Archive for the 'Birding' Category

Happy Spring! Below is my bird list for March. It contains fewer additions than I’d hoped for, but there are a couple of new birds and I was finally able to get a decent look at the hawks too. Early in the month, my wife spotted a House Sparrow at our feeder but that was, unfortunately, the only time we saw it. Likewise, I only managed one good look at a Brown Creeper while walking the dog through the trails at Dogwood Park a few days later.

Two weeks ago, we went for a walk along Centennial Beach at Boundary Bay Regional Park and a Bald Eagle buzzed our heads and landed close by. It was a huge, chocolate coloured juvenile, but when it flew away we could see that it was bright white under its wings. This creature’s enormous size made me question the sanity of the couple who came walking along behind us with their snack-size Shih Tzu off-leash.¹

Spring is coming on quick in our neck of the woods. The garden is surging back to life and we’ve even had a few bees about. The neighbourhood crows are busy building nests, as were the pair of Bewick’s Wrens that spent last Saturday morning scouring our garden for building supplies. I could make no sense of their selection/rejection process but it seemed like pretty serious business. One day, I even heard a hummingbird zip by, a sound that always reminds me of the rapid whir of my fly reel when an angry trout suddenly takes off with my line. An obvious sign that it’s time to go fishing!

American Robin

American Wigeon

Bald Eagle
Bewick’s Wren*

Black-capped Chickadee
Brown Creeper*

Bushtit

Canada Goose
Cooper’s Hawk*

Dark-eyed Junco

European Starling

Glaucous-winged Gull

Great Blue Heron

House Finch
House Sparrow*

Mallard

Northwestern Crow
Red-tailed Hawk*

Song Sparrow

Spotted Towhee

Steller’s Jay

Varied Thrush

Winter Wren

My wife and I took the dog for a short walk about Blackie Spit last weekend. Somehow we managed to time it just right and were able to stay dry despite the variable weather. It’s changed quite a bit since we moved away from that area ten years ago and I like the improvements that have been made to protect the birds.

At first, I was disappointed with the restrictions now placed on dog owners, but after narrowly avoiding quite a few piles of dog poop, I remembered that there are a lot of pretty poor pet owners out there and thought it just as well. Since we had our dog with us, some areas were off limits to us, but we still saw a lot of birds (12 species in total that day) and I was able to sort out some of the duck issues I was having with my bird list. We saw Mallards, American Wigeons and the Northern Pintail, which I find to be one of the most striking puddle ducks. My wife was thrilled with the number of Great Blue Herons we saw. We also spotted a number of hawks on the way there, but I haven’t added them to my bird list yet as I’m still not sure I’ve identified them correctly. I think at least one was a Cooper’s Hawk.

Unfortunately, we also saw a lot of people down there and I think I’ll look for more remote locations for future birding. Why anybody would want to live like a sardine in busy Crescent Beach is beyond me.