Hi Tweets,

Another weekend, another personal-early-record migrant raptor. Walking along
the S end of Ferguson Point on Stanley Park west, outer-shore side, I heard
the kind of yipping that usually means a couple or three eagles having a
spat, except something wasn't quite right about the quality of one of the
calls. Look up and there's an OSPREY Pandion haliaetus getting the
county-line quickstep from a white-belly II-phase young BALD EAGLE
Haliaeetus leucocephalus.

The Osprey's about a month early, the average arrival date for Vancouver BC
being April 04. Today's sighting was on the first relatively warm,
non-clouded-up day of the entire winter, south winds for part of the day
shifting to moderate (and cold) northwesterly in the late afternoon.

Ran into Paul Gagnon, who showed me where the flock of 35 BLACK TURNSTONES
Arenaria melanocephala were messing around along Ferguson Point's south end
on a very low tide, and finally removed an annoying little hiatus in my
Stanley Park List, a Basic-plumaged ROCK SANDPIPER Calidris ptilocnemis;
that one's been thirty years in the filling. The flock eventually moved
south around the corner where the big boulder which is sometimes an
oystercatcher roost site at high tide and onto the rocky edges of the big
bay between Ferguson Point and the Second Beach Pool. To locate the flock,
just listen for the irritable-sounding trilling of the turnstones, usually
at or very near the water's edge.

Paul had originally been trying to photograph an odd little bird he can't
identify which had been working a cliff-face above a couple of benches and a
Himalayan blackberry tangle about fifty meters S of Siwash Rock, also of the
Park's west side. About kinglet-size or slightly bigger, it's dark above,
white below with distinct dark streaks. It flycatches, starting at the top
of the cliff and works downward to the base. My guess was an overwintering
Townsend's Warbler Dendroica townsendi, except the behavior doesn't seem
quite right, somehow. Paul's the only person in Vancouver to hit both the
high and low of Rock Wren Salpinctes obsoletus occurrence here in Vancouver
BC where the species is *very* rare: he photographed one near the summit of
Grouse Mountain above the city and then found and photographed *another* one
a few years later at Spanish Banks on rocks at the sea's edge.

While we were there talking, a pair each of BEWICK'S WRENS Thryomanes
bewickii and WINTER WRENS Troglodytes troglodytes took turns to see which
could be the more conspicuously daring, the Winter Wrens mousing about
almost literally at our feet for nearly thirty minutes, both Bewick's
perching out in the open a few feet away, all four birds offering
frame-filler shots. Nice to see Winter Wrens in the open in full sunshine in
sustained view: in the gloom of the coastal forests, it's easy to miss how
richly chestnut-colored these western pacificus-race Winter Wrens are.

Here's a bit of a puzzle, though: both Bewick's there were brownish-grey,
not grey, as the western race T. b. calophonus is supposed to be. According
to the National G field guide, it's the eastern subspecies T.b. altus which
are the brown ones.

Another notable thing was the silence of the birds and their tolerance of
each other. Though in a very tight space, and in close proximity to each
other, with a gazillion people walking by (weekends in Stanley Park,
particularly on the first decent day in months of rain and wind, tend to be
kinda jammed) just a few feet away, not one of the four wrens uttered a
sound for nearly half an hour--some sort of record for either species--nor
did they quarrel. One of the Bewick's began to fizz and sputter a bit but
quickly subsided. I would have thought that four wrens sharing the same
five-meter stretch of blackberry tangle would have been a noisy oxymoron.

At Lost Lagoon in early evening, though there were only a hundred or so
LESSER SCAUP Aythya affinis on the Lagoon, seven or eight large
flights--approx 5 thousand birds in all--flew in from the east, but unlike
several past years, most overflew the Lagoon and continued out of sight
westward, presumably going to join the scaup flocks at Iona Island. For some
reason, the scaup are also eschewing the Lagoon as a day-roost site and for
the first time in a decade the numbers have dropped. Drastically so: where
up to eight to ten thousand scaup would roost on the Lagoon on any given day
between early December and mid-April in years past, this winter, only a
relative handful of birds are using the Lagoon. Even this number may drop as
the City of Vancouver introduces secondary chlorination (engineerspeak for
doubling the amount of chlorine going into our water--helpfully, they've
suggested leaving a pitcher of city water on the counter overnight to let
the chlorine evaporate if we don't like the taste of our tapwater) to the
city's water. One of the new chlorine-introduction plants is at Lost Lagoon.
Already the Lagoon is a dead lake from the chlorinated water entering it;
it's about to get a whole lot deader. Yeah, ozonation of the water may be
less carcinogenic, but hey, it's so expensive to install, y'know.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net