Hi Tweets

Oh, the joys of insomnia. Well, over the years it's led to my hearing lots
of Barn Owls flying over the house, Green and Black-crowned Night Herons,
the usual job-lots of passerine and non-p migrants, sleepy robins startled
into song or alert call by cats or raccoons poking around too close.

New species for the night watches last night, though: Caspian Terns going
over south to north at 3:50 AM PDT, full dark what with the overcast.
Daytime they're routine, flying in groups overhead whenever the rising tide
pushes them off the sandbars of Spanish Banks, and my house is on the route
they take back over Point Grey to Iona Island or Roberts Bank, wherever.

They spend a lot of time loafing around on tidal sand- and mudflats in
Vancouver BC, all adult birds. So I'm curious about what they're actually
doing here if their nearest nesting colonies are a hundred or more miles to
the south. I've not heard of them being nocturnal, and last night's
occurrence being a personal first (and they wouldn't be hard to hear if they
habitually travel at night-- sounded like a bunch of rowdy drunks rolling
home from a late party, all idiotic yee-ha and hoarse rebel yells: Yow!
Yeah, Yowza!). So, do they feed and loaf during the day and fly the hundred
or two miles to feed their young at night? Or why so many (sometimes over
250-300 adults at the Roberts Bank Jetty) local adults and no local
breeding? That doesn't make a lot of sense; in nature, no adult animal
willingly undertakes vows of chastity.

Cheers

Michael Price When I found out that seven of my years
Vancouver BC Canada was only one of theirs,
mprice at mindlink.net I started biting absolutely everything.
-Max Carlson (Ron Carlson's dog)