Hi Tweets,

Sorry to be late with this report but something's messed up my email, and I
finally got it working just today. For a while. Fingers crossed.

Out to a five-hour seawatch from the far end of the Iona S Jetty on a
blustery cold wet day giving way to a 'Group of Seven' sunset full of
dramatic cloud wrack and god-lighting over the Strait of Georgia:
meteorological mellerdrammer. Highlights included three (2 light-morph, 1
dark-morph) Parasitic Jaegers, an adult Bald Eagle looking on avuncularly
as 5 immatures learned how to hunt gulls in typically adolescent slipshod
way, a late-ish Lapland Longspur at the base of the Jetty and 2
SemiSandpipers in the Iona Settling Ponds.
Here's some stuff I found interesting: there were no Common Terns or
Bonaparte's Gulls for the jaegers to mug, and all the Caspian Terns were
adults (have seen PAJA singling out juv. CATE for some quality attention,
never adults) so they jacked California Gulls instead--and only Alt 1
CAGU's at that, never an adult in six harassing incidents though adult CAGU
were common in the area. When smaller targets are unavailable (BOGU, COTE),
this selection of young birds only as targets when the target is nearly as
large to larger than the jaeger is consistent in my observations in
Vancouver BC over a decade or so.

The Bald Eagles gave some strenuous chase to gulls and waterfowl when I
first got there in the early afternoon, with one large young bird in
particular being persistently aggressive, but the chases became more and
more perfunctory as the afternoon latened. At the last, when I left in the
early evening, some 300 gulls were standing fairly and nonchalantly close
to at least three of the eagles. Also saw a large immature come out of
nowhere and literally knock an adult which had been posing photogenically
on the rocks at the end of the jetty completely down into the deep water
just off the rocks (vanity gets its comeuppance?). Swim ashore? Nah, just
took off straight from the water like the world's biggest Mallard (a post
following this one sometime soon will relate my observation of an adult
eagle that went down in the water off Point Grey almost a full kilometer
--half a mile or so-- from the nearest land the day before--and survived).

The small Double-crested Cormorant colony (12-15 nests) on the beacon 150
meters to the NW of the Jetty end may suffer low survival for the eggs and
chicks: that big young eagle used it for a perch for much of the afternoon,
and the water was full of cormorants itching to get back and brood those
eggs cooling in the biting southeasterly wind.
This big batch of eagles hanging around Iona Island this spring (hah!) is
unusual; any group like this in any season outside of winter is unusual for
Iona.

Almost 30 Sanderling sprinted around the sandflats, two in Definitive
Alternate plumage, most others still pretty fresh (hey, dudes, look at all
those Red-necked Stints! Yeah, right ;-), and a couple looking like they
were gonna stick it out in Basic/Alt 1 style for the putative summer.

*Lots* of White-winged Scoters, and still quite a few loons of the three
common species. Not to mention the rare loon freezing his butt off on the
concrete wall overlooking the Strait. Seeing the jaegers made it
worthwhile.

Conditions: temp: 10-12 Celsius; wind: E-SE 35-40 km/hr to NW 15 to NE
15-20 (almost completely around the compass just in the short time I was
there); precip: intermittent showers, occ. heavy; cloud: heavy cumulo- and
nimbostratus overcast lifting to broken strat and stratocumulus
(cumulonimbus cells above mountains); tide: slack very low to flooding
high; sea state: rippled to light chop.

Species seen from far end, Iona S Jetty

Red-throated Loon 3 2 Alt, 1 Bsc
Pacific Loon 8 all Alt
Common Loon 11 9 Alt, 2 Bsc
Red-necked Grebe 2 in pair, both Def Alt
Western Grebe 48
Aech. grebe sp. 32
Double-crested Corm. 45 27 Alt
Brandt's Cormorant 3
Great Blue Heron 32
Canada Goose 4
Mallard 2 in pair
Greater Scaup 11
Black Scoter 3 2m 1f
Surf Scoter 25
White-winged Scoter 850 70%m
Red-breasted Merganser 1 f
Bald Eagle 6 2a 4im
Sanderling 28 2 Def Alt, 24 Alt molt or Alt1
Western Sandpiper 2 2f, Def Alt
Parasitic Jaeger 3 2 light- 1 dark-morph
Bonaparte's Gull 1 Alt 1
Mew Gull 3 3 Alt2
Ring-billed Gull 2 1 Alt1, 1 Alt2
California Gull 350 70% imm
Glaucous-winged Gull 300 40% imm
Western X Gl.-winged 3 2a 1 Alt2
Gull sp. 150*
Caspian Tern 42
Rhinoceros Auklet 1
Small alcid sp. 1
Black Swift 3
Lapland Longspur 1 m Alt1 (?)
Savannah Sparrow 2

*including a single flock of about 70 small gulls working a tid-rip but
far too far out to see what they were; they were behaving exactly as a
flock of 56 Sabine's Gulls (an unprecedentedly large flock for Strait of
Georgia) had acted several years ago about 1/2 km off the Jetty end at this
time of year. Were they just a fluke? Or do they regularly move through the
Strait but normally just too far out to see? Boy, I *reeeallly* tried to
psychokineticise that flock of gulls closer in. The Truth is Out There. You
just need a bigger scope to see it ;-)

Cheers

Michael Price The only alien planet is Earth.
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net - J. G. Ballard