The 10th was a Thursday and my usual Thursday meeting at work had been cancelled, so I was faced with the prospect of a free day. The weather was great, and so there was really no option for me except to get outside and take photos.

So somewhere near the crack of noon, I headed out into the courtyard where I live to see if ducklings were about. There had been a mother with several young in the lagoon the day before, and another one sitting on a clutch of eggs in the tall planter.

The first thing I noticed, though, was not ducks but fish. Three of our Koi were swimming in a tight circle in the middle of the lagoon.

I thought maybe that was a sign that we were going to have an earthquake, or that the end of days was coming. Neither of those things came to pass, though, so I guess they were just practicing their synchronized swimming for the next Olympics.

I eventually found the mother Mallard with her little ones up on some vegetation at the side of the lagoon. Most of her little ones were under her, keeping warm, but two or three of them were out.

I spent about 15 minutes with them before heading on.

My plan was to go out to Iona Beach to see (and hear) the Yellow-headed Blackbirds. Male Yellow-headed Blackbirds have spectacular color and some very interesting calls, particularly in the spring when they're advertising their territory and trying to woo the females.

But if I was going to Iona, then I was going to check for some of the other specialities of the place, which were shorebirds and swallows. The shorebirds are often found around the sewage treatment ponds, which are right by the entrance to the park, so that's where I started.

As I reached the far end of the ponds, some combination of water contents, blue sky, and sunlight caused the pond to appear a teal or an aquamarine color, and since I'm a sucker for good color I took a few photos.

The birds in that shot are all peeps: Western and Least Sandpipers.

As I walked along, I noticed a few more Leasts on the side of the pond near me. I sat down, partly to get a relatively low angle, and partly because I was in a shady spot and it was hot out. I waited for the birds to present in the sunlight. Here I got a nice shot when one of them pulled a little red worm out of the mud.

That's what attracts these birds to the ponds: plenty of tasty little organisms for them to eat.

On another bit of mud out near the opposite side of the pond, I saw some movement. It was clearly a shorebird, but hard to make out, even with my binoculars. The bird's reflection in the water was much easier to see than the bird itself. Here's an admittely fuzzy photo of what I saw.

I watched the bird through binoculars for a few minutes, and eventually was able to conclude that it was a Spotted Sandpiper. That's obvious from the photo, but the binoculars didn't give me quite as good an image as the camera, so it took me a while to figure it out.

All in all, though, there weren't that many shorebirds at the ponds, and so I headed back to my car, which I had left by the entrance gate. Along the way, I went by the northeast pond (I had mainly been at the southwest one) and found some interesting ducks there, like this drake Northern Shoveler

That looked like a good plan to me, so when I got back to my car, I sat for a little while and drank some water. After five or ten minutes, I drove on down to the main parking lot, gathered my gear, and walked to the north side of the island.

Along the north side of the island are several dolphins with nestboxes placed on them. Various swallows, including Purple Martins, use these boxes, as do a few other species. I was looking for swallows. A favorite swallow hangout is on a cable that is strung from one of the dolphins in towards the shore. I headed for this cable, and sure enough, when I got there, I found swallows.

This one is a Northern Rough-winged Swallow.

I'd been hoping to see Purple Martins, which are a slightly bigger swallow species, but four species was a pretty good collection. Especially for just one wire.

I waited a while to see if any Martins would show, but they didn't, so I moved on. On my walk back I found an interesting sight...a slightly weathered book sitting on some driftwood on on the ground.

I wondered who would've been reading what out at the edge of a park, and why they would leave their reading to the elements. I never figured out the who, but the what was a cookbook...and it was open to a recipe for Welsh Rabbit, a.k.a. Welsh Rarebit.

Now, I love a good rabbit, and can't see why anybody would abandon a recipe for one. So I examined the recipe more closely, and found that it instructs you to serve the rabbit over Buttered toast points.

Mulling that over, a scene formed in my mind: our cheese-sauce chef, having completed the rabbit over the campfire, runs to his car to get his toaster to make the toast points. As he starts back, heavy rain comes, and he naturally doesn't want to get electrocuted by operating a toaster in the rain. So he dives back into the car, leaving both cookbook and sauce to the mercy of the downpour. Yep, it probably happened just like that.

At this point, I'd been at the park for about two and a half hours, and the sun was getting low enough to provide nice lighting for my main target bird, the Yellow-headed Blackbird. This species likes the north part of the middle island, particularly the reedy area around the north outer pond. I saw a few females as I neared the pond, and I also heard the males calling. I enjoyed just standing and watching and listening to the calls for several minutes.

The male behaviour was fairly easily discerned; each was trying to establish a territory, and would fly around to a few favorite perches and call from each of them. Occasionally they would take a run at another bird that got too close. To get decent shots, I approached one of the perches while the bird was away, and hid myself and my camera under a camouflage sheet to await the bird's return. The camo disguised me fairly well, but it can't disguise sound: the bird definitely noticed my camera's shutter and mirror noise.

Despite that, I was able to get some pretty good photos. I always like it when I can get a front shot of these birds with the white wing markings showing, so one sees black, white, and yellow in the photo.

The white parts are particularly evident when they're flying.

I could take hundreds if not thousands of those sorts of shots...and I probably have. I only got about sixty of them on this day, though.

After a half an hour under camo, watching and listening to the blackbirds, I decided to call it a day. On the way back to the car, I encountered my last subject, a Robin with some dinner for the kids.

That seemed like a really great idea, so on my way home I stopped and let a Red Robin bring me some grub.

Wishing you cheese and mustard in your beer,
Tom