Dick Cannings: Birds and Books

As happens far too often it seems, Marg and I realized last week that we hadn’t done any hiking in the high country yet this year, so we blocked off a couple of days this past weekend and headed for Manning Park.  We stopped in Princeton on the way to take in a day of the Princeton Traditional Music Festival—we’d heard of this small gem of a festival before but had never made it up the Similkameen while it was on.  What a great event—an d free to boot!  A bit of a cold front rolled in late Sunday afternoon, but Ex Pirata International Company (clearly the crowd favourite) kept everyone warm with their fantastic French accordion and Canadian fiddle tunes.

The Winthrop Range (left) and Mount Frosty (right)

We dragged ourselves away from the music and continued along Highway 3 up into the North Cascades and Manning Park.  It was clear that the dog days of summer were over when we woke on Monday morning to low clouds and 3°C (37°F) temperatures.  After a lazy start (breakfast in Pinewoods!) we drove up to the alpine meadows and started out on the Heather Trail.  By then the sun was out and the water drops from last night’s rain were glistening from every leaf in the meadows.  A perfect day for a hike.

Male Spruce Grouse

A lot of songbirds obviously felt it was a good day to be on the move, too, and we were in almost constant contact with mixed species flocks.  Juncos were the commonest members of these flocks, the juveniles looking a bit ratty as they’d almost—but not quite—completed their moult into their first winter plumage.  Mountain Chickadees gave their nasal calls, joined by the even more whiny-sounding zitzi-dzay of the Boreal Chickadees.  Townsend’s and MacGillivray’s Warblers added a bit of yellow splash to the flocks, while Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets flitted nervously in the branches.  A few Townsend’s even tried to sing now and then, perhaps stimulated by the shortening day length, now the same as that in April when their breeding season begins.  At the creek crossing a Pacific Wren gave the chit-chit call typical of its newly-minted species.

Male Sooty Grouse

The Heather Trail is a great route for seeing grouse, and it wasn’t long before we saw the first trio of Spruce Grouse, their tails obviously foreshortened by active moult, with the new, jet black feathers barely extending beyond the white spangles of the upper tail coverts.  A few hundred metres later we saw a female Sooty Grouse with two large young, then at the two-kilometre mark heard the insistent hooting of a male Sooty.  Marg soon spotted him as he walked through the heather, pausing to inflate the egg-yolk-yellow air sacs on his neck and give the deep hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo call meant to attract mates.  He was obviously a bit over-optimistic if he felt the female nearby was thinking of nesting again this season, but I guess it never hurts to try.  This is an interesting site to check out Sooty Grouse, since the Heather Trail is right on the contact zone between this coastal species and its Interior cousin, the Dusky Grouse.  The two are very similar (formerly considered one species, the Blue Grouse), but differ in a number of features.  The Dusky Grouse in this area have all-black tails, while those of the Sooties are broadly tipped with pale grey.  The males of both species give the series of deep hooting calls, but the calls of the Dusky are so low-pitched that I can’t hear them even when the bird is right in front of me.  Another difference is the colour of those neck sacs on displaying males—instead of yellow sacs, the Dusky has dark reddish-purple sacs.

Fritillary nectaring on aster flowers

Most of the flowers in the meadows had set seed already—the tousled heads of the western anemones, the green pods clustered on wood betony stalks.  The greenish flowers of the hellebore were tipped brown and had lost the watermelon scent they have when fresh.  The flat-topped masses of cow parsnip flowers were covered in flies taking advantage of the warm afternoon for another good feast.  Many people think of bees when they think of pollination, but white flowers such as the cow parsnip are usually pollinated by flies.  A few paintbrush flowers still glowed scarlet against the dark green meadows, and a lone hummingbird refuelled on one of them, then buzzed down the ridge before I could get a good look at it.  Probably a Rufous.

Fly party on cow parsnip flowers

We climbed up through the old burn (still very much an open meadow 65 years after the fire) and had lunch on Big Buck Ridge, with a view to the Cathedrals in the east, the Winthrops and Frosty to the south, and the spire of Hozameen in the southeast.  The skies were a little hazy with forest fire smoke but the scene was still breathtaking.  A Pine Grosbeak ate its lunch of grouseberries beside us while ravens played on the afternoon wind.  Next year we will do more of this.  I promise.

With daily high temperatures hovering around 36°C (97°F) it’s hard to remember that summer is almost over at this latitude.  Many birds are already drifting south towards winter homes in California, Mexico or Argentina, part of the annual cycle that has been turning for millennia.  A small, and much more recent, cog in that annual cycle is the opening of the Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory.

Vaseux Lake, with McIntyre Bluff in the right background

The name is perhaps a bit misleading, possibly conjuring up images of towers and telescopes.  What it is in reality is a band of dedicated birders, a screened tent (essential to ward off the impressively dense mosquito population), a cluster of 14 mist-nets and some alarm clocks that get the team up early each morning from early August through mid-October.  And a spectacular site in the Okanagan Valley, a rich woodland of birch and alder along winding river oxbows set amidst high rock bluffs, arid grasslands, green vineyards and the lake itself.

Vaseux Lake is one of 25 migration monitoring stations in the Canadian Migration Monitoring Network (there are three others in British Columbia—Rocky Point at the south end of Vancouver Island, Tatlayoko Lake on the west Chilcotin Plateau, and Mackenzie on the west side of the northern Rockies).  The primary goal of these stations is simple—to assess the populations of birds migrating through Canada.  These populations are also monitored to some extent by other programs such as the Breeding Bird Survey and the Christmas Bird Count, but migration monitoring fills in some important gaps.  Many species breed too far north to be counted easily during the breeding season, and many winter too far south to be found on Christmas Bird Counts.  But all these birds have to migrate through southern Canada in spring and fall, and birders and bird biologists have come up with ingenious ways of counting them as they go by.

The grandfather of migration monitoring stations in North America is the Long Point Bird Observatory.  This station has been counting migrants along the north shore of Lake Erie since 1960.  Its programs gradually expanded over the years to include nation-wide efforts such as Project FeederWatch and the Canadian Lakes Loon Survey, and in the 1990s it morphed into Bird Studies Canada. One of the main goals in setting up Bird Studies Canada was to promote a network of migration monitoring stations across the country.

Bander Doug Brown in the banding tent at Vaseux Lake

The 25 stations that now form the Canadian Migration Monitoring Network are all managed and funded by local groups (the Vaseux Lake operation is run by the Okanagan Similkameen Conservation Alliance, with most of its funding coming from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Baillie Birdathon).  Each site differs slightly in its setup, and of course the bird populations it encounters, but the protocol for counting the birds is basically the same across the country.  During migration each station sets out mist-nets that catch many of the songbirds that are moving through shrubs and small trees.  A daily census counts birds that miss the nets, and miscellaneous observations are thrown into the mix as well.  At the end of each morning session, daily totals are estimated for each species recorded, based on the number of birds netted, seen, or heard.

Most of the effort goes into the mist-netting operation, since it provides valuable information that is otherwise impossible to gather.  The birds are harmlessly extracted from the nets every 15 or 20 minutes, carefully measured, banded and released.  The measurements include data on the age of the bird (whether it was born that year or is an adult (“after hatch year” in the lingo of banders).  This age data creates a quick index of the breeding success of each species that year, based on the ratio of young to adults.  Birds are also examined to see how much fat they are carrying (easily seen through the thin skin at the base of the neck—between the two arms of the wishbone).

A long-term commitment is essential to any effort aimed at monitoring bird populations.  Regular monitoring began at Vaseux Lake in 1994, but the station started operating at its present site in 2001.  So this is its 10^thyear of comparable counting, and hopefully we can start calculating meaningful population trends for some species when the data are in from this season.  You can download the report of trend analyses from other stations published online here.

The careful observation of birds results in other discoveries, too.  One interesting finding is the presence of many local birds that apparently move down from adjacent mountainsides into the valley-bottom riparian woodlands in late July.  Species such as Swainson’s Thrush, Nashville Warbler and Orange-crowned Warbler leave their breeding and natal territories at higher elevations to take advantage of the rich feeding opportunities essential for their post-breeding moult.  They skulk in the bushes, gobbling caterpillars and other bugs, grow their new feathers and put on a healthy layer of fat before flying south.  These birds are very inconspicuous in late summer, and it was only the systematic banding program that revealed this tactic.

Black-capped Vireo, 27 September 2008, Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory

We also encounter rarities of course, something that spices up the often monotonous work of a bander .  On August 27, 2008 a Prothonotary Warbler was netted at the station.  Bander Doug Brown thought that this bird—normally found in southeastern North America—would be the highlight of the season until a month later when he pulled a Black-capped Vireo out of a net.  This species has a very limited breeding range on the Edwards Plateau of western Texas and is listed as Endangered in the United States.  Why it flew north to British Columbia is anyone’s guess, but it was only the second of its kind to be found in Canada.

The Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory is open every morning in August, September and the first half of October.  It is located on the west side of Hwy. 97, 3 km south of Okanagan Falls and 1 km north of Vaseux Lake.  Park by the wire gate and walk down to the banding tent.  Bander Doug Brown welcomes all visitors and would be happy to show you how the birds are banded.  Please don’t bring your dog along, thanks.

All migration monitoring stations across Canada use volunteers for much of their work.  If you’d like to volunteer, let me know.  You’ll learn a lot about birds!

Postscript:  To see regular updates on what’s going on, check out the Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory website.

Another traditional midsummer event is the unveiling of the new decisions made by the American Ornithologists Union regarding the species of North American birds.  Each year, new information is examined and decisions are made about whether some species are best considered two species (or three or four), and whether the present order and arrangement of species makes sense any more.  So every July, birders look to the latest AOU checklist supplement to see what the news is, since that news will affect the names they see in future field guides, the order of those field guides and checklists around the continent, and of course the length of their life lists.

So here are the news–in edited form…

1.  The Black Scoter of North America is recognized as separate from the Eurasian species, and is now called the American Scoter (I’m still waiting for them to call some species “Canadian…”). [late-breaking news–apparently the AOU made an error with the scoter names and will correct it in the next issue of their journal, the Auk.  They meant to name the North American birds the Black Scoter and the Eurasian birds the Common Scoter.  This retains the names already in use on either side of the Atlantic].

2.  The Whip-poor-will is split into two species, the Eastern Whip-poor-will of eastern North America, and the Mexican Whip-poor-will, which breeds in the mountains of southwestern USA and down into Mexico.  The species have different calls (the Mexican one talks faster) and differ significantly in genetics, as well as having subtle plumage differences.

3.  The Winter Wren is split into three species;  the Pacific Wren west of the Rockies, the Winter Wren east of the Rockies, and the Eurasian Wren (known in Britain as THE wren) in Eurasia.  This is based on a number of studies, including genetic work done in northeastern BC (near Tumbler Ridge) by Dave Toews and Darren Irwin that showed the two species didn’t breed with each other, had different songs, and looked different as well.  There’s a thorough discussion of all this research on Slybird’s blog.

4.  The Greater Shearwater is now called the Great Shearwater to match up with the name used elsewhere in the world.

5.  For those of you who have birded in Hawaii, the Elepaio has been split into three species, one for each of the islands it is found on:  Kauai, Oahu and Hawaii.

There are many other changes, mostly regarding the scientific names of birds (e.g. the waterthrushes are now in the genus Parkesia, separated from the genus Seiurus now used only for the Ovenbird), new families (e.g. longspurs and Snow Buntings are now in their own family, the Calcariidae) and the order of species (e.g. the herons and ibises are now considered more closely related to pelicans than to storks, so are moved from the stork Order Ciconiiformes to the pelican Order Pelecaniformes; and the cormorants, boobies and gannets are moved out of the Pelecaniformes into their own order, Suliformes, as are the tropicbirds moved into the Phaetontiformes).

You can get all the details by reading the full checklist supplement online.

Last Tuesday I got up at 3:20 a.m.  Now, I’m a morning person, but that is a little bit earlier than usual.  I had to be in the western hills of Summerland by 4:20 to start my Breeding Bird Survey.  I stuck my head outside to check the weather—warm, calm and dark, the stars still twinkling.  The forecast had mentioned wind, and that’s not a good thing for a bird survey; I didn’t want to get up to the starting point and have to abandon the whole exercise because I couldn’t hear anything.  But this looked good, so I put the coffee on and got dressed.

I wasn’t alone in my early rising.  Each year, all across Canada and the United States, over 4000 birders get up really early one morning in June and do their Breeding Bird Survey.  Some have been doing it since the late 1960s when the survey began; I did my first route in 1973.  The survey design is deceptively simple.  Volunteers—yes, we’re not getting paid for this—drive a 25-mile route, stopping every half-mile to look and listen for 3 minutes.  They cover the same route once a year, every year.  The database this creates is the best tool bird conservation biologists have to monitor the populations of songbirds in North America.

I got to the start point at 4:15.  Five minutes to get the forms ready, put the thermometer on the roof of the car (note to self—don’t drive off with it there!), and assess the sky and wind.  The sky was still clear, but the wind had kicked up significantly.  The small pines were swaying and I could barely hear the Vesper Sparrows singing.  If it kept up like this I’d have to bail out after 10 stops or so and try again another day.  The wind was still high at the second stop, but at the third stop (the entrance to the Summerland landfill—where was that Rock Wren that is usually here?) it dropped to negligible levels.  A Golden Eagle sailed out of the dawn and landed on a snag at the edge of the landfill–a real surprise.  At the strip of cottonwoods and birch along Trout Creek I bagged Veery, Red-eyed Vireo and a Western Flycatcher, but no Lark Sparrow.

Calliope Hummingbird

The route turns south onto the Shingle Creek road and winds through open ponderosa pine forests and sweeping grasslands.  Gray Flycatchers are scattered through the pines and Calliope Hummingbirds provide a bit of spice when they buzz by.  Clark’s Nutcrackers call raucously from the hills, and at one lucky spot, a Northern Pygmy-Owl tooted from the forest.  The dominant species on this route used to be the Western Meadowlark, but today the grasslands are relatively silent and I only hear 22, about half the normal number for this route.  Not surprisingly, Breeding Bird Survey data from across the country suggest this species is only half as abundant as it was in the early 1970s.

At stop 25 I break out the coffee to help me celebrate the halfway point; I’ve been counting birds for two and a quarter hours.  The route follows Shatford Creek now, the ponderosa woodlands changing to Douglas-fir forest, and Hammond’s Flycatchers take over from Gray and Dusky Flycatchers.  MacGillivray’s Warblers sang from willow-cloaked springs.  Then the road takes a sharp right and begins to climb the mountain in a serious way, headed for the Apex ski hill.  Species diversity plummets away from the valley bottom, but high elevation specialties make each stop interesting—Townsend’s Warblers wheezing from atop the spruces, Hermit Thrushes giving their ethereal songs from across the valley, an American Three-toed Woodpecker drumming on a snag.  The wind usually increases at this point, but today it held off and the weather was fine until the end.

Steller’s Jay

Finally, just before 9 a.m. I reached the ski hill village and turned around at stop 50.  I put out the thermometer again (I remembered!) and counted the last birds, a Steller’s Jay and a Hairy Woodpecker.  I’d counted 525 individuals of 74 species, about average for this route.  If you want to see a full listing of what I’ve seen over the years, click here, then choose Raw Data and route BC-208 (Summerland).  I arrived home at 10 a.m., tired but satisfied that I’d provided one small but essential chunk of information biologists can use in managing landscapes for birds and other creatures.

Last Saturday I loaded up the binoculars and the GPS and drove east to the Kootenays to help local birders “bash a square”.  The target was the romantically named 11MQ45, a 10 X 10-km square in the mountains west of Castlegar.  The British Columbia Breeding Bird Atlas is in its third year (of five) and atlassing efforts are getting more focussed.  I’d been invited by Gary Davidson, atlas coordinator for the West Kootenay region, to join him and a few other keen birders to thoroughly cover a priority square in a single day.  One of the joys of atlassing is that it gets you into places you’ve never explored before, so I checked my calendar and agreed to meet him on Saturday evening.  Sunday was the day.

The BC Breeding Bird Atlas project is similar to the many other natural history atlas projects that have taken place across North America and around the world.  The simple idea is to divide a geographical region—in this case, BC—into a grid of squares, then to sample the birds (or flowers, or butterflies, or whatever) in as many squares as possible to get a snapshot of each species’ distribution.  Most atlases use a 5-year window to get that snapshot.  You can then go back after a period of years, usually 10 or 20, and do the exercise all over again to see what changes have taken place.  The results are often surprising.  One of the best examples of this atlas technique is the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, which was done first in 1981-1985, then again in 2001-2005.  I use data from that atlas regularly when assessing the status of Canadian birds.  The challenge of doing an atlas in British Columbia had delayed the project for many years—there are over 10,000 squares to cover in a very rugged landscape—but a few years ago a partnership of birding groups, naturalist clubs, governments and private companies formed to take on the task.

I drove south through the Okanagan Valley to Osoyoos, then turned left just north of the border to follow Highway 3.  As I climbed over Anarchist Mountain, I was happy to see several soaring Swainson’s Hawks, a prairie species that has a very local distribution in British Columbia.  One of the things the atlas will accomplish is to really provide a clear picture of the present range of some of these uncommon species.  I stopped for coffee at the Rock Creek Trading Post (never miss that opportunity) then continued on through the beautiful Kettle Valley to Greenwood and Grand Forks.  When I went through Grand Forks I turned on the GPS—I had some time to do a bit of solo atlassing in a square I’ve been working on just west of Christina Lake.

White-throated Swift

11MQ03 has some spectacular scenery and habitats.  I pulled off the highway on to the Gilpin Forest Service Road, then stopped to have a listen.  A dozen or so White-throated Swifts chattered overhead, some courting in dizzying cartwheels.  A Rock Wren trilled, then the cascading song of the Canyon Wren.  To think that I once thought of all these birds as Okanagan specialties!  I stopped at a cattleguard to check a line of nest boxes on the fence.  The first had a clutch of House Wren eggs in it (NE: confirmed!), the fourth contained 4 newly-hatched Tree Swallows (NY: confirmed!) and the eighth had 4 Violet-green Swallow eggs (NE!).  The road wound up the steep hillside into the ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests.  I added singing Western Tanagers, Black-headed Grosbeaks, Cassin’s Finches, and lots of Spotted Towhees to the list.  Higher up there were Swainson’s and Hermit Thrushes.  Not bad for a late afternoon stop.

I continued east around Christina Lake and up over Paulson Pass.  I noticed the Shields Creek forest road going off to the north and figured it would be fun to explore that for a half-hour or so (11MQ35 here I come!).  The songbirds were pretty quiet this late in the afternoon, but at one spot I had a Red-naped Sapsucker and a pair of Mountain Chickadees.  I then saw two more chickadees and wondered if I was looking at a family (FY: fledged young).  But no, it was a pair of Boreal Chickadees!  Nice addition.  Then an American Three-toed Woodpecker drummed in the distance.  A nice start for this square.

In Castlegar I went to Ed and Hazel Beynon’s house to meet with Gary and the others for a planning session.  We formed four teams to cover the square; I was teamed up with Linda Szymkoviak, a birder from Rossland who I’d corresponded with but never met.  We were to cover the little village of Genelle on the Columbia River, then go up Sullivan Creek to cover some high elevation forest.  After the meeting I drove down to Genelle to make sure I could find the roads, but discovered that the Buckley Road up Sullivan Creek was gated and locked.  While atlassing gets you into new country all the time, it often throws curveballs at you simply because you don’t know the roads!  Time for plan B.

I stayed at Ed and Hazel’s with a few others—we were up at 4:15 a.m. for a quick breakfast of oatmeal, then parted to cover the square as best we could.  I met Linda at Genelle and we immediately began finding point count locations.  These counts are used to develop relative abundance data and maps for the atlas; we try to get at least 15 done in each square, and have to cover the habitats of the square in representative fashion.  Genelle turned out to be a gem of diversity, with three species of hummingbirds, three species of vireos and a host of other valley bottoms species.  We quickly confirmed the breeding of a number of species—an American Robin and Brewer’s Blackbird carrying food (CF), Violet-green Swallows building a nest (NB), a European Starling feeding young in a hole in an old cherry tree (NY); Tree Swallows entering a cavity (AE), a Yellow Warbler with 2 eggs in her nest (NE).

Brown-eyed Susans, aka blanketflower, Gaillardia aristata, Gilpin, BC

At 0730 we headed up the highway to the 9-mile forest road, our plan B to get to subalpine forest.  It was a brand-new road, so we drove slowly through the cedar-hemlock forests, gradually climbing higher and higher.  We did three more point counts here to balance out the valley bottom ones, adding species such as Hermit and Varied Thrushes, Townsend’s and Wilson’s Warblers.  A Ruffed Grouse drummed from a thicket.  After reaching the end of the road, we went back down, then up an old branch of the College Creek road.  Going even slower up this goat track we did find a Northern Pygmy-Owl calling and a pair of Chestnut-backed Chickadees carrying food.  At noon we retreated to Genelle to see if we could add anything else, then called it a day at 2 p.m.  We all entered our data separately, so by the following day we could see the success of our efforts—24 point counts done and a total of 84 species on the square list.  Now only 9999 squares left to go!

The weather gods were on our side yesterday.  After a week of overcast skies, heavy rain and high winds, the sun shone and the June air actually felt warm.  Fortuitous indeed, for we were off on a helicopter tour of the south Okanagan and lower Similkameen valleys with a Global TV crew and local media reporters, promoting plans for a new national park in the area.  The tour had been organized by the local committee for the park proposal, as well as the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Wilderness Committee.

View south over Kaleden and Skaha Lake to Vaseux Lake in the left distance.

My day began at the Eclipse Helicopters hangar in Penticton, where we climbed on board and were soon high above the hills south of town, looking down on the blue waters of Skaha Lake and the old volcanic terrain of the White Lake basin, dotted with small alkaline lakes.  One of these lakes, Mahoney, has the highest measured concentrations of hydrogen sulphide for any lake in the world, and has a remarkable layer of pink, porridgy sulphur bacteria that separates its oxygen-rich upper waters from the black, anaerobic layer below.  We cruised over the tremendous gneiss cliffs of Vaseux Lake and McIntyre Bluff, home to Peregrine Falcons, Golden Eagles, Canyon Wrens and Chukar, then swung southwest to follow the long, high ridge of Mount Kobau.  To the west were the high peaks of the north Cascades—Snowy Mountain, Chopaka and beyond the alpine ridges of the Cathedral Lakes.

Mahoney Lake, Sleeping Waters and Green Lake

The Similkameen River wound through rich bottomlands below us, on its way to the US border only a few miles away.  There are ridiculous plans to flood this valley by raising the dam at Shankers Bend just west of Oroville, WA, but I am confident that an intelligent appraisal of the project will result in all river-altering options being shelved.  We paralleled the US border to the highlands west of Osoyoos, where Kilpoola Lake nestled in the hills.  Like all small lakes in this area, it has shrunk dramatically in size over the last 20 years as drier climatic conditions and increased water use have drawn down the local water table.  Below us (though not visible from our altitude!) was the only Canadian population of the beautiful Lyall’s Mariposa Lily.  We landed at Osoyoos so that another group could board the helicopter for the trip back to Penticton; we boarded their van for a full-day trip of the land we had just flown over.

Spotted Lake, a unique alkaline wetland in the grasslands west of Osoyoos

I have long dreamed of a national park in the Okanagan Valley.  My parents were deeply involved with conservation efforts here in the 1960s and 1970s, including the formation of the Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society which was instrumental in the creation of Okanagan Mountain and Cathedral provincial parks, the Vaseux-Bighorn National Wildlife Area and the Haynes Lease Ecological Reserve among other accomplishments.  But I have seen too many other opportunities squandered over the years by governments lacking foresight.  In 1980 Parks Canada contracted me to write a report outlining some options to complete the parks system—the Dry Interior of British Columbia was the last ecozone in the country without a national park.  The south Okanagan and lower Similkameen valleys were one of the obvious focal points of this study, since they are the most diverse part of the region and contain most of the species at risk in the BC Interior.  In fact, the south Okanagan has long been touted as one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada, and analysis of species ranges from the federal Species at Risk Act show that it has by far the highest concentration of endangered species in the country.  So ironically, although the Dry Interior is the only region of Canada without a national park, if we were starting the parks system now it would be at the top of the priority list to get one.

Bitterroot blooming south of Kilpoola Lake

Absolutely nothing happened for over 20 years, then the idea was revived in 2002 by John and Mary Theberge, Senator Ross Fitzpatrick and others who took the idea to Prime Minister Chretien.  Within months, the federal and provincial governments signed an agreement to begin afeasibility study of the park proposal.  Local support for the park proposal has been high all along, with about 70% support.  A small number of local people—about 8% according to polls—are strongly opposed to the park, and have been very vocal in that cause.  The study process has been slowed and stalled recently by various issues, but there are indications recently that some of the issues that have bogged down the proposal may be close to resolution, and I’m more optimistic now that the right thing will be done.

But to see this park become reality, we will need more than the weather gods on our side.  It is important that many people voice their support for the park, and do so quickly.  You can send a message directly to Jim Prentice, the Minister of Environment, or fill in the online message form on the Wilderness Committee’s website.  Thank you!

Vaseux Lake with McIntyre Bluff in the distance

 PS:  the Global TV piece on the park proposal will be aired on the 6 p.m. news on Monday, June 7, 2010.

Bicycle Birdathon 2010:  23 May 2010

The weather looked good—patchy cloud and calm, the temperature a balmy 10°C.  But it was 2:30 a.m., and as George Carlin, the hippy-dippy weatherman used to say: “Forecast for tonight—dark”, so we turned on our headlamps and cycled away from home into the hills northwest of Penticton.  After warming up (literally) on a few steep hills, we reached our destination—the narrow Max Lake valley—just after 3 a.m.  There to greet us was a singing Gray Catbird, my first of the year and a great way to start the day.

The 2010 team:  Grant, Michelle, and Nancy

My Birdathon team this year consisted of Nancy Baron, a veteran of last year’s effort, and Michelle Hamilton and Grant Halm, who were new to the Big Day/Birdathon concept but were experienced cyclists, something that was bound to come in handy through the day.  We continued up the road, dodging large potholes and mudpuddles, then stopped at Max Lake itself, really a glorified pond filled with cattails and bulrushes.  After a few whistles on my part, a Sora whinnied loudly, followed immediately by the grunts of a Virginia Rail.  Things were going according to plan.

The plan was to get some of the owls Max Lake was famous for, so we rattled on for a couple more kilometres until the road ended in a steep valley.  Common Poorwills called from either side of us.  A family of Northern Saw-whet Owls hissed off to the left, the brood from a nest I’d found back in April.  This species is tough to get in late May, when the adults are largely silent.  We parked the bikes and I started to imitate the hoots of the Flammulated Owl.  Silence.  We clambered up the steep slope to the nest site traditionally used by one of the pairs here, but it was early in the season for nesting, and no owl peeked out of the hole.  We sat and waited, sat and hooted.  I decided to switch to whistling for pygmy-owls, and one quickly answered off to the east, then gradually flew in quite close, looking for the intruder.  I went back to hooting and finally a Flammulated gave a couple of calls near us, then Nancy saw the silhouette of a small bird swoop downhill in front of us, but we never did get a good look at it.

We stayed up on the slope for some time, enjoying the calm morning as the eastern sky lightened and the dawn chorus began—Townsend’s Solitaires warbling, Spotted Towhees trilling, Mourning Doves cooing.  The temperature had dropped a bit and we’d become rather cold nestled in the bunchgrass, so we got back on the bikes and returned to Max Lake, quickly adding more species as the birds woke up.  A Lincoln’s Sparrow and two White-crowned Sparrows, probably delayed in migration by the recent cool weather, were a real bonus as usually they would all be at higher elevations by now.  A Rock Wren in the gravel pit was a surprise.  By the time we got back to my house it was 6 a.m. and we’d tallied 59 species.

One of the juvenile Great Horned Owls in our yard

 After repacking food and clothes, and checking off the resident Great Horned Owls in the yard (they’d been worrisomely quiet when we left), we got on to the Kettle Valley Trail to the Okanagan River Channel.  Things got very busy quickly.  Lazuli Buntings were flitting all around us, and a Yellow-breasted Chat—a lifer for Michelle and Grant—sang from a rose bush in the meadow below.  We continued to add species along the river— Vaux’s Swift, Willow Flycatcher (just back—phew!), Spotted Sandpiper, and an array of swallows.  At the outlet dam on Okanagan Lake an Osprey sat on the wire right next to a Belted Kingfisher.  The lake was mirror calm and we could scope right over to the eastern shore, where a Common Loon and Red-necked Grebe added to our list.  Below the dam a strange gull puzzled us for some time, but we eventually decided it was an immature Glaucous-winged X Western hybrid.  I took photos for later perusal by gull experts, then was happy to see 6 Ring-billed and 1 Herring Gull fly directly overhead.  Gulls are hard to find around here in late May, so this was another bonus for the list.

We turned south at 7:45 for the long haul to Oliver, cycling along the river channel to Skaha Lake.  The oxbow that had been filled with ducks last week was only half-filled with ducks, but a flock of 16 vultures was nice to see.  Two Great Blue Herons flying by saved us the cycle up the road to their colony.  Skaha Lake was flat calm as well, but Lesser Scaups were the only things dotting the surface.  We collided with the Peach City Half-Marathon as we cycled down the east side of Skaha, dodging runners and being held up at the turn-around for a few minutes.  We were an hour behind schedule, so it was rather frustrating, but we did have a strong wind at our backs as the skies darkened and threatened us with a drenching rain.  The wind shaved 15 minutes off our time deficit by the time we got to Okanagan Falls, so we dashed over to the river to look for the Harlequin Duck that had been there all week.  Try as we might we couldn’t find it (we found out later that we’d missed it somehow—it was perched on a rock in the afternoon!), but a  few Wood Ducks on Shuttleworth Creek brought our list to the century mark at 10:30 a.m.

We continued south to Vaseux Lake as the sun came out—we’d managed to miss the rain somehow.  We walked out on the boardwalk—soon to star as High Island, TX in an upcoming Hollywood movie, The Big Year—and tallied the usual wetland species—Marsh Wren, Veery, Redhead, Pied-billed Grebe, and Eastern Kingbird.  I’d hoped we could get by with a quick dash into the big rock cliffs at the north end of the lake, but no birds showed by the highway so we grunted up the gravel hill for a kilometre or so to get Canyon Wren, Chukar, White-throated Swifts, and stupendous looks at a Lewis’s Woodpecker.  The hill offered a good view of the lake, but we couldn’t find the resident Canvasback pair, though a small flock of five Eared Grebes were a nice substitute.  Continuing south along the highway, we had great looks at a Lark Sparrow and distant views of a pair of Greater Scaup.  We tried to turn its companions into Harlequin Ducks but eventually realized we were dreaming in Technicolor.  A rest at the base of the massive face of McIntyre Bluff was welcome, but didn’t produce a sighting of the Peregrine Falcon pair that were (I’m sure) looking at us from above.

At River Road we turned north again, checking off the cooperative male Black-chinned Hummingbird that likes to perch on the powerline there, then slogged up Secrest hill.  Well, I walked up most of it.  We looked at the checklist and realized we were missing some pretty common birds.  Nancy spotted a Cooper’s Hawk going overhead, so we finally had something down in the hawk department.  I wandered off behind some bushes for a bathroom break and heard a Dusky Flycatcher calling from the next Saskatoon, and a Cassin’s Vireo sang in the afternoon sun.  We all breathed a sigh of relief when we finally got our Vesper Sparrow at Willowbrook.

Since we were two hours behind schedule by now, I decided to axe plans to cycle out to Green Lake and back, a 15-km jaunt that would probably only net us Ruddy Duck and take about 2 hours to do.  Continuing north, the next big hill slowed us down quite a bit, so I managed to hear, then see, a Pacific-slope Flycatcher in the narrow draw.  Michelle spotted  a Hammond’s Flycatcher around the next corner, so suddenly our list of big misses was getting a lot shorter.

Nancy looking for partridges at White Lake

 A Merlin entertained us up the really long hill into the White Lake Basin by chasing—unsuccessfully—every bird in sight.  We got to White Lake a half-hour early, thanks to our revised itinerary and another fortuitous tail wind.  We ditched the bikes and went on a stroll through the sage, hoping to kick up Gray Partridge, see a harrier or maybe hear a Grasshopper Sparrow.  But we returned empty-handed, so cycled on to get the expected Brewer’s Sparrows.  At 5:30 we finally added American Kestrel to our list, then pulled into Doreen Olson’s Three Gates Farm, where we hoped to find a White-breasted Nuthatch.  Doreen informed us that she thought the nuthatch nest had been predated by a bear, and although our pishing brought in a surprising diversity of birds there was no White-breasted Nuthatch to be seen.  We had one card up our sleeve at Three Gates, though—we hiked down the hill toward the Marron River and peeked into a nest box to see 4 big Western Screech-Owl young.

After a relaxing pot of coffee and plate of cookies in Doreen’s kitchen, we thanked her and  cycled off into the increasingly chilly evening air.  At Kaleden we screamed down the steep, winding Lakehill Road to reach the Kettle Valley Trail again, this time along the west side of Skaha Lake.  The wind had dropped and the lake was calm again, but no new species were to be seen.  We went north to Penticton and back along the river channel, checking the oxbow and outlet dam again for anything new.  Nothing.  By now it was 8:45 p.m. and we (or at least I) were tired and sore, so we cycled back up one more long hill to my home.  We got there at 9:06 p.m. with 106 kilometres on the odometer, a list of 124 species, and a bike-load of good memories.

You can still make a donation to my Birdathon by clicking this link.  The money raised goes to the operation of the Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory.  Thanks!

The signs are all there–warblers flitting through the new spring leaves, shorebirds winging their way to the tundra, nuthatches hiding in tiny holes–it must be Birdathon season.  It may have started with the walkathons I remember as a teenager, but whenever it did, organizations have long been raising money by asking volunteers to do crazy things, often for extended periods of time.  The volunteers then ask their friends and relatives to pledge money to watch them do these crazy things, or at least get a vivid report of the goings-on afterwards.

Some birdathons are wet; that’s me starting the Richter Pass climb in 2006.

The grand-daddy of all birdathons is the Baillie Birdathon, organized by Bird Studies Canada, which has been raising money for bird conservation for over 30 years.  I started doing birdathons about 20 years ago and have never missed a year since.  When I first began running birdathons, I did all the organizing myself, but soon found that it was much easier just to make my efforts Baillie Birdathons, since the folks at BSC do all the detail work with receipts, and always have a long list of great prizes.

Most birdathons are a fundraising variant on the Big Day (or Bird Race, as I think they are called in the UK).  The concept of Big Day is simple–try to find as many bird species as possible in one day.   Big Days take a lot of planning to make sure you have designed the most efficient route, something that is a true test of your local bird knowledge.  They also favour those with keen ears and eyes that can pick out a rarity from the flock.  But what I like best about them is that, unlike the Big Year or lifelist, they’re over in 24 hours.

Mark Gardiner and Eva Durance on the west side of Skaha Lake during the 2007 Okanagan Big Day Challenge.

I started doing Big Days in 1979, driving from my parents’ home in the Okanagan Valley to the Pacific coast at Vancouver.  We would pick a good day in May when most of the breeding birds had returned from the tropics and a few Arctic nesters were still passing through.  These were a lot of fun but they lacked real competition—we only had one carload of birders trying to see if we could beat last year’s result.  In 1986 I decided to challenge others to the game and founded the Okanagan Big Day Challenge.  The rules were straightforward—get a team together and see how many birds you can find in the Okanagan Valley on the Sunday of the Victoria Day weekend, then meet on Monday morning to pass out various trophies and exchange wild stories.

The Challenge has been a birdathon for most of its history, much of that as part of the Baillie Birdathon.  And since 1998 it has been an integral part of the Meadowlark Festival in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.  The money I raise through the Baillie Birdathon goes to help run the Vaseux Lake Bird Observatory, part of theCanadian Migration Monitoring Network.  It’s very difficult to raise money for a never-ending project such as monitoring bird populations, and birdathons are an ideal method.

Chris Charlesworth, Gary Davidson and Kenn Kaufman in that last-minute desperation period just before dark, 2005.  Shortly after, we saw a family of Long-eared Owls, our 160th species.

Half the fun of a birdathon is in the planning and scouting, so I’ve been out on my bike a lot this spring, trying to get in shape for the event, and, now that migration is well underway, seeing where I can best find some of the more uncommon species.  The Okanagan Big Day Challenge has gone green over the past few years, and the teams now compete either on foot or by bicycle.  This year I plan to leave my house at 2:30 a.m., cycle up into the pine forests to get Flammulated Owls and Common Poorwills, then work my way south through the valley to the great mix of wetlands, desert grasslands and towering cliffs at Vaseux Lake, then back through the sagebrush bowl of White Lake before getting home at 9:30 p.m.  I hope to get over 120 species with that route, but I’m guaranteed to get good and tired after 120 kilometres in the saddle.

So–and you knew this was coming–you can make a pledge for my Birdathon simply by clicking this link and filling in the online form.  If you don’t like online forms, you can mail a cheque made out to Bird Studies Canada to my home address:  705 Sunglo Dr., Penticton, BC, V2A 8X7.  The birds will thank you!