Hi Tweets,

Had some business in East Vancouver today (had a real job for a little while
but bad back forced the owner to lay me off; there was some residual
paperwork to finish up), so cycled back along Powell Street. Stopped at the
N end of Rogers Street, just over the railway tracks (if you go, be careful:
there's a *lot* of freight trains go through there) where the Roger's Museum
of Sugar (really!) is, just W of the UGG (United Grain Growers) silos on the
waterfront; closest main intersection is Clark and Powell--these are *not*
the Alberta Wheat Pool silos; they're about ~2 km to the E--to see if there
were many ducks there, and noticed the resident couple of hundred Rock Doves
Columba livia were bunched up and circling in that sweeping unison style
they adopt when a raptor is around. I thought perhaps Granville Clint, the
downtown male Peale's Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus was there, checking
out the lunch specials. Eyeballed the building's many possible falcon
perches and finally spotted the unmistakeable falcon shape parked on the
rooftop at the water end of the grain terminal. Howdy, Clint; I thought,
gee, I see you've put on some length and weight. Hmmm. Got the bins out and
immediately saw that the falcon's tail projected *well* past the wingtips
and the bird was of a honkin' big size that made the ID a certainty: a quite
dark grey-morph GYRFALCON F. rusticola, which I tentatively aged out as an
immature.

Greyish-brown-looking when perched, when in good light, banking or soaring
overhead, it showed a heavy brown cast to the back and very heavy dark brown
streaking on underparts; the breast appeared to show a white or very pale
ground beneath the coarse streaks, suffused browner on the belly. Underwing
coverts showed dark checkered brown contrasting with pale cold brown flight
feathers. Head lacked the hood of adult dark-morph but showed little obvious
pattern--usually, it was simply too far away to see fine-point detail. On
one of its passes overhead I got the impression of a greyish cere and
eye-ring, rather than yellow.

Put on a lovely show--I spent half-an-hour there--sweeping the length of the
*very long* buildings in long ruler-straight glides interspersed with the
occasional gonnagetcha dash or short pitch at a pigeon, down to one end,
brief circle and sweep back the other way, repeat twice more, scare the
muffins out of the pigeons, then park butt for five minutes and enjoy their
panic wheeling before getting back to work scaring them some more.

Well, after half an hour, a northbound adult dark-morph Red-tailed Hawk
Buteo jamaicensis (a very blackish bird with dull dark-russet tail) that was
riding a thermal makes the mistake of not seeing the falcon until it's too
late. I learned from direct observation that, as fast as an adult Red-tailed
Hawk can hike when it's a-skedaddlin', which is considerable fast, even a
young Gyrfalcon in level flight can reel it in *much* faster. The chase took
them behind the terminals and no-one came back out, though I waited another
ten minutes. Perhaps the falcon killed and ate the Red-tail, perhaps they
decided to share a thermal and head north in amity, perhaps the falcon
chased it all the way to Burnaby then returned to the terminal--we'll never
know. Drat.

But while I was waiting, another totally unexpexted species showed up: two
*Greater White-fronted Geese* Anser albifrons of all things flew in from the
harbor over the little saltwater slough W of the terminals and joined some
snoozing and listlessly snacking Canada Geese Branta canadensis on a
grass-and-cinder parking lot near the beginning of that stretch of Rogers
St., immediately N of the railway tracks. Usually rare in Vancouver BC.

Interesting little spot this afternoon!

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)