| Photojournal
- 16 September 2006
One stinky guy
I had had such a fun time crawling around on San Josef Beach on my vacation that I decided to try a similar thing closer to home. So on the 16th, I headed to Boundary Bay with a plan: I was going to find a relatively high spot on the mud, lie down on it, and wait for the incoming tide to push some shorebirds my way. I took along a tarp to lie on and some camo sheets to throw over me.
As I trudged out into the bay, I encountered my first subjects, gulls. By their pink legs and dark mantle, I'm thought that they were Herring Gulls, but those wiser than I think they're Glaucous-winged. |
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| No trip to the bay would be complete without taking some photos of lugworm burrows. |
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| A little further out, I came upon one of these things. Looks like it could have been a really useful thing at one time. Give me a call if you ever need one; for a small fee, I can tell you where to go to find it. |
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| I hadn't seen any shorebirds on the mud on the way out toward the waterline, which seemed a little unusual. All of them were out by the water. Occasionally, a flock would fly past, going one way or the other. |
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Well, I evenutally found a small bump in the mud as near as I dared go to the birds. I spread out my tarp upon it and laid down. The tide was definitely coming in, and the water approached my little mound and split to go around it.
The birds hadn't really changed position, and so I took some shots of them while they were at that distance, just as "insurance shots" in case they didn't get closer. One of these shots is below.
The large birds in this photo are Black-bellied Plovers, and the small birds are Sanderlings. There's also one Western Sandpiper visible—he's the really small brown guy over the 'o' and 'm' in "Tom".
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The tide was coming in fairly quickly and my mound was rapidly shrinking. It became clear that I would be lying in water well before the birds felt like moving; it was a good thing I'd gotten some insurance shots. I picked up my stuff and went walking back towards shore; I had my shoes off and was walking through a few centimeters of water.
Because the bay is so flat, I had some distance to go before I was out of the water, and then I started looking for other mounds to position myself on. I was looking for a higher one than the one I had found before, but I didn't really see any nearby...besides which, the shorebirds were still very far away, out where they had been before.
I was a bit discouraged by this, as my plan wasn't going to work, and I wasn't seeing any birds near where I was. But I kept scanning as I walked along, and soon some motion in the dried plant matter caught my attention. It took some waiting and watching, but eventually the source of the motion moved again, and I saw that it was an American Pipit. I got down on one knee to take photos, even though there was a little standing water where I was. |
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A little further along, I noticed a peep around a little puddle. I laid down on the moist-becoming-submerged mud. I decided against deploying the tarp because it was crinkly and the noise might scare the bird away; besides which, at the rate the tide was coming in, it wouldn't do me much good for long.
After lying down, of course, my frontside was nice and wet, with my jeans and shirt absorbing lovely mudflat water. For those of you not familiar with tidal mudflats, that means that the water is chock full of the lovely rotten-eggs aroma of sulfur.
So I crawled forward through the sulfurous water and eventually found a little mesa of mud, where some grass had taken hold and its roots kept the mud from eroding down to the level of the rest of the flat. I rested my chest and camera on the mesa, with my belly and legs in the water behind.
From there, I started taking photos of the little bird. It turned out that it was a Baird's Sandpiper. |
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The photos turned out okay, but I wasn't able to get close enough to get the kind of detail I had on the shots from San Josef.
From my position, I saw a Savannah Sparrow come and land on a nearby clump of dirt and vegetation. That little dot to his left isn't from dust on my lens or camera sensor; that's an insect flying around. |
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| With no more nearby subjects, and the water now several centimeters deep, I got up and started walking my half-wet self towards my car. On the way, I found some more shorebirds up near the dyke. The first one was easy to identify: in these parts, any shorebird this small with yellow legs is a Least Sandpiper. |
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| Before heading on, I took a look around and saw a large flock of ducks to the southeast. Here the ducks are all those dots on the water near out past the clumps of grass. Those clumps are bigger versions of the little mud mesa that I had half-laid upon. |
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| The next birds I found as I went along were these fellows. They're yellow-legged, but a fair bit bigger than the Least was. These guys are Pectoral Sandpipers. Despite their size, I didn't see them until I was almost upon them; their camoflauge is quite effective. |
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| Next up was another Baird's Sanpiper. |
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| I reached the spot nearest my car, and I climbed over the logs and rocks to reach the dyke. From there, I took a few photos around the bay. This one shows the flock of ducks, much closer now, and from a higher angle. The ducks were dabbling ducks, who stick their head down in the water to pick at submerged edibles. I can recognize a few species there—Northern Pintail, American Wigeon, and Green-winged Teal—and there are probably others. |
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It was now almost 5pm; I'd been on the bay for three hours. There was a bit of a breeze, and the wet parts of me had gotten cold. The walk along the dyke and road to my car was unpleasant, with sharp gravel digging into my bare feet. I could've donned my shoes, but I didn't want the water on my feet getting in them. After all, that would dilute my shoes' wonderful natural bouquet with that equally-wonderful sulfurous one. That clearly wouldn't do.
Back at the car, I toweled off my feet, changed shirts, and put on fresh socks with my shoes. That made me feel a little warmer and better, but I was still one stinky guy. The first orders of business when I got home were throwing my clothes in the washer and my body in the shower. Again, that helped, but it was days before I stopped smelling sulfur on my skin and hair, and weeks before I stopped smelling it in my car.
Your fragrant friend,
Tom
(who, by any other name, would still smell as sweet.)
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