Where: Blackie Spit/Crescent Beach, Serpentine Wildlife Management Area (Serpentine Fen), Green Timbers Lake (Surrey)
Weather: Partly sunny, 16-18°C
We spent the day birding in the city where tomorrow lives. We did not encounter tomorrow, but we did see a Tufted Duck!
Blackie Spit
It was unusually mild and as a bonus, there was almost no breeze at all at Blackie Spit, so it really did feel like 16C or warmer, thus making this our first shorts-wearing birding of 2026.
Despite the balmy weather, there weren’t as many people there as expected. The super low tide might have been a factor.
Walking the path to the end of the spit itself, we had copious opportunities to get snazzy shots of the equally snazzy Savannah Sparrows, some of which were singing their little hearts out, because spring has sprung, and you can’t mate with yourself.
At the end of the spit, we spotted some Long-billed Dowitchers, but they were rather far off, thanks to the aforementioned extreme low tide.
The trail to the pump station yielded better results, with sparrows a-plenty in the trees, bushes and on the ground. A female blackbird sat proudly on a branch for a bit, holding a juicy ol’ caterpillar in her bill. Yum!
With low tide putting many waterfowl out of reach of even our telephoto lenses, we headed to Serpentine Fen, to see if our luck would change.
Serpentine Fen
As it turned out, the Serpentine River was also probably the lowest we’ve ever seen and the overall number of birds was relatively small, though we did get some decent variety, with an eagle in a tree near the start, a few herons, a cormorant and a Canada Goose nesting on what would normally be a small island but is currently a hill surrounded by a lot of mud. I’m sure the future goose babbies will be safe, regardless.
An unexpected surprise came in the form of a few Greater Yellowlegs strutting around some of the ponds in the area, mingling with the shovelers and Mallards.
The view of Mt. Baker was quite nice, too, with a tuft of white cloud caught on the top of the peak and being pulled away by the wind like cotton candy. I took a photo using my phone’s 30x digital zoom. It looks like an impressionist painting. My camera yielded a less opinionated version of the mountain.
Green Timbers Lake
And speaking of tufts…
We originally planned to go to Brydon Lagoon, but Nic had already driven a lot for reasons, so he suggested we go to the closer Green Timbers Lake instead, as a rare Tufted Duck has been seen there recently.
We arrived and I noted again how they have two signs over each other, one that says WELCOME and the other which says DANGER.
And lo, there in pretty much the middle of the lake (a bit far away, boo) was a Tufted Duck.
If you check the link, you’ll see the usual range of a Tufted Duck is Europe, Asia and Africa, none of which are North America, so he is a long way off course. He didn’t seem to mind.
Despite being a lifer, I felt strangely indifferent to seeing it, because they look almost exactly like a scaup, just with a little black mullet on the back. I like scaups, don’t get me wrong, but it’s…just not very different.
We ended our visit to the lake with a Douglas squirrel going big on a pile of sunflower seeds atop a fence post, giving us a nice cute-squirrel-pose before wrapping up.
In retrospect, the number of photos I took vs. the variety of birds we saw is probably among the most skewed ever–only 384 photos in total (and if that sounds like a lot, I regularly shoot over twice that and sometimes more than 1,000–without using burst mode, too!) The particular circumstances and locations meant a lot of the birds were far away or too fleeting to get shots of. But sometimes that’s the way it goes.
The weather for the third week of April was totally fabulous, though, apart from some increasing high cloud later on.
The Shots
Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto. Some scenery shots taken on a Samsung Galaxy S26.
A few shots, gallery pending:
The Birds (and other critters)
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
- American Bushtit
- American Goldfinch
- American Robin
- Anna’s Hummingbird
- Black-capped Chickadee
- Dark-eyed Junco
- Golden-crowned Sparrow
- House Finch
- Orange-crowned Warbler
- Red-winged Blackbird
- Rufous Hummingbird (heard)
- Savannah Sparrow
- Song Sparrow
- Spotted Towhee
- White-crowned Sparrow
Waterfowl and shorebirds:
- American Coot
- American Wigeon
- Bufflehead
- Canada Goose
- Common Loon (heard)
- Double-crested Cormorant
- Great Blue Heron
- Greater Yellowlegs
- Green-winged Teal
- Killdeer
- Long-billed Dowitcher
- Marsh Wren (heard)
- Lesser Scaup
- Mallard
- Northern Shoveler
- Tufted Duck
- Wood Duck
Common:
- American Crow
- Some gulls
Raptors:
- Bald Eagle
Non-birds:
- A single turtle sunning itself, probably a Western painted turtle
- A Douglas Squirrel nomming away on sunflower seeds
- A few chunky bumblebees
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