Bird-watching can be very hit-or-miss. One day birds show up in noisy droves, challenging your ability to even get them into camera range, and the next they just seem to disappear. Species come and go in my own back yard with dizzying frequency. Right now it's house finches, black-headed grosbeaks, nuthatches and chickadees, though the odd rogue towhee shows up to hop back and forth scratching for bugs.
The larger birds, the Steller's jays, ravens and flickers, are nowhere to be seen, though we do see a downy woodpecker now and then, hammering away at suet. Likewise, the places we go to birdwatch vary wildly in what they present to us. This sandhill crane chick was such a gift, and the blackbirds swooped down on me relentlessly, jabbing their needle beaks into the palm of my hand as they greedily devoured black oil sunflower seeds.
But aside from those two, all we seemed to have were obnoxious Canada geese in their dozens, if not hundreds. I've seen so many species at Burnaby Lake, including the rare mandarin duck, as well as ringnecks, scaups, wood ducks, teals, and God knows what else that I can't remember just now. But the geese appear to have taken over. You can tell by the massive poops on the dock, as large and foul as dog shit.
Will the rest of them be back? That's up to the birds, who are so "flocky" that no one can really predict their ways. Today I walked around Como Lake and was heartened to see several duck families with ducklings of different ages, some drakes having a bachelor party, and MANY Canada geese, which were behaving very strangely indeed.
They were all in the water, at least two dozen of them, and suddenly they all started running along on the surface of the water - all in one direction. HOW can a bird as heavy and "breasty" as a Canada goose RUN on the water? But I saw their feet! They kept doing this, not preparing for takeoff but just skidding along in unison, looking utterly ridiculous, while I tried to take a video of it (it was too far away to film properly). Then they started splashing violently, dunking themselves, and dabbling so deep that their huge webbed feet flailed wildly in the air.
But the thing of it is - last time we went to Como, maybe a couple of weeks ago, I don't think we saw any ducks or geese there at all. The place seemed deserted. I'm still not seeing my beloved diving birds, coots, hooded mergansers, Northern shovellers, and the cormorants that used to show up in the "duck park" (Lafarge Lake). The lagoon, which has in the past displayed red-tailed hawks, sandhill cranes, mergansers of every stripe, and even SWANS (and just once, an otter), seems completely dead right now. WHERE IS EVERYONE??
I don't know how many times I've been convinced my bird-watching days are over, when everyone just takes off somewhere and the lakes are virtually vacant. Will this teach me patience? Probably not, because a blank lake makes me bleak.
But being so flocky, these creatures think with a single mind, so whatever the flock leader wants to do (and who knows how THIS gets sorted out), the rest of the birds either follow, or quickly die due to the lack of protection from predators. This is, unfortunately, what happened to my beloved Bosley and his companion, Belinda. I tell myself it's all part of nature, but so am I, so I can't help feeling the loss.
