Hi All

Yes it was a great day for birding. Any time you can get , what looks to
be, 5 nice days in a row while your on a weeks vacation in this neck of
the woods, things have got to be great.

On top of it all I managed to score a local lifer in the form a Say's
Phoebe. I was out riding my bike again in the usual area and it flew
across in front of me. Gee! that's a pretty small Robin, thought I. Then
the light bulb lit up and I knew what it was. I just wasn't expecting it
on this side of the mountains. I've seen them just about everywhere else
I've been.

In the field to the east of the Phoebe was what may turn out to be, our
sole surviving Sandhill Crane. The most I've ever seen was 14, at one
time, before I started birding.

A while back an attempt was made to try and re-establish a local
population. However somebody, short on foresight and long on cash,
managed to aquaria about 38,000 acres of prime farm land and waterfowl
habitat which has degenerated ever since.

Some of you may not be aware of this but a significant % of our
agricultural land, in British Columbia, is protected by a Land Use
Freeze. This is supposed to prevent the loss of such land to vast
tracts of housing or industrial sprawl.

The Agricultural Land Reserve, as it is called, was a good idea, at the
time but it is gradually getting eaten up by non agricultural uses. Also
I don't think too much thought was given to what would happen if good
dairy farms were turned into tree nurseries and blueberry fields.

The wintering duck populations have plummeted and with the introduction
of large scale cranberry growing, what may be, our lone crane is faced
with with a significant loss of habitat.

The verdict is still out, at least in my opinion, on the large number of
Golf courses that are springing up in the ALR as they are too new to
tell whether or not they will eventually provide some habitat
replacement.

Having said all that, it was a great day for birding.

The Bittern was in the same spot as he was the last time I was out. It's
fun to try and get by birds like this without flushing them. I'm riding
on top of the dike and it was in the open ditch below me. The trick is
to not look directly at them. It seems that if they think you can't see
them they feel safe enough to stay where they are. Of course it did the
famous Bittern stretch but shortly continued going about it's business.

It also pays to stop and look back where you've been. In one spot I
turned around and saw a Great Blue Heron preparing a vole for supper.
This was going on under the less than watchful eyes of one of the
nesting pair of Bald Eagles.

I was fully expecting to turn around again and see the eagle preparing
heron for supper.

I also the first Cinnamon Teal for the year, for me, and for you Varied
Thrush fans, a couple of those were still lurking around.

Well, enough for now except for one more thing. Yesterday I downloaded a
free program from AltaVista, the search engine people. It is called
AltaVista Discovery 1.1 and as well as being just a fancy update of an
existing service the program will index your files, documents and email
so that you can search them just like on the internet. Type in Turkey
Vulture and every location where those words are stored in your computer
will be brought up and displayed on results pages and you can bring up
any of those results directly from the search page. In the words of a
regular contributor to Tweeters, who shall be allowed to sing it's
praises for himself if he so chooses, Slick.

Comments from anyone that already has it?

One word of caution though, the program does not seem to like proxy
servers so you may have to bypass any that are set up in your browsers.

With that I will bid you all a good night and good birding.

Roger Craik
Maple Ridge BC
(east of Vancouver)