Wet.......and dry.....

Headed over to Harrison Bay today in hopes of getting a walk in before the rain started.  Didn't quite make it but at least we got it done before the really heavy rain arrived.

Started out promising...

as we could hear a Pileated Woodpecker....and there he was...on the very dike's very first hydro pole.

here is a closer look at him.  You can tell it is a male as he has a red 'moustache' that the female lacks.

Carrying on it was pretty quiet bird wise....

a flock of Dark eyed junco were on the dike at one point....

here is a closer look of one on a fence post.  Further down there was a White Crowned Sparrow on a post but it didn't hang around long enough for a photo.

a number of Song Sparrow were seen scattered all along the length of the dike...

and one Spotted Towhee in this Pacific Crab Apple tree - notice the fruits.

not much of anything out on the bay.  A few gulls, that was it, but with the amount of boat traffic running up and down the river right now, that isn't a surprise and notice the amount of beach now, compared to the last time we walked here.

a flock of Canada Geese flew over and there were well over a hundred of them in nearby farm fields.

What was spectacular were the fall colours of the foliage....

with the wind warning in the weather forecast - this might have been our only chance to see them!

One last spotting...

was this Brown Creeper.  There were a lot of Black Cap Chickadees and also a Downy Woodpecker.

Now for the 'dry' part....  people have been commenting to me on how low the water levels are right now, and I've been saying that this is fairly normal for this time of the year....well seems my memory is failing because today I went and checked back in my records for this date over the past few years going back to 2011 and water levels right now are lower than any of those previous years.  We are going back to the estuary now. Here is how it looked 1 year ago....

 

will mention that this morning, when I hadn't taken my camera because I thought it was raining (won't do that again), there were about a dozen eagles in close feeding, but nothing like the above scene.

In 2015 ....

same thing....look at the amount of water and the number of eagles....  here is a photo of Harrison Bay in 2015...

compare the beach, or lack there of, with the photo posted earlier in this report....of course with the weather forecast for the rest of this week, all that could change.  For the sake of the salmon and the eagles, we can only hope.