Weekend at Bluetail's

This past weekend Calgary Birder, Mrs. Calgary Birder and our two nestlings flew to Vancouver.  We were taking their 98 year old great-grandmother to attend her big sister's 100th birthday party!  It was a wonderful celebration and we all enjoyed the time visiting with family.  

As many as twenty Steller's Jays, Cyanocitta stelleri, at a time in our host's front yard - but these aren't the blue tails I was looking for...

Of course, I wasn't going to pass up the chance to chase the Vancouver area's current "mega" - a Red-flanked Bluetail, showing in a park in New Westminster since being discovered by Colin McKenzie on January 13th.  For the non-birding followers of this blog (or birders who have been living under a rock for the past two months) this little Eurasian flycatcher, which should be spending the winter in Indochina, is the second ever mainland North American record of this species.

I slipped out of a dark house in North Vancouver shortly before dawn and headed for Queen's Park in New Westminster.  The only birds I saw on the half hour drive were members of a huge flock of Northwestern Crows leaving their roost in Burnaby but even in the predawn light the park was jumping with activity.  American Robins and Dark-eyed Juncos were busy feeding on the ground along with, to my delight, several Varied Thrushes - a life bird before the sun had risen.

Varied Thrush, Ixoreus naevius.  Not bad views for a shy resident of the damp, dark understory.   The patterning on the feathers gives a textured quality to the plumage.

I spent about thirty minutes exploring the area around the playground, enjoying the melodic but frantic trills and buzzes of Pacific Wrens high above, before seeing a little brownish bird flicking its tail in a low shrub.  It flew a short distance, landed on a tree stump and flicked its tail again.  I brought my binoculars up and, in the dim lit of the understory, made out a faint eye-ring and what looked like reddish sides.  Almost certainly the bird but far from definitive views.  I wandered a little further north in the park and eventually relocated the bird, getting a good look and a passable identification photo.

Red-flanked Bluetail, Tarsiger cyanurus, a long way from home.

Uncropped, 420mm lens!

By this time there were a couple of other birders in the area and we chatted for a little while, enjoying the cedar trees which maybe reminded the little wanderer of the Northern Russian forests where it should be heading to breed at this time of year.  With limited views of the Bluetail and a deadline to be back in North Vancouver, I decided to head back through Vancouver and try to find a Brambling reported in the Fairview neighbourhood.  Thanks to a great set of directions from Dave Ingram over at Island Nature, I had no problem finding the right alley and backyard where another birder was quietly peering through the brambles.  

"Brambling was here until 10 minutes ago"  

Oh.  

"Apparently it's often only seen before 9 or 10 in the morning"

Uh-oh.

I stuck around in the rain for as long as possible - about forty-five minutes - but no sign of the Brambling.  What we did enjoy was a great selection of west coast songbirds: Song Sparrow, Pine Siskin, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, House Finch, Black-capped Chickadee, House Sparrow, and both the Slate-coloured and Oregon subspecies of Dark-eyed Junco.  To wrap things up, here are a few shots of those birds....

"Sooty" Fox Sparrow, Passerella iliaca unalaschcensis

"Oregon" Dark-eyed Junco, Junco hyemalis

Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia

Purple Martins' Majesty

Another school year is finished with a mad flurry of activity but CalgaryBirder now finds himself enjoying vacation sunshine on the west side of Vancouver Island.  En route, we spent two rainy days in North Vancouver and I took the opportunity to checkout the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area.  This is considered to be a "must see" birding spot in BC's Lower Mainland and, as it's been well covered by local bloggers, I'll simply leave you with these two links and move on to the digiscoped photos:

1. Birding in Vancouver has a site guide with recommended trails, and,
2. BirdtrekkerBC has some photos and a species checklist

The species I particularly wanted to see were Purple Martins, which nest on the piers out on the mudflats.  So far I've missed these in Alberta - just haven't been in the right place at the right time.  There were certainly no trouble to find as they were bombing around the shoreline hunting and calling loudly.

Nestboxes out on the mudflats 

Purple Martins pausing for a rest between feedings.  The two birds with the pale faces are juveniles.

Other birds also make use of the piers (I think that's the right term?).   This is a Bald Eagle, like I needed to tell you that!

The "flats" part of Maplewood Flats looks like this.  I didn't see any shorebirds, as early July is the narrow window between northbound stragglers and southbound early-birds.  There were 6 Great Blue Herons, almost all in the arc of this photo.

Purple Martins weren't the only life bird for the morning.  Although I'm fairly certain I've seen this particular flycatcher before, I've never had the chance to confirm the ID, which is by song.  Anyway, here's the bird:

An Empidonax Flycatcher, but which one?

And here's the ID...

Handheld videoscoping doesn't give great results but it's the soundtrack that counts - "rrritz-bew" is unmistakably a Willow Flycatcher, common enough but still eluding me in Alberta.

I'm off on a sea kayaking trip tomorrow but will keep the blog updated with some more sightings, although if you want a sneak preview have a look under "Checklists".

The Hunt

This is the third and final part in a series of posts on my recent Gulf Islands sailing trip.  You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

An important part of the science instruction on our Grade 9 sailing trips is intertidal explorations.  We always have fun wading around in the shallows looking at all of the squishy invertebrates and learning about their unique niches in the ecosystem.  At Montague Harbour we were not alone in our prowling through the shallows.  This Great Blue Heron, with all its breeding season plumes, was also hard at work stalking fish.  It seemed completely unfazed by our group and allowed us to watch it at distances of less than 50 metres until it was time to get back on our boat.

Patient and motionless

The strike

Success!

That's close enough folks!

Landing on the other side of the bay

Gulf Island Passerines

This is the second in a series of posts on my recent Gulf Islands sailing trip.  You can find Part 1 here.

The Gulf Islands are dotted with parks and protected areas, both marine and terrestrial.  The flagship park is the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve which was established in 2003 and covers 36 square kilometres of land scattered around the islands.  There are also eight provincial parks, including Montague Harbour where we spent one night on the trip.  Of course all of these protected areas, with thick forests and dense shrubbery, provide rich habitat for bird life.

Spotted Towhee, Pipilo maculatus, love tangled overgrown shrubbery so they love the Pacific Northwest.  They call "Drink TEA" and occasionally pop up to more visible perches to sing, look around, or be photographed.

Russell Island is a small island off Saltspring entirely held under the Gulf Islands National Park.  We woke up in this anchorage to hear Pacific Wrens singing across the water and found this Orange-crowned Warbler, Oreothlypis celata, during a hike around the trails.

Golden-crowned Sparrows, Zonotrichia atricapilla, are common on the coast but this was a new species for me when I spotted this one mixed in with a flock of White-crowned Sparrows.

Here's one of the aforementioned White-crowned Sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys, a few weeks before they show up in Calgary.

I know this is not a passerine, but I wanted to include this Rufous Hummingbird, Selasphorous rufus, as it was another bird that succeeded in drawing the interest and admiration of my crowd of non-birding teenagers.

Those are few of the smaller birds that we saw on our trip but the hummingbird was not the bird that most wowed the crowd, as we'll see next week....

Boiling Reef

At the end of April, I took my Grade 9 class on their West Coast sailing trip to British Columbia's Gulf Islands.  Like last year, I thought it would be interesting for you if I featured a few of the birds and birding hotspots that we saw during the trip.  Once again the students were unsurprisingly bemused by my birdwatching but I think I made a few connections.  At least two or three students were getting very good at identifying seabirds by the end of the trip and were doing so without any prompting from me.  We also found a beautiful Townsend's Warbler which hung around on a low branch long enough for one teenager to say "OK, I guess that's pretty cool looking"!  Progress?

The warbler was on Tumbo Island, part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, just a short distance from Boiling Reef where we went to look for sea lions, porpoises, and a diverse collection of seabirds.  As you can see from the map below, the reef sits right at the convergence of currents where the tides empty and fill the Strait of Georgia.  This twice daily flow stirs up nutrients creating a rich feeding ground for all types of marine life.


View Boiling Reef Location in a larger map

The currents were in full flow when we were there, creating surging whitewater between the lighthouse on the point of Saturna Island and the reef, which was covered in Stellar's Sealions.  The loud and smelly marine mammals were certainly the most obvious life to be seen but porpoises were busy feeding between hundreds of bobbing seabirds.  Among the birds, alcids were probably the most common group of species.  These are sometimes described as the penguins of the north, swimming underwater with powerful wing strokes to propel them along in pursuit of prey, and I managed to get half-decent shots of three species during the trip (some not taken right at the above location - click images to enlarge)

Pigeon Guillemot, Cepphus columba, after a successful hunt

Common Murre, Uria aalge, this is a first year plumage bird (according to Mr. Sibley!)

Rhinoceros Auklet, Cerorhinca monocerata, - most of the alcids would dive as the boat approached and surface hundreds of metres away so it was nice to see a few in flight showing off their plumage

Alcids may have provided the diversity but it was the gulls that provided the numbers, specifically thousands of Bonaparte's Gulls rafting up and flying around in huge flocks as they prepared for their spring migration.  A little further to the north, in Active Pass, we sailed through a single tightly grouped flock which had, at a very conservative guess, 5000-7000 individuals.

It's nice to have friends - one of these Bonaparte's Gulls has lost a contact lens! (Actually they are feeding on small organisms on the surface of the water that have been stirred up by the current, which is more scientific but less funny.)

There were also some life birds to be had in the area as well.  Among the many sea ducks were White-winged Scoter, a new species for me, along with Surf Scoter.  Perhaps most exciting were Long-tailed Ducks which felt like a life bird as my previous "tick" had been long range scope views of a female in winter plumage on Glenmore Reservoir.

Oh, that's why they call it a Long-tailed Duck!

So those are some highlights of the impressive diversity of nearshore seabirds that we saw on our trip.  I'll follow-up with some passerines and more familiar landbirds in the coming weeks.

West Coast Sailing 5: The List

There were many great bird sightings on this trip with even the more “ordinary” birds showing amazing beauty…

Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias

… and some remarkable behaviours, like a Belted Kingfisher, which was following a Harbour Seal around the bay at Musgrave Landing on Saltspring Island.  The seal was chasing a small shoal of fish around the shallow water along the shore and the kingfisher was dashing in to grab fish as they leapt out of the water ahead of the seal.  This is the best shot I managed to get of a kingfisher on the trip but it does capture a certain essence of what it’s like to see one of these birds hunting.

Belted Kingfisher, Ceryle alcyon

Anyway, that about wraps it up for the West Coast Sailing trip.  Here's a list of species seen, in chronological order with life birds in bold:

1. American Wigeon
2. Common Merganser
3. Glaucous-winged Gull
4. Bufflehead
5. Belted Kingfisher
6. Great Blue Heron
7. Common Goldeneye
8. Pelagic Cormorant
9. Double-crested Cormorant
10. Pigeon Guillemot
11. Canada Goose
12. Brandt's Cormorant
13. Hooded Merganser
14. American Robin
15. Dark-eyed Junco
16. Winter Wren
17. Herring Gull
18. Trumpeter Swan
19. Turkey Vulture
20. Barrow's Goldeneye
21. Anna's Hummingbird
22. Chestnut-backed Chickadee
23. Harlequin Duck
24. Northwestern Crow
25. Bald Eagle
26. Brant
27. Red-breasted Merganser
28. Rhinoceros Auklet
29. Common Murre
30. Song Sparrow?
31. Rock Pigeon
32. Mew Gull

Passing Cloud, Fine Madness, and Duen in Poet's Cove, South Pender Island

West Coast Sailing 4: Larophilia

Gulls (Larids) are not everyone’s favorite bird – they’re loud, the steal food from people and other birds.  They are also one family of birds that has, on balance, benefited from human impacts on the environment, which probably means they are displacing other species in certain habitats.  And of course they poop.  A lot.  In one case on this trip, on one of my students.

With all that being said I think they are extremely cool birds.  They are intelligent and adaptable.  They are accomplished and graceful fliers.  They also, as I discovered in my bird rehab volunteer days, have an amazing gape to which this great photo barely does justice.

Source and License: Flickr Creative Commons, Photo by Ingrid Taylar

With that in mind, one of the things I wanted to do on this trip was try to sort out gull identification a little bit - Calgary is not really a gull hotspot!  Although I freely admit that a Thayer's or Iceland Gull could fly right in front of me and I would miss it, I think I've figured out a system that works for the more common species.  For example, dark iris + medium gray back + matching wingtips = Glaucous-winged Gull, here on the dock at South Pender Island.

Glaucous-winged Gull, Larus glaucescens

Of course the whole three-year gull thing, with partial molts and different plumages makes my head spin.  As far as I can make out the bird below, based on the heavy black bill and primaries matching the body colour is also a Glaucous-winged Gull, in this case a first winter bird.

Glaucous-winged Gull, Larus glaucescens

Lastly, while on the subject of gulls, we saw a neat phenomenon on the last night of the trip as we were anchored in Fulford Harbour.  There was a large flock of gulls and some alcids (auklets?) some way out in the channel, apparently feeding on a school of fish.  Over the course of an hour or so, as the fish moved closer to shore (presumably spawning and/or following the sunlight as it set) the alcids departed.  The gulls - predominantly and appropriately Herring Gulls - followed all the way to the shoreline, where there were two Belted Kingfishers that joined in the feeding, as well as several Buffleheads, perhaps cleaning up fish eggs?  In any case it was great to see several species working together in their respective niches and a great learning opportunity for the students on the boat who could really see the ecosystem working as a whole.

Gull spp. (mostly Herring) feeding on fish in shoal

One more West Coast post to wrap things up in another two days...

West Coast Sailing 3: LBJ Confusion

I know I’m not the only beginning field birder who is challenged by the “little brown jobs”.  I had a few hours birding around Victoria in February and was able to locate a lifer Spotted Towhee.  White breast, red flanks, black back and hood – straightforward enough.  Unfortunately this particular Towhee was feeding in a flock of several dozen sparrows which included such species as "the one with brown stripes", "the one with tan stripes", and "the one with brown and tan streaks".


Clearly an area that I need to improve if I want to get more serious about understanding sparrows and their behaviours, not to mention building my life list.  This issue was brought to a head when we took a hike on Russell Island, just off the south-east of Saltspring Island.  At the old homestead on the tip of island we found several American Robins along with some Dark-eyed Junco's (Oregon) and two of these guys.

This individual was very obliging in hopping out onto a branch in clear view in response to a quick "pishing" noise.  I grabbed my field guide back on the boat and quickly came to the excited conclusion, base on the white throat and yellow supraloral spot that this was an uncommon White-throated Sparrow.  Hmmm.... but the breast was just a little bit too streaky and those malar stripes are pretty dark.  I went home feeling less than comfortable with the ID.  


On the weekend, with my full library on hand, I had a look through the excellent "Sparrows of the United States and Canada: The Photographic Guide" by Beadle and Rising.  The photos available in that publication, combined with Sibley's description of the Song Sparrow as being "common and widespread in brushy areas near water", leads me to believe that Song Sparrow is the correct ID.  


Whether or not that ID is correct, I take three things away about LBJ identification from this experience:


1) Learn birdsongs
2) Get out with more experience birders more often
3) Accept that not every bird seen can be identified


Any confirmation, feedback, or tips for dealing with "little brown jobs" are welcome in the comments. 

West Coast Sailing 2: Seabirds Feeding

As we cruised around the Gulf Islands there was lots of chance to practice some seabird identification.  Brant are moving through the area at the moment and six birds sat on the water in a open channel between two islands.  They allowed us to approach quite close before taking off to the north, flashing the white “V” on their rumps. 

While I didn’t manage to get a picture of the Brant, I did have lots of opportunity to watch this Surf Scoter feeding on the edge of the dock where we moored on the third night.  The bird was plucking mussels off the concrete below the waterline and crunching down with that wonderful multicoloured beak.

Surf Scoter, Melanitta perspicillata

Another treat was Rhinoceros Auklets.  There were several rafts of these little alcids particularly around Swartz Bay and Fulford Harbour.  I wasn’t able to see any with fully developed horns but their “whiskers” stood out against their black plumage.  Pigeon Guillemots and Common Murres were also distinctive and were actively fishing – bobbing along on the surface then spreading their wings and quickly diving below the surface.

Pigeon Guillemot, Cepphus columba

As could be seen from my previous post, South Pender Island was a great spot for bold birds that seemed accustomed to people up close.  This female Red-breasted Merganser was peeking under the water then popping her head up to check that I wasn’t getting too close for comfort.  The ID of Red-breasted comes from the punk mohawk this bird is sporting.  The female Common Merganser is basically the same, minus mohawk.  If you feel I’m off on this identification, please let me know in the comments – it’s all part of the learning process!

Red-breasted Merganser, Mergus serrator 

More in two days – this time on to the infamous “LBJ’s”

West Coast Sailing Part 1: Harlequin Performance

Harlequin (noun): a colourful stock character in an improvisational comedy.  Also a sea duck breeding in fast flowing waters and wintering on rocky shorelines.  I think this video shows that there is some overlap between these definitions:

The lack of posts over the last couple of weeks is due to report card preparation time, leading up to taking my Grade 9 class sailing in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia last week.  It was a great trip with generally decent weather – a few wet days but that’s to be expected on the coast in March.  We spent our time around the south end of Saltspring Island and near Pender Islands.  We were probably never more than 10-15km from the Victoria airport as the (Northwestern) Crow flies but as far as the kids were concerned we were in the middle of nowhere!

The "Passing Cloud" in Todd Inlet, Brentwood Bay, BC

Obviously this was not a birding trip, and tramping through the woods with 22 rambunctious teenagers does tend to flush all but the most laid back species (that would be you, Chestnut-backed Chickadee!).   Nevertheless it’s kind of hard NOT to see lots of species when you’re on a boat in the Pacific Northwest in March with the birds migrating and the herring spawning.  I ended up recording 31 species in my journal and I thought I would write a few posts spotlighting some of the more interesting sights and a few of my novice identification challenges. Mr. Harlequin seemed as good a place as any to start.  More to follow tomorrow...

Harlequin Duck, Histrionicus histrionicus