Blog of the Plague Year(s)

eBird data:  https://ebird.org/checklist/S75654617  Weather:  Clear, patchy frost early, 8 am 1C, wind calm, noon 10 C, E 10 kph.   Tide:  Falling--4 m at 8 am, 3m at 11 am Very calm early morning.  Mergansers seem to have left the pond.  The light was kinda magic.    There are flocks of hundreds of pine siskins in the Estuary this past week. They feed on the seeds in the Douglas fir cones.   One of my least favourite birding moments is when I meet up with folks on the trails (here or anywhere) and they see my binocs and camera and ask me, usually loudly, "Have you seen anything interesting?"  My usual answer is, "It's all interesting," but lately I've made the mistake of telling them what I've found interesting.  Today it was, "Oh YES!  There's an American Dipper down at the gravel bars in the river, and he's singing his little lungs out and feeding on salmon eggs that I guess have washed down from the spawning area ...

 eBird data:  https://ebird.org/checklist/S75605669 Weather:  unsettled, windy  12C, showers, wind gusts to 22kph Tide:  3 metres at 9:30 am, falling Relatively quiet, bird-wise.  I think the wind kept the smaller birds in the shrubbery for most of the morning.  The snipe was present again, and possibly a second bird, in the marshy area nearest the houses.  I'm still not managing a photo, but perhaps over time I'll get lucky.   That said, the eagles were very busy--at least 8 of them, 2 juveniles, all harassing gulls and following the salmon run.      20 red-breasted mergansers in the river.  Salmon run seems to be getting livelier.  Today there were fishermen as well as birds.  I didn't photograph them.   By the end of my walk the wind had settled and I was happy to note that no trees had come down.    

 eBird data:  https://ebird.org/checklist/S75567109  Weather 9C @ 8 am, mostly cloudy, wind calm, picking up to ESE 7kph Tide:  falling to 2.3 metres at 10am, then rising Relatively quiet morning bird-wise.   Assorted ducks in pond, female hooded mergansers, 4 mallards, 2 female buffleheads. Big flocks of siskins, many spotted towhees and juncos along the path to the shore.   Interesting (to me, at least) patchy emergence of sunlight.  I took this shot intending to show the fall colours and didn't even notice the raven.  The mid-tide left a tidal channel open, and I watched a merganser fishing--swimming back  and forth across the channel with its beak in the water.  I gather there must have been small fish to feed on.  Alas, none of my fishing photos actually came out. As usual, I sat on the bench overlooking the shore.  There were 100s of gulls, and eagles harassing them, all really too distant for my zoom. ...

This is an experiment, to see how access to blogs work.  More editing anon. See eBird for data: https://ebird.org/checklist/S75444151 32 species observed. Cloudy, wind increased from calm early to ESE 5kph by mid-day. Temperature steady at 5C. Tide:  1.8 m at 8 am, rising to 3.2 m at mid-day Hooded mergansers back on the pond, with 1 pair of bufflehead, 1 pair mallards, and 2 pair of common mergansers: (not all visible in photo) A spotted towhee was eating the snowberries.  First I'd seen that--I thought they were toxic to most species. 4 deer browsing in fields.   A naturalist, a very pleasant young man, from Nature Trust BC was taking a survey of the estuary, apparently to evaluate the effect of restoration.  Low tide reduced the ability to count waterfowl presence. A seal in the river, following salmon upstream.  A sea lion offshore.

 I've made a commitment (at least to myself) to visit the north side of the Englishman River Estuary regularly.  Perhaps not every day, but, weather permitting, at least 5 days out of the week, to observe and record, not merely birds, but the changes in the setting --flora, fauna, weather, tides, light.  It's not a heavily travelled area, but there are always people to meet there, and many of them seem to share my sense that this is a truly special place.  I think I might say, a sacred place.  Often there is a stillness in the morning that is deeply wholesome and serene.   Other times, of course, there is a lively chorus of birds--tweeting, quacking, honking.   It was cold this morning.  No doubt it will become colder as the season deepens, but -4 Celsius at 9 am of an October morning is nippy, and there was frost and frozen puddles.  The effect was striking. The duck pond by the bridge was showing a glaze of ice at its far end. The sky ...

 Three nights at Green Point Campground in Pacific Rim National Park. Dark rainforest, long sandy beach, very popular with surfers.  A remarkably clean beach, free of styrofoam and other bits of grot.  I've camped here before, some years back, but don't remember the lack of flotsam.   Campsite was rather damp--not because of rain, but just really foggy and misty overnight. This was an old boardwalk among the ferns down to Combers Beach And this (above) is Combers Beach Lagoon A couple of views of Long Beach     And a view of beachfront real estate.  Back in the High and Far-Off Times (as Kipling would have had it), when I first arrived in BC,  Long Beach wasn't a National Park but rather a destination where hippy types camped on the beach and built shelters out of driftwood.  (Actually, I never did--I was too busy trying to become a great musician, but lots of my friends did.)  Camping on the beach is now strictly forbidden, and it ...