But then I discovered that Lincoln's is not supposed to occur in central Virigina. It's supposed to be on the coast, or west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but not in the center. That would make this an out-of-place bird.

Now, being a relatively inexperienced birder, I'm not supposed to go around seeing out-of-place birds that others haven't led me to. The birding gods would be unhappy with that. So I checked my books carefully, and began to have some doubt. Maybe my first impression was right and this was a Song Sparrow.

I eventually decided that I couldn't decide, and so I sent a couple of photos of the bird off to my birding friends Ilya and Carlo. Ilya got back to me right away, saying that he was confident that it was a Song, and Carlo sounded in with the same opinion a little later. They based their identifications on the overall appearance of the bird, the reddish tinge to the brown, and the coarseness of the breast stripes. It turns out that Song Sparrows in the eastern part of North America can appear more neatly-groomed than their western counterparts. For this to have been a Lincoln's, it would need to be even neater still, with thinner breast-streaks and a more pronounced buffy color.

That's one of the interesting things about birding...the same species can have different characteristic appearances in different parts of its range. It's one of the things that birding books will warn you about.

It's a good thing I did my homework and decided I had made an iffy field identification. That saved me from getting it wrong here in the photojournal, and helped me learn something new.

One bird I didn't have trouble identifying was this big black, white, and red thing that definitely wasn't out-of-place. Did I ever mention that Turkey Vultures are common in this area?

Northern Mockingbirds are also common here. For my next photos I managed to coax one into demonstrating how he eats a berry.

The process goes as follows. First, one has to find a slightly withered berry. Not completely dried up and useless, but not all round and hard, either.

Not only that, but when you're a mockingbird, you don't generally get table napkins to help wipe off the evidence.

After that little demonstration, it was time for me to go in and give my own demonstration of how to eat breakfast. I think I did a decent job, because my nieces seemed to get the hang of it.

After that breakfast, we settled on our plans for the day: we would make an outing to Belle Isle, which is a park on an island in the middle of the James River.

When we got out of my brother's van after parking near the river, my eyes were immediately drawn to a bird perched in a tree some ways distant. I raised my camera and through my viewfinder I saw a little bit of red on the head, and the overall shape and impression of the bird told me it was a Northern Flicker. Flickers are a type of woodpecker with very non-woodpecker-like habits, such as foraging along the ground. We get a lot of them out in BC, but this one would be the eastern subspecies (which are called yellow-shafted; the ones in BC are called red-shafted).

My brother likes to go geocaching, which is a pastime where people hide a container in some location, post that location (latitutde, longitude) on the web, and some other people go out (typically with their handheld GPS receivers) and try to find the container. The container typically contains little doodads or baubles or messages to pass along, and when someone finds a container, they take something from it and leave something in it. It's an interesting activity that has his whole family scrambling around looking for little hidden treasures.

Well, there was a geocache on Belle Isle, and we spent the next little while searching for it. On the path we took to get to the right coordinates, one of the girls found a piece of what was probably a wasp's nest.

I liked his spiky crest.

We never did find the geocache, and it could be that that one had been found and destroyed or taken by someone who wasn't in on the fun. That happens sometimes.

We started to walk around the island, which used to house an iron foundry, a quarry, a metal-working factory, and an old hydroelectric plant. Perhaps most famously, however, Belle Isle was used as a prison during the US Civil War, one of three Confederate prisons in Richmond. It held almost 10,000 Union soldiers at its height, with something like 30,000 prisoners having been held there at some point or another during the war.

Civil war prisons on both sides were places of great suffering and death. The Confederacy in particular had little food and even less shelter to offer the prisoners, so at Belle Isle starving prisoners would sit and lie and sleep exposed to the elements. There's now an interpretive sign on the main trail commemorating the losses and attesting to hardships that prisoners encountered there.

Belle Isle was not the worst Confederate prison to be in, though; that distinction goes to the Andersonville prison in Georgia, where the guards were unusually cruel and the mortality rate was around 28%. (The Union had equivalently horrific places such as the Elmira prison in Elmira, New York, and the Camp Douglas prison in Chicago.) Sadly, some unfortunate prisoners were transferred from Belle Isle to Andersonville when Belle Isle became too crowded.

Thoughts of prisoners and wars evaporated as we walked around the island, though, passing the electric plant, stepping onto some river rocks, and then coming to the tip of the island farthest from the footbridge.

At this end of the island, there is a flat area that looks out onto the rather swift-moving river, and we paused there for a while to enjoy the sight. Looking vaguely upriver, I saw a flock of seagulls perched on some rocks in front of a small dam.

The James is quite popular with rafters and kayakers, and those folks call this section of river Hollywood; the dam is Hollywood Dam. Hollywood is considered class III or IV rapids, depending on the water level. This high classification didn't seem to bother the gulls, though.

As I watched the river, I noticed a bird out in the rapids, sometimes underwater, sometimes hidden by waves, and sometimes visible. Eventually she surfaced where I could get a good look and some photos. She was a female Common Goldeneye.

I admired her ability to calmly make a living out there in the violent river.

From this point we walked back up the other side of the island, passing a quarry pond with a face above it where rock climbers do their thing. We got back on the hanging footbridge and from there I took a few shots of an old bridge pier in the late-day sun.

With that our excursion was over.

I did take a few more photos later in the evening. My brother's family serves two cats, Mickey and Purrvis, both of whom are adorable but fairly shy. I tried to make friends with both of them but was only successful with the less-shy one, Purrvis. Once we were well-acquainted, I was able to talk him into posing for a couple of photos. Here's the full cat...

Purrvis has really big cute pouty kitty eyes, and his white whisker "eyebrows" are a really nice feature, too. I complimented him on his good looks and thanked him for posing for me before putting my camera down for the night.

Shooting the rapids,
Tom