dyke, in the slough on the garden side, there was a Great
Blue Heron. I often find them there; it must be a good spot to hang
out if you're a heron. And a bad spot if you're a fish. |
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| I went out
on a path that leads under a train trestle to a boatyard. As I was
approaching the trestle, I noticed a Barn Swallow sitting on the
ground near the path. |
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As I passed below the
trestle, I was taken with the how it looked from underneath, and
so I took several photos of it before going on to the boatyard.
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There wasn't much doing
by the boatyard; it had a security fence and so I wasn't free
to roam around to find any good stuff to take photos of. I turned
back towards the gardens.
As I neared the dyke
between the two sloughs, I found a flock of six or seven American
Goldfinches in the trees. Their bright yellow made them pretty
hard to miss.
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Then I walked towards
the entrance to the gardens. I stopped to take photos of a few
House Finches on the path in front of me.
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Some bird calls from
some tall trees near the garden entrance intrigued me, and I some
time trying to find the source of the calls. I never did, and
after about ten minutes or so, I gave up and went into the gardens.
As I entered, I heard
more shorebirdy sounds and looked up to see a flock flying south.
I took a few photos of them, but I wasn't able to identify the
birds.
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But now that I'm at
home with the photos, it's a different story. That flock of 18+
birds was a flock of Whimbrels. Here's a detail showing three
from the middle of the photo.
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They all have the Whimbrel's
distinctive curved bill.
At the back of the
gardens, I saw a Rufous Hummingbird doing the Rufous courtship
display flights, slowly flying almost straight up and then diving
in a "J" pattern. I'd seen this illustrated in one of
my bird books (Sibley's), but this was the first time I'd seen
it live, which was a treat. I eventually lost track of the hummer,
but found him a little later on a post. He was showing off his
throat plumage.
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He then zipped off
the post, over to a nearby hummingbird feeder. After that he zoomed
off and I lost him for good.
As I was almost finished
walking the perimeter of the gardens, I encountered a Tree Swallow
on a post underneath a swallow nest box. Like the gull I had seen
earlier, this swallow allowed a surprisingly close approach.
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The swallow was my
last photo subject in the gardens, and I walked back to the dyke.
Before heading back down the path, though, I went out on a little
bit of land that protrudes into the bay (or, with the tide the
way it was, into the mudflat). From there, I found another Whimbrel,
one who had obviously not flown off with the flock. He yielded
my best Whimbrel shot of the day.
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It was now about 5:00
and I was getting tired, so I decided to go fairly directly back
to my car. As I went back along the slough, though, the sun started
to come out, and I stopped and took some sparrow photos. There
were both Savannahs and White-crowneds around; here's one of the
White-crowneds.
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last treat of the day flew into one of the bare trees in the slough
right behind that sparrow. It was a Downy Woodpecker, who proceeded
to peck at and climb up the tree. |
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I watched that woodpecker
for several minutes before remembering that I was tired. I made
it back to my car without further photographic incidents.
I did take a few more
photos that day, though. When I got home, our third clutch of
ducklings had appeared in the courtyard. So I took a few photos
of the little ones in amongst the bamboo before heading in.
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I hadn't seen any Purple
Martins, but I know of several other places where they are reliably
seen, so that wasn't a disappointment. I had seen Whimbrels; not
just one but at least 18 of them. That, and the fact that I got
a few decent photos of them (and of lots of other things, besides)
made this little expedition a resounding success.
Next time, I'll go
searching for an odd tern at Iona.
Glad I don't have a
nose like a Whimbrel,
Tom
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