In my last report we were walking over to the park and the gravel bars were emerging....now the path is underwater again with not a gravel bar in sight! I don't have any photos of them but the last couple of days, especially in the evening the entire estuary area and Harrison Bay as well has had swarms of all sorts of swallows and swifts flying about, often very low. Primarily Barn Swallows and Vaux's Swifts but have also seen Violet Green, Tree and even Cliff Swallows, mainly young ones and obviously on migration.
This afternoon we walked over at Harrison Bay....
Nice and sunny as we set out and we noticed way off in the distance....
fresh snow on the top of Mt. Cheam! Nice to see. Usually Mt. Cheam retains a trace of snow throughout the summer but not this year, between the lack of snow last winter and the extremely long hot spring and summer even the snow field had vanished.
We didn't see a lot of birds (apart from the swallow swarms) but did spot this Pacific Slope Flycatcher who will no doubt be headed south pretty quickly.
There were a number of American Robins down feeding on various berry bushes as well, this one being a young one just changing into adult plumage. Could hear lots of Black cap Chickadees but they were way up in the tree canopy. There were also several Turkey Vultures, a Sharp Shin Hawk (which might account for the lack of birds) and an Osprey was seen carrying a stick! Not sure what that was all about as it definitely isn't nesting season.
Up in this area, looking up the Harrison River, could hear a few geese and a Belted Kingfisher...
and spotted a couple of White-crowned Sparrows. It was at this point a rumble of thunder made us turn around....
where this picture doesn't do justice to how ominous it looked. We did make it to the car before the skies opened.
Now for a not very nice subject. For several weeks now there have been a number of sightings of Black Bears in the area. Black Bear are seen here every year and so they should be, this is their territory. But this year, probably because of the drought situation causing natural food sources like wild berries to dry up and maybe even the near by forest fire contributed, there seems to be more than normal and they are showing up earlier than normal.
All of which has contributed in the last couple of days, to two sad situations. Yesterday a Black Bear was trapped and hopefully relocated, and today, this little guy in the above photo (taken by a neighbour as I hadn't actually seen the bear myself) that already bore a yellow ear tag meaning that it had already been relocated was shot and killed by the R.C.M.P.
This led to a comment from a neighbour that I heartedly agree with "what's wrong with people! They hate animals, they hate trees, the animals are starving cause there is no natural food so we shoot them for trying to survive!"
on that note I will sign off and won't be back until mid-October when it will be time to start watching for eagles, salmon and swans.....
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