Cormorants diving in LaFarge Lake

Increasingly, I find my peace, if I find any, walking around lakes. Now that I am aware of birds, it's amazing what that bird's-eye view can reveal. For example: there may have been cormorants in LaFarge Lake before, but we never saw them. Cormorants aren't fresh-water birds for the most part; they hang around the coast, probably because the fishing there is easy. But LaFarge is stocked with fish for sport, and right now those fish would probably be right-sized for the cormorant's diving.

Another thing they do - and this almost freaks people out, it looks so strange - is perch on a rock and stretch out their enormous wings and wave them gently, as if drying them. I hope to get a better video than the one below, taken at a great distance, but that one at least gives you an idea.

Their wings look batlike and a little frightening. There is something of the pelican about the cormorant, something of the heron and something of the seagull, and yet what they remind me of the most is the dodo bird.

Photographing these marvels is tricky, because without any warning at all they disappear into a straight-down dive, coming up somewhere quite else. They stay down an amazingly long time. Lately we've been treated to various different deep-lake divers, most notably the hooded merganser (and were THEY there all along, for years and years, and we never saw them?). In full hoodedness, the male's heads look like small china dinner plates, very white and flat.

I know this is only the beginning of my birded-ness, and I find myself literally running after them with my camera like some demented old-lady birder crashing through the underbrush. Even the back yard is exciting. It's different every day, and we've had some spectacular moments - a couple of months ago I was swarmed with blackbirds wanting to eat out of my hand, and a year or so ago when everything was iced over, all the birds congregated on the open water on Burnaby Lake. I've never seen so many different kinds of birds in one place, at one time.

Sunset through a fence in Port Coquitlam

We so seldom get a red sunset where we live, I had to go racing out to the back yard to try to capture this one. It wasn't easy. Our whole neighborhood is densely treed, which I love, but which gets in the way of natural phenomena. I was also shooting through the wooden lattice of the back fence. 

One evening I trotted all over the neighborhood looking for a harvest moon. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, but I sure didn't find it, and felt like an idiot. At one point I was sure I had found it and went racing toward it with a camera, only to find it was a street light. And don't get me started on the eclipse (though that was my fault, not the sun's).

This is a pretty long video for me. Originally it had a lot of jabbering in the background, but I substituted music. For the most part it's unedited, so there are dark stretches. In fact, I appear in parts of it, but am apparently invisible. At the end I was trying to show how we have green grass all year round here, but I'm not sure it showed up. At any rate, this was pinker and lasted longer than any sunset I can remember around here.

Blackbird, bye-bye

From the time it first happened, it has always seemed magical to me that blackbirds fly down to eat out of your hand at Piper Spit, the dock on Burnaby Lake. I've even had a bird in each hand, but this time they took turns, not always graciously. I've never seen so many of them at one time, all of them greedy to be fed. For months I've noticed this flock, juvenile males who were probably hatched last spring, and they were too shy to come down, though they did take an interest. They seem to like to mass in a clump of bushes near the entrance of the dock, and even if you can't see them, you can hear that exquisite song. And when people walk by, they don't fly away. They know a good thing when they see it! But with the capricious habits of birds, we may not see them again until next spring. 

Sea to sky majesty

A glimpse of our drive home on the Sea to Sky highway, Squamish.

Stop, stop! Stop this thing NOW!

Our Sea to Sky adventure got a bit hairy when at maximum altitude, the wind began to howl. At that point my husband helpfully said, "They stop it when the wind picks up." STOP IT?? How do you stop a gondola in mid-air? How do you get OUT Of the thing?

Hybrids in love

The continuing saga of Bosley, the magpie duck/mallard hybrid, who has finally found love in Belinda - another hybrid. At least, we're pretty sure, with her pied markings and flipped-up tail. And she has a green bill, which I've never heard of! Every time we go to Como Lake, we see the two of them together, but there is always a third presence - a mallard drake who just hangs around them. At one point, he seemed very attached to Bosley and even chased him all over the park, while Bosley ran in terror. Is this a romantic duck triangle, or what?

Our miracle duck has found a mate!

Bosley, the magpie duck/mallard hybrid of Como Lake, has had an interesting summer. We almost always see this handsome, friendly guy dabbling along the shore or waddling around, fat as a goose. But then he disappeared for weeks, and we were very worried. Finally we saw him frantically running towards the lake, a mallard drake in hot pursuit. We were a bit shocked, but thought, well, maybe Bosley is a Boslina. Another time, we saw him chilling in the reeds with what looked like the same drake. What was going on?

Then the other day, an amazing development: Bosley appears with a completely different duck, which also looks like a hybrid. She (for it must be a she) is white with creamy-tan markings, a cocoa-brown head and neck, and a white ring where a mallard's neck-ring would be. She has the ruffly wing-feathers and tail-curlicue of a magpie duck, and her long bill, very strangely, is green.

Trust Bosley to pick a true exotic. I don't know if these two will produce young, but I hope so. Oddly enough, a lone male mallard is still hanging around with them, and I can't tell if it's the same one as before.

A threesome? What can it mean?

Christmas waterfall

The most amazing light display at Lafarge Lake was the waterfall, reflected in the lake. I've never seen anything like this. I want to go back just to see this again and get a better shot of it.

Christmas Wonderland

This video does not begin to reflect the beauty of the light display at Lake Lafarge. We nearly froze to death, but it was worth it. No longer do we need to drive all the way in to Stanley Park to see an impressive light display! The reflections in the water were particularly beautiful.

Haunted movie set: squeamish in Squamish

As part of our "staycation", Bill and I took a drive to Squamish, B. C., for a two-way mini-vacation. We rode the Sea to Sky Gondola, dizzily but beautifully, up the mountain (which mountain? All I know is, my ears were popping), then down into the mines, where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew. 

And by God, I went on my first suspension bridge! I always thought I'd have to be blindfolded like a horse, but I made it. It has a very thick cable to hang on to, and is more stable (speaking of horses) than I thought it would be. No way do you stop to get photos on this thing, however, so that's not me.

The whole day was nice, with its moments of giddiness. For some reason, the ascending gondola seemed to be going at a tremendous speed, which queased me out a bit.  Descending, it was gently floating down. So I didn't have that tingling feeling in my fingers and toes. I was no longer squeamish in Squamish.

Great big truck!  Wheels go all the way across the sky. What can it mean??

My friends Bobby Orr and Jack Miner at the Britannia Mine Museum, once a working copper mine, now a spooky relic/tourist attraction with lots of strange vibes around.  A bit squirmy to go underground in a sort of metal train thingie, which would have been nicer without the 400-pound woman jamming me into the side of it. Sorry, it really did take away from the experience. I likely had about 1/3 the room I needed to be comfortable and bear bruises today. 

A sub-mo-chine gun? No, it's a drill. Really old. The really old ones kicked up so much dust that the miners died. It was a horrible life. They had to demonstrate every bit of deafening machinery in the tunnel. By then I really was squeamish in Squamish.

I'm not sure that hard hat is on right. I don't know why it's so imperative that we wear one, unless gigantic hunks of rock sometimes come hurtling down and pound people into the ground like a tent peg.

Now this was the best part. You can't begin to get the idea of the scope of this place - it is huge, cavernous, and like something out of a Terry Gilliam cartoon in its elaborate grotesquerie. They did something-or-other here. This is frequently used as a movie set, earning the facility a nice piece of change. This could double for any abandoned factory. It is both creepy and cool, and at one point I turned my head and kind of said, mentally, "hello". Someone was "up there", but I did not get the creepy feeling I sometimes get (like in that goddamn coffee shop in Vancouver that had been converted from an old warehouse). I think there is such a thing as a happy shade. 

If you've read this blog at all, I mean followed it, and I just realized the "views" I get here are mostly from me going back in to edit the piece, you'll recall my Gershwin's Ghost experience. I am not a medium, but I do pick up strong impressions which were entire discounted by my so-called medium friend.

Then he died. Dropped down in his tracks, just like that. Funny, because I've never cursed anyone before.

Really Stupid Picture!

Special bonus video. Oh, all right - it isn't so special, but here it is.

Mystery of the Magpie Duck: still unsolved?

After the revelations in yesterday's email from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, we went to visit our newly-recognized magpie duck in Como Lake. There he was, fat and feathered and practically eating out of a man's hand as he threw seeds to the flock, which was waddling around on the lake shore.

But then I noticed something.

I noticed something I had sort-of noticed before. Our duck's plumage didn't exactly match the photos of magpie ducks, though they had the same general configuration of light and dark.

But our duck is brown.

Our duck has a brown breast and sides which pretty closely match the rich variegated plumage on the mallards (particularly the females) all around him. Magpie ducks are closer to solid black and white.

Then I realized I probably didn't fully understand what the Cornell Laboratory guy said: "It is a hybrid  of mallard origin" likely referred to OUR duck alone, not the whole species as I had assumed. I guess I thought his entire race had a mallard origin, like Thoroughbreds being spawned from ancient Arabians, or Bengal cats from wildcats, but probably not. Our guy is unique.

Though we can't know for sure because he likely won't submit to a DNA test, this is likely a mixed-race duck, a genetic puzzle, which is partly what makes him so special. That means either his Mummy or his Daddy was a magpie duck which mated with a mallard: a strange love affair, which might even have rendered him sterile, like the mule which results from a donkey mating with a horse.

Or not?

And why is he so big? He's nearly the size of a goose, for God's sake! It's hard to believe he was crossed with anything, let alone a duck so relatively small. We noticed his feet were at least an inch longer, as was his bill. But I tend to trust what the Cornell Lab guys say.

Today, when I was particularly eager to get a good look at him, he practically posed for me, his whole body out of the water, even turning to let me get a look at the other side.

Though the mystery has been solved, it hasn't been solved fully. The scenario is now more complicated: a magpie duck and a mallard producing offspring which has features of each, but is mostly magpie in size and configuration.  And what of "the other one", the second magpie duck which we thought we saw once? Did that mating produce more than one offspring which decided to stay in the safety of the lake rather than become someone's dinner? Or is this Bigfoot all over again, seeing what you want to see?

I wonder, too, why he posed for us on dry land like that. We've been glimpsing that duck for several years, in an "oh, look, there he is!" "Where?" "Oh, he's gone now" sense. Never has he stood there three feet away from us, preening and quacking into the camera.

The magpie is a most illustrious bird

Dwells in a diamond tree

One brings sorrow and one brings joy

Sorrow and joy for me

The magpie is a most royal bird

Black and blue as night

I would that I had feathers three

Black and blue and white

I saw the gentle magpie bird

In dusky yester-eve

One brought sorrow and one brought joy

And sooner than soon did leave

The magpie is a most illustrious bird

Dwells in a diamond tree

One brings sorrow and one brings joy

Sorrow and joy for me

Sorrow and joy for me

Sorrow and joy for me

Pigeon explosion at Piper Spit!

Pure magic: gifs from Piper Spit

I love making gifs, in full knowledge that they don't always  run so well. They can be slow or jerky for the first thirty seconds or so when you open a post, but normally they resolve - or at least, they do for me. For you, they may not be jerky at all, I hope.

Lately I've been able to make some really beautiful ones from our Burnaby Lake visits. I've found a new program - Imgur  - well, until IT stops working too, as they all do. Imgur works well and makes some huge gifs, but is very very slow and it's hard to save them. I'm not sure why that is. I use another one called Giphy that takes about thirteen seconds to make a beautiful gif, but it can only be from a short video, and a maximum of ten seconds long. Imgur is more like fifteen. But then, that's not important - is it? All that matters is getting them up here, a few seconds of magic time seen over and over again.

Some people say they hate gifs, and I do too, the two-second ones that are supposed to be funny. They are awful. People with the right equipment can make one-minute ones, but why don't I see them anywhere?

That gorgeous alpha male red-winged blackbird just swooped down on me unbidden, but after he finally left, THIS gorgeous creature came along. Looking it up, I found out it was a female red-winged blackbird, explaining her boldness. It's hard to describe her beauty, as her feathers were shot through with gold. 

Now here's a nice little sequence! Though if you watch carefully, the male actually waited until the female flew away. Or so it appears - unless she saw him coming - but that's not likely, because he flew up behind her. May I say once more - I have NEVER fed wild birds, and don't believe in feeding wildlife, but in my old age I have become weak, and there is a dire shortage of magic in my life now that my backyard birds have fled. An excuse, no doubt.

These sandhill cranes are mystical creatures, and they love to hang around the docks, hoping to be fed like all these birds. We usually see a mated pair, but this looks to be a smaller bachelor male (note the red mask). I just keep waiting for the pair to return with a fuzzy crane chick. If that happens, oh God, the gifs, the GIFS!!

POST-IT NOTE: Sometimes I think the gifs have to go through one entire (in this case, 15-second) cycle to run properly. But how do I know? All I know is that they DO run properly eventually, but if they're slow and jerky it takes forever to run through that first cycle.  Just keep watching, they'll move. These are some of the nicest gifs I've ever made. Just little packages of magic.

A bird in the hand: mystery songbird at Piper Spit

Later identified as a tree swallow, but can't they come up with a more lyrical name than that?! This guy's song was intoxicating. Like all the birds at Piper Spit, he's too tame for his own good, and I know I'm not helping matters with my handfuls of seeds. But what can I say? I'm weak, and short on magic moments in my life. I have NO birds in my back yard all, and barely any squirrels, though last year it was just teeming out there. Don't know why. Even took down the new bird house in case they thought it was a predator (like those plastic owls you see). And our former favourite haunt, the "duck park" at Lafarge Lake, is being bulldozed to make way for a Nazi-like cement amphitheatre (just the name has Third Reich connotations to me - like something from Hitler's proposed monstrous empire, Germania). We may never get that lake back, but now we have this.

Blackbird singing. . . on Piper Spit

I can't describe to you the feeling of having this handsome devil fly right down to me without any prompting. I know I shouldn't be feeding him, but I am. I'm tired of feeling like an evil human being. I need my moments of utter magic, and I find so many of them in this magical place.

Blackbird, fly: magic on Burnaby Lake

I was astounded when this guy flew right down to me. Obviously he has no fear, which is not the best thing for him. But it's the best thing for me. He is magnificent and he knows it!

Gangsta geese in the 'hood

Canada geese form ‘gang broods’ in Burnaby

Two adult birds with 33 goslings grab attention at Burnaby Lake

BY LARRY PYNN, VANCOUVER SUN MAY 22, 2015

A family of Canada Geese with 33 goslings at Burnaby Lake May 21 2015.

METRO VANCOUVER -- A new gang has claimed Burnaby Lake as its ‘hood.

Although a pair of Canada geese normally give birth to five or six young, Burnaby streamkeeper John Preissl documented two adults with no fewer than 33 goslings in tow. “As I walked down the trail near Piper Spit Pier, I noticed the large brood ... following the pair,” he explained Friday. “About 45 minutes later they swam right by me and across the lake to spend the night. It was good to see most of the rowers stopped for the family.”

The explanation is that Canada geese often form “gang broods” — defined as two or more broods amalgamated into a single cohesive unit and shepherded by four or more parents — according a 2009 study in the journal, Condor.

Gang brooding is more typical among older, experienced geese, and among geese that change mates from the previous year, the study found.

Gang broods, or crèches, can reportedly range to 100 goslings following just a few adults and are more common in areas of high nest density, in urban and suburban areas.

Rob Butler, a retired bird scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, said he spotted the same gang brood at Burnaby Lake. While he’s heard and read about such large numbers, this is the first time he’s actually seen it. “I said, ‘Holy smokes, look at that pair, they have a lot of young.’ ”

Butler said gang broods may be a case of safety in numbers — more eyes to watch for predators such as bald eagles, and reduced odds of being targeted should they attack.

“It’s mutual protection, lots of eyes and adults around,” he said.

It’s not clear why Preissl photographed just one pair of adults with the 33 goslings, but it’s possible the other parents are nearby, are dead, or are younger adults with less experience at raising young. “Anything’s possible,” Butler said. “At Burnaby Lake, they all get together to mooch food off people. They get all these broods together. It’s pretty easy to band together into one big group.”

lpynn@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

PLEASE NOTE: there's a really cool short video with this that I couldn't embed. Here's a link to the whole story.

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Canada+geese+form+gang+broods+Burnaby/11075978/story.html

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Geese What? Goslings Galore!

Three broods of goslings at Sasamat Lake. Taken last year. This was all I could find in video to illustrate the "Canada geese form 'gang broods'" story from today's Vancouver Sun. It's our own shaky home video. I believe we counted eighteen geese altogether, but the spectacular mega-brood in Burnaby Lake totalled 33 goslings swimming in one long line. We watch wildlife in Como, Lafarge and Burnaby lakes all the time, but we've never seen anything like this!

Back to the garden

I hate being photographed - my head is always on one side, and my face looks kind of like a stroke victim's for some reason. I can't turn on a cheesy "cheese" smile like some people can.

But this was different. Bill got inspired. We made one of our pilgrimages to Burnaby Centennial Rose Garden, a place we stumbled on during one of our walks last year.

The place greeets you with waves of scent, intoxicating. You just have to stick your nose in all the blooms. I know nothing about roses, but they all smell different, some sweet, almost cloying, some spicy, others heavy and honey-like. A bee would drown happily here. The ladybug on the lip of the petal was content to sun itself.

I told you I can't do a good smile. I thought I WAS smiling for most of these, but this is how they came out. But the delicate mauve flowers enchanted me. Roses seem to come in all shades, including the deepest purple.

And fuschia. Every shade of pink and red (and none of the red shots turned out, but they have that long-white-cardboard-box-with-the-ferns smell, almost peppery - an anniversary smell).

These were dark burgundy, and as complex as peonies. 

Is this called a trellis, or a bower? It's much-o full o' flower. They drape heavily over the trellis and nod in the sun, drenching the air with sweetness.

I am happy in these roses, as I am happy in so many things.

There had to be a long shot - or not - but here it is.

I remember a line from Bradbury:

"I think the sun is a flower

That blooms for just one hour."