Black-tailed Gulls of Hachinohe
The Aomori Shrine Where “Umineko” Soar is a recent episode from an NHK series entitled Document 72 Hours.
The Aomori Shrine Where “Umineko” Soar is a recent episode from an NHK series entitled Document 72 Hours.
Last Sunday marked the beginning of the B.C. Coastal Waterbird Survey season. This is my third year volunteering with Birds Canada to help gather information on population trends and the health of birds using our coastal waters.
I was hoping to write an entry about the first visit to my survey site – my stretch of beach is quite rocky, and during winter months it becomes treacherous and even impassable, as the photograph below demonstrates.
But I adore it.
Yesterday I went to one of my favourite local patches to do some birding – which I haven’t done since I began monitoring gull nests back in mid-June. I honestly forgot what it was like to bird in a quasi-natural environment after spending over two months spying on gull chicks from desolate concrete sidewalks a meter or two away from passing cars (and their exhaust).
Jericho Beach Park is one of my favourite places in Vancouver for birding. There’s a large variety of habitats and it’s fairly quiet if you go early enough in the morning.
A lot of birders have been showing up for the past week to catch a Great Egret that’s been hanging out in the pond – a rare species for us here in Vancouver. This bird was not the reason I went. I’ve given up on ’twitching’ – the jargon birders use for chasing rare birds – as it always entails too many people with too many cameras mulling around. I’m far happier wandering about aimlessly and experiencing whatever I encounter.
Birding, for me, is about escaping humanity – even to the point of pretending Homo sapiens or our recent ancestors never made it through the population bottleneck(s) we encountered.
Anyway, enough of my anti-anthropic ideology… here are some of the birds I was lucky to encounter.
Filtered through the wildfire smoke, the morning sunlight took on the colour of apricots. The air was heavy with humidity and the heat already pressed down on the city and those of us walking the barren concrete spaces where pedestrians are an afterthought.
Almost all the nests I’ve been watching since late June are empty. It’s strange seeing these rooftops with only scraps of nest material remaining. How far removed we are from the nomadic origins of our species. How difficult to imagine our homes as temporary spaces, to travel and survive without our countless possessions, to leave so little trace of our existence.
I found the chicks from Chimney nest on the awning/overhang where they have taken up residence since leaving the chimney platform.