During my gull survey on Sunday I made another detour to visit the cormorants under the Granville Street Bridge.
This time I sat myself down and tried to take in the whole scene, paying attention to the comings and goings, to juveniles begging for food and awkwardly testing out their wings as they side-stepped along the steel girders. There were many active nests, and some that had served their purpose and were now apparently empty.
Last week Toumani Diabaté, a virtuoso kora player from Mali, passed away at only 58. As the early morning sun illuminated the city, I was listening to In the Heart of the Moon, an album he recorded with the late and equally gifted Ali Farka Touré.
I mention this not only because everyone should discover new music, but also because it’s a reminder of our mortality as living beings, of our subservience to time. This is a keynote motif of my gull surveys too, witnessing the utter mystery of these birds as they grow from fragile speckled chicks to sooty-grey fledglings, cautiously gliding in the wind.
… and then they disappear into the sky and the city. Perhaps they recognize me – but once they leave their nest, I can’t recognize them. When the season ends, I have a profound sense of loss, yet somehow strangely entangled with joy, as I witness another generation of gulls begin their tentative and risky voyage.
We’ve got some surprising updates this week, so let’s start.
Pyramid Nest
This weekend I was lucky to catch – and quick enough to change my camera settings -– one of the chicks testing out its wings!
While doing some searching about bridge-nesting cormorants, I happened across Geezer’s Blind, a guy who documented some of the nests under the Granville Street Bridge back in 2015-2017.
A few weeks back, I caught at least half-a-dozen Pelagic Cormorants gleaning vegetation from rooftops by the Granville Street Bridge. I knew they were nesting under there, but only after visiting the above blog did I realize that I could obviously see them from Granville Island.
So last Sunday I took a detour from my regular gull nest route and got my first glimpse of the nests. I spotted approximately ten nests, but there are certainly more – to my uninitiated eye I don’t quite know how to look at the scene.
Last Friday (July 20th) was the first night of the ‘Honda Celebration of Light’ fireworks. As if Honda hasn’t done enough for us… thanks guys!
Our primate brains may go wild for colourful explosions in the sky, but research unequivocally shows how dangerous and terrifying these events are for pets and urban wildlife, in addition to their detrimental environmental effects.
I suspect I was one of the few people in the city worried for the gulls nesting on the Burrard Street Bridge, located adjacent to English Bay, where display takes place.
Burrard Nest #4
Most of the chicks closest to English Bay (Clipper Nests, Burrard Nests) were accounted for on my visit, though I couldn’t see any chicks at Burrard Nest #4 (above, the most directly exposed nest), or at Pyramid Nest. I suspect (and hope) that they were nestled up, sleeping in a spot I couldn’t see.