22 September

 eBird data: https://ebird.org/checklist/S119204010

weather:  8 am 7C wind S2,  1 pm 18C wind E 14, clear

tide:  11:30 1.7m rising

A morning rich in curiosities, some fine, some quite disturbing.

Setting out this morning, I thought the light on the Estuary fields was exceptionally lovely.


Still within the mobile home park, a youngish female pileated woodpecker was very busy at the base of a Douglas fir. (I'm pretty sure she was youngish--her pileus was still tinted with orange.)


She was very busy with her drilling, so much so that I could stand very close and photograph her.  She was also a bit of a contortionist:


Never saw a woodpecker do this before.

The early light on the changing foliage continues to delight me.



BUT:

(no photo for this)  as I walked along the service road along the river, I smelled smoke.  Not good.  Sure enough, there was an abandoned smoldering campfire a short distance into the forest.  Wow.  Angry.  At least it was just smoldering, and the wind wasn't up yet.  I phoned 911.  The dispatcher for the fire department asked me to wait at the trailhead, maybe 500 meters back along the road, which I did.  A guy was there within 15 minutes.  This seems slow, but as it happened, there was a huge fire in the town centre.  Fire departments from nearby communities had been called in and it took four hours to extinguish it.  A building was demolished.  

The nice guy from the fire department who did show up said he'd been called away from the fire in town and would have to go back to it.  But, he said, they do take fires in the Estuary grounds very seriously, and as dry as it's been this past month, untended smoldering campfires are pretty serious stuff.  I'm glad I spotted it.

We walked back from the parking lot to the fire and he put it out, using a shovel and a 20 pound fire extinguisher.  There was also drug apparatus near the fire.  Oh dear.  

I resumed my walk, finding (oh wow!) the two young peregrines, and a merlin chasing a northern flicker.  Didn't manage photos of either, but there was also a kestrel.  Photo stretches my zoom quite a bit but for sure it's a kestrel.


Kestrels are even more uncommon than peregrines in these parts.  I was happy to get the photo, because when I compare it to the young peregrines that I photographed last week, it relieves my concern that the birds I saw weren't kestrels.  They look quite different.  

Then as I sat drinking my coffee, for which I was quite ready by then, an incredibly stupid and rude woman came asking the usual stupid question.  "Do you see anything interesting?"


  I'm afraid I wasn't at my most civil, and kind of shook my head at her question, to which she replied, "I didn't think there was anything."  Two hundred gulls, three great blue herons, a small flock of mergansers, a few mallards, three killdeer, assorted ravens, and a shorebird that I couldn't see well enough to identify.  Not to mention the distinctive vegetation. Oh well.  So she began to climb over the fence and enter the marsh, and I said that it was a wildlife refuge area and the fence meant it was closed to the public.  She said, "Why?  There's nothing out there that matters."  OOOOOO!  SNARL!!! I just wasn't in a mood for that.  Then she said, "I appreciate nature."  To which I replied, "Like Hell you do."  She'd kind of picked the wrong day for me.  She left.  Good riddance.

I finished my coffee, still grumbling a bit and made my way along the river.  There was a towhee in somewhat transitional plumage, who's eye hadn't turned the usual scarlet.  He looks a bit as though he'd been chatting with the same woman as I'd just snarled at.


A bit further along the river there was a nice red-shafted flicker, posing in front of a maple leaf.


The river itself is low, but very clear.  I wonder what the salmon run will be like here.


Even with the various stupidities, it remains a wonderful place. The episode with the fire department added nearly a mile to my usual walk, and I arrived home late and hungry.



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