Chilly day

With the temperature sitting at zero and a heavy overcast, it was one of those sort of bone chilling days..

Gull’s continue to be the most predominant species seen..there was a Belted Kingfisher here today, and there was a good sized flock of Red-wing Blackbirds as well.

The Great Blue Heron was back in this favorite spot today with Mallards in the background.  Saw a Northern Shoveler in another spot.

Not nearly as many Bald Eagles out there today – of course when we are talking ‘not as many’ that is a hundred or so as opposed to a thousand or so…  There were a lot of Swans way over on the other side of this sandbar.

Now speaking of Bald Eagles…I’m not sure how many of you check out the Fraser Valley Bald Eagle Festival website or ‘like’ their Face book page but on the site today is an article written by David Hancock on the incredible numbers of Bald Eagles being seen this year…one trip on the Fraser River Safari boat, 7,362 were counted.

Here are a couple more…

this is a terrible photo of a Song Sparrow that I took today – the lighting was impossible…but I wanted to post it to show that this native bird was busy eating the seeds from the Alder Cones…in fact the cluster of cones were just out of reach and he had to keep sort of leaping up to get the cluster – it took a few tries but I finally managed to time the camera with the leap’s results.  I wanted to post it to remind people how important our native plants, even Alder trees that many people dismiss as ‘scrub’ – are to our native wildlife be it bird or animal…after all they had eons to evolve together before we humans came around to throw the whole system for a loop.

Back to the Eagle and Gull theme…here is another guy feeding on a dead salmon…there continue to be quite a few live salmon out there as well…and should mention that Chickadees, both varieties, continue in large numbers.

 

I’ll end off with a couple of Glaucous-wing Gulls, both of them, I think, in the year when they mature into their adult plumage – the guy on the left just a little further along.