Stained-glass feathers

We came around a bend in the trail at Reifel Island just in time to catch this pair of wood ducks out in the open.

Wood ducks, female (left) and male.

They're shy birds; before we got a chance at a second shot, they had scooted down the bank and into the water. They came back, partway, when I tossed a few handfuls of seed in their direction. The lighting was bad; we were in shadow, pointing into the light. Imagine these colours, but shining as though with an interior light.

Blues and greens on the male's back.

I always thought the female was drab, but here, in breeding costume, she is in no way eclipsed by her gaudy mate.

Between water and clouds

Sometimes, along our shores, there are moments when there is nothing, really, to see, yet it takes your breath away.

From the Westham Island bridge.

Same bridge.

Afternoon nap

Boundary Bay

Tree, Reifel Island

Evening clouds. Reifel Island

I don't usually like photos of me, but this one is different, somehow. Boundary Bay.

Practice session, Boundary Bay

North Shore mountains

Another Skywatch post

The bush has staring red eyes

Imagine a tangle of half-fallen trees, lichened branches, bedraggled blackberry vines, dead twigs. Like this one:

That's a juvenile black-crowned night heron, out in plain sight. More or less; his feathers blended in with the colour of the branches, and he sat perfectly still. I have upped the contrast, to make him stand out.

We were near the entrance at Reifel Island, when a worker clearing brush pointed these out to us. The young one, and two adults. I couldn't see the adults at first, even when she lined me up to squint down her pointing finger. After a bit of walking back and forth to get different angles, my eyes adjusted and I caught the hint of white feathers behind the screen of branches. It was quite a distance away; I couldn't see the features. The camera did a better job.

Adult black-crowned night heron, Nicticorax nicticorax.

I didn't see the second one until we passed the trees an hour later. Laurie didn't see him at all.

The grey smudges are shadows. Just part of the camouflage.

A closer view of the young one.

This was a first sighting for me. Very exciting!

Characteristics for ID, from USGS;
Adult:

• Red eyes, legs yellow
• Black bill
• Black crown and back
• White face, throat, foreneck, chest and belly
• Blue-gray wings

Juvenile:

• Eyes yellowish to amber, legs dull greyish - check
• Yellow base to bill - I didn't see this.
• Brown head, neck, chest and belly streaked with buff and white - check.
• Wings and back darker brown with large white spots at the tips of the feathers; spots especially large on the greater secondary coverts - check.

Immature:

• First year; similar to juvenile, but with less extensive spotting on upperwings and a dark cap
• Second year; resemble the adult, but have a brown neck and wings contrasting with darker brown cap and back
• Third year; full adult plumage

So this young one is either this year's nestling, or one year old.

And a "Cool Fact" from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: 

Adult Black-crowned Night-Herons apparently do not distinguish between their own young and those from other nests, and will brood chicks not their own.

They nest in colonies, so there may have been several other herons in the same trees. And the adults we saw may not be the parents of Junior, here.

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Coot jester

 Dressed for the part ...

"I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. Everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large." Charlie Chaplin on his costume

Caperng coot:

"Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?" Frida Kahlo

"I just put my feet in the air and move them around."  Fred Astaire 

"... madly off in all directions." Stephen Leacock

"The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool." Miguel de Cervantes

"Too much sanity may be madness." Miguel de Cervantes

Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary, yesterday.

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Quiet afternoon, with background quacking

Before I go on to something else, let me show you the last of the Reifel Island photos:

I love the light in this one. An almost-deserted waterway. The ducks are behind us.


Coot, collecting leftovers after the kids went by. Those feet are far too big; they get in each other's way.


"Nobody's using this nest box; I may as well perch on it."


Unidentified hawk on another nest box. Good thing it's not breeding season yet.


Mallard hybrid. I don't think I've seen this particular mix before.


Great blue heron, fishing.


Scaup females. Greater, I think. Or Lesser. One or the other.


Redwing blackbird. The males arrive here first, then the females about a month later. We'll look for them at the end of February.


Bird feeder. With resident squirrel.


Looking out the window of the warming room. A welcome haven in cold weather, heated by a fragrant wood stove.


On the way home, we stopped to see this eagle guarding his nest.

Next: Stone soup.
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A trio of leggy redheads

These three sandhill cranes like kids. I think they're the same ones who "persuaded" Hugh's son to empty his seed bag for them a week ago. This Friday, they hurried to meet us on the pathway, in hopes of more goodies.

Two of the three, looking for a handout.

Yesterday, I wrote that they were youngsters. Later, I began to wonder; don't the red heads mean that they are adults? Time to do a bit of homework.

Amazing how one question leads to another; I ended up with pages of notes on Grus canadense, or Sandhills.

Sandhill chicks, called "colts" (because they're leggy, like young horses?), are reddish brown, with grey underparts. By maturity, they have turned grey, except for the forehead, which is bright red. During breeding season, they smear themselves with red mud, maybe for camouflage purposes; by the end of the season, they are ragged and worn.

So these three are adults, not breeding yet. The adolescents, once the parents have chased them away in order to start a new brood, wander around aimlessly, "hanging out" with their peer group. Somewhere between 2 and 7 years old, they pair off, then stay with their mates year-round, often for life. The lifespan in the wild is about 25 years.

Practicing the dance steps.

Male and female sandhills look alike. (To human eyes, anyhow. They seem to know the difference.)

When the time comes, the adults put on their makeup, and go to the dance. One will start dancing, and the prospective mate will imitate him. Soon, the other sandhills in the group join in until the whole flock is "on the floor".

"Five courtship displays have been identified as part of "dancing," the primary mechanism of pair formation in this species. These displays are the Upright wing stretch, Horizontal head pump, Bow, Vertical leap and Vertical toss. Three courtship displays are used exclusively by paired adults to maintain the pair bond and synchronize reproductive development. These are the Bill up, Copulation and Unison call displays."
From Animal Diversity Web

I've never seen this. Maybe this year, I hope.

Wing stretch; full wingspan, about 6 feet.

Breeding starts, for migratory birds, in April or May. Sandhills resident year-round, like some of the Reifel Island birds, may start earlier, even in mid-winter. Two eggs are laid, in large (2 -3 ft. wide) nests on small, low islands with a good view, in May or June, and hatch a month later. (Which is about the time that Laurie tried to sidle past a protective adult on the trail, and was stabbed for it.)

Both parents incubate the eggs and care for the chicks, with the male doing most of the guarding, while the female sits. The colts leave the nest, at least for the days, a day or two after hatching. They are soon able to feed themselves. At ten weeks, they begin to fly.

We've seen these youngsters, standing ankle-deep in mud, probing for food, while the adults stood guard on the banks.

For this nesting and family-raising endeavour, the sandhill crane pairs claim a territory of an average of 40 to 60 acres, although if conditions are favourable, it may be as small as 3 productive acres. The Reifel Island sanctuary covers 890 acres; room enough for at least 20 families.

Contemplating a possible snack.

What do sandhill cranes eat? Anything. Insects, seeds, frogs, mice and other rodents, plants, fish, snails, snakes, roots, berries, grass, other birds, birds' eggs, ... And the contents of kids' bags and buckets. They'll have your sandwich, too, if you're still carrying it, thank you. After we and the bucket lady emptied our containers for the trio, they followed us down the trail hoping for more.

I was surprised to find, on a discussion board (Hancock Wildlife Channel), a local resident who feeds sandhills out of his hand. And he has the photos to prove it. Brave! I don't think I would have steady enough nerves. Those beaks look dangerous enough, but the eye ... !

Armed and ready. With his eye on you.

One other tidbit:

"Fossil evidence found in Nebraska indicates that sandhill cranes have been around, unchanged, for about 10 million years. That makes them the oldest-known surviving bird species in North America." From The Georgia Straight

Wikipedia clarifies:

"A 10-million-year-old crane fossil from Nebraska is often cited as being of this species, but this is more likely from a prehistoric relative or the direct ancestor of the Sandhill Crane and may not belong in the genus Grus. The oldest unequivocal Sandhill Crane fossil is "just" 2.5 million years old, over one and a half times older than the earliest remains of most living species of birds, which are primarily found from after the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary some 1.8 million years ago."

2.5 or 10, whichever; that eye does look dinosaurish.

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Some of the sources for this post:
Wikipedia, The Georgia Straight, NationMaster Encyclopedia, Bird Web (Seattle Audubon Society), US Dept. of the Interior, Animal Diversity Web, Hancock Wildlife Channel, Baker Sanctuary, and Rock, Paper, Lizard.
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Stuffed ducks

We survived the trip to Reifel with the little ones. And they got to see birds bigger than themselves: a trio of young sandhill cranes.

Blurry photo of Sophia distributing her first bag of bird seed.

There were a couple or three elementary school groups on the trails; most were well provided with feed. One of the leaders was carrying it in buckets. The mallards' crops were bulging.

Photos tomorrow.
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On a grey day, all the colours

It was a good thing we'd started on our way to Reifel Island early; with a stop for lunch, and all the stops in between to look at birds, it was well past 2:00 when we arrived at the parking lot, barely 2 hours before sunset.

The mallards were out in force, some in the parking lot, more along the first part of the pathway, where new visitors would have fresh bags of grain. I dispersed a mere handful, though; I had other customers in mind.

Kid contemplating mallards.

Mallard with orange belly.

Between the office and the first crossroads, the LBBs (no-name brand: Little Brown Birds) set up shop. In the summer, the feeders are kept full; this week, they were all completely empty. But the scrubby bush there is full of food; dried blackberries in abundance, full heads of weed seeds, dried grasses, holly berries, and more. The birds chirp and sing happily in the tangle of stalks.

I tried to entice them out with my bag of grain, without much luck. We managed to get blurry photos of brown -- somethings -- before they hopped back into hiding. Oh, well; the ducks would get the bait instead.

A few LBBs, however, sat on the fence, and even stayed put as we took photos.

All puffed out against the cold.

House sparrow.

Golden-crowned sparrow in the blackberry canes.

We turned into the paths bordering the waterways. Now, the predominant birds were ...


... mallards, of course.

But there were a fair number of pintails:


... wigeons:


... coots, mergansers, and a few shovellers. We saw no geese, which surprised me.

Laurie got this photo of a male bufflehead, in all his female-luring glory:


I've always thought of buffleheads as black-and-whites, but when I looked at the photo, I noticed the sheen of blue on the head, and saturated the colours a bit more, just to see what they were. Here's what I came out with: (Click on it for a large copy, to get the full impact.)

Black and white. And blue, green, and burgundy.

I wondered; what do the females see? Do their eyes pick up all this display of colour? How much are we missing of the scenery here at Reifel?

Back to Google. I found this page: Causes of Color - Color Vision in Birds.

Only recently have we begun to grasp that vertebrates such as birds and fish possess more sophisticated color visual systems than we do. While we are trichromats, having photo-pigments with sensitivities at three peak wavelengths, birds have photo-pigments with sensitivities at four or five peak wavelengths, making them true tetrachromats, or perhaps even pentachromats. In some species, the visual spectrum extends into the ultraviolet range, once thought to be visible only to insects.

It is as hard for us to imagine how birds perceive color as it is for a colorblind person to imagine full color vision; it is outside of our experience. This impacts the study of bird behavior, and our grasp of how birds navigate during migration, classify objects, and interact socially and sexually. For example, some species we see as having identical male and female plumage differ when seen in the ultraviolet range - a difference apparent to the birds themselves.

Wandering through discussion groups and GoogleImages, I learned that some birds glow under ultra-violet lights. The males only, at least in some species. And the females pay no attention to them if they are somehow prevented from seeing the UV. (Sunglasses?)

From Wikipedia:

Some animals can distinguish colors in the ultraviolet spectrum. The UV spectrum falls below the human visible range. Birds, turtles, lizards, and fish have UV receptors in their retinas. These animals can see the UV patterns found on flowers and other wildlife that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. ...

UV and multi-dimensional vision is an especially important adaptation in birds. It allows birds to spot small prey from a distance, navigate, avoid predators, and forage while flying at high speeds. Birds also utilize their broad spectrum vision to recognize other birds, and in sexual selection.

Something to mull over. Something to think about in these grey days; maybe we are surrounded by unseen, unimagined rainbows.

Maybe not so dull, after all.

And here's a rainbow, even for our limited eyes: the male wood duck.

Handsome pair.

On our way back to the car, I stopped off at the washrooms. And while I was there, I checked out the swallow's nest at the side of the building.


Still there, still in good repair. I'll look for violet-green swallows there this spring.

I wonder how many colours they really wear.
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