you'll love the Harrison River. On Thursday, 28 Nov, I estimated as
carefully as I could *900* Bald Eagles in sight at one time. There were
surely 1000 or more present in the area. The Harrison River flows into the
Fraser River from the north, east of Vancouver. Look for highway 7 on your
Vancouver-area map, and you can find the Harrison R. west of Agassiz. The
best way to see the eagles is to park on the N side of the road and W side
of the river, scramble down the bank and walk north along the shore until
you can see the roosting trees and the eagles spread all out across the
shallow river feeding. Take a scope, and take rubber boots, as it's mushy.

There are a fair number of Herring Gulls mixed in with the Glaucous-winged,
and I was surprised there were no Glaucous. Tundra Swans and many ducks
were feeding in the river, including the most Common Goldeneyes I've ever
seen at one place.

If you love the smell of rotting salmon, you'll like the experience even
more. The banks are littered with hundreds of chum and fewer sockeye
salmon in all stages of decomposition.

On the more pleasant side, the Harrison Hotel at Harrison Hot Springs is a
really nice hotel, with lovely warm swimming pools and a magnificent view.
We had a nice room for $69 Canadian. The Black Forest and Cote d'Azur
restaurants in town serve haute cuisine, German and French respectively (as
if you couldn't figure that out).

For the bird recordkeepers, there was a female Oldsquaw on Harrison Lake on
27 November, and surprising numbers of Steller's Jays moving through the
cottonwoods, far from conifers, all through the Fraser Valley. We looked
and looked in vain for a Hawk Owl that just *had* to be somewhere in those
cottonwoods and birches.

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 206-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 206-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416
web site: http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html