As the chill and damp of autumn return to Vancouver, a few species of gulls become more common around the city.
Many people I talk to are often surprised to learn there is more than on type of “seagull”. However, if you start paying any attention to gulls you’ll quickly notice you’re able to differentiate the common species where you live.
Short-billed Gull
Short-billed Gull
One of the gulls you’ll see more often is the Short-billed Gull – until a few years ago known as a Mew Gull.
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.
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.
