Where: Iona Beach, Richmond Nature House, Terra Nova (Richmond) Weather: Cloudy, 7-10°C
The Outing
We opted for a rare weekday outing this week because the weather otherwise looked to be more of The Rains (which turned out to be accurate). We seized our window of opportunity and actually had pretty decent light for much of the day and zero precipitation, woo.
It was an all-Richmond outing today, and that meant planes. And helicopters. And then more planes. I shot more planes than chickadees. To be fair, planes travel in nice, predictable paths, which makes them a lot easier to shoot.
Iona Beach had an unusually dense population of herons nestled in the reeds around the main pond, all of them sleeping or looking stabby. A few flew off, and I managed to capture one pooping in flight. Herons are fairly large birds, so the volume they dispense is…impressive.
Elsewhere, we saw song sparrows, a finch and various waterfowl, including a merganser that was a little too far away to get good shots of. We also fell yet again into the Iona Beach trap of “walk back along the beach, run out of beach, then figure out how to keep going without getting your feet wet.” We got our feet wet.
Along the way, we saw a lot of gulls diving for goodies and got some good action shots there.
Next up was the Richmond Nature House, where we actually found parking. Yay. The feeders were doing good business, with approximately one million juncos dominating. At least until the towhees wanted some seed. We were pleasantly surprised by the appearance of a female and male downy woodpecker, both of whom went for the suet. We watched the fame stuff the suet into little holes in a nearby tree. That woodpecker is probably more organized than I am.
One squirrel was present and managed to squeeze itself into a feeder where it gorged on and off. It would sometimes come out and wade around in the water (most of the area around the feeders was a bit flooded from the recent snowmelt) to find soggy but easy-to-access seeds there.
We ended at Terra Nova, where we saw more planes than birds. I was happy, Nic less so. But we did get a nice treat, as the pond where we usually see a grebe or two not only had a grebe, it was much closer than usual, allowing for our best, grebiest shots yet.
I experienced some issues with my camera after swapping batteries, which may have been a coincidence, or it could be the camera just needed to be cleaned. Or both. It wasn’t due to the cold, though, as it got up to a downright mild 10C, a sharp contrast to recent outings. I’ll be thinking of spring now, which means more snow is on the way, probably.
Terra Nova is also where we saw this weirdly yellowish looking bank of cloud along the horizon, out on the strait, the kind you’d see in a horror movie, with ships full of undead pirates sailing out if. We just saw the cloud, though.
Overall, a fine outing, despite said glitches, with better than expected weather and light that was largely better than expected.
The Shots
Soon™
The Birds (and other critters)
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
- Anna’s hummingbird
- Black-capped chickadee
- Dark-eyed junco (x 1 million)
- Fox sparrow
- Downy woodpecker
- Golden-crowned sparrow
- House finch
- Northern flicker
- Red-winged blackbird
- Song sparrow
- Spotted towhee
Waterfowl:
- American coot
- American wigeon
- Great blue heron
- Hooded merganser
- Mallard
- Ring-necked duck
- Pied billed grebe
- Snow goose
- Surf scoter
- Trumpeter swan
Common:
- American crow
- Seagull
Raptors:
- Bald eagle
Non-birds:
- One very robust squirrel
