Nature Vancouver

It was a perfect spring day. The skies were clear, the winds were calm, and the temperature was about 10 C for the 13 birders who joined Harvey and Michelle for an Easter Saturday birdwalk at Iona Beach Regional Park. After introducing ourselves and sharing a small Easter treat in the parking lot, we headed towards the pond to start our exploration of this great birding hotspot. There was a moderate collection of less-common ducks visible from the boardwalk: Lesser…

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Stanley Park is a popular destination!  Harvey and Michelle posted their March 23 walk to enews and Meetup and the Meetup slots filled in about 1/2 an hour, so we decided to run two walks on the 23rd: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. However we had no way of predicting the atmospheric river that was forecast for Sunday.  Many attendees canceled and in the end only 10 hardy birders joined us under the heron rookery at…

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Trip leaders Harvey Dueck and Michelle Baudais had originally planned to lead a trip to Pitt Lake in early February, but one of the attractions was the opportunity to see Trumpeter Swans. That’s not very practical if most of the lake and marsh is frozen. So we delayed and were happy to find open water and clear skies when we arrived at the Grant Narrows parking lot on the morning of Saturday March 1st. The trip began with scope views…

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The walk at Terra Nova that was scheduled for Saturday February 8th was cancelled due to icy trail conditions, but a few of us looked ahead at the forecast and saw warmer temperatures predicted for mid-week and decided to reschedule to Wednesday for those who were available. Unfortunately it wasn’t warmer! Four brave birders joined Harvey Dueck and Michelle Baudais for a beautiful sunny morning of birding, but the paths remained icy and we had to move slowly to stay…

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The morning of Saturday December 7th dawned dark and wet, with a heavy rainfall warning from Environment Canada. Several attendees cancelled at the last minute, so only 8 hardy birders joined trip leaders Harvey Dueck and Michelle Baudais at 9am at Maple Ridge Park for our annual quest to find Dippers. The American Dipper is North America’s only aquatic songbird, so we were relatively confident that the rainfall would not deter our target species. Fortunately that was true! After about…

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Twelve birders braved the very wet weather forecast to join trip leaders Harvey Dueck and Michelle Baudais at Trout Lake on October 14th, including a visitor from Ottawa who happened upon our gathering on the South Beach and asked if he could join. We started by focusing on the birds on the water: more than 80 Canada Geese, about 40 Wood Ducks, and a few Mallards.  After a Downy Woodpecker flew into the willow behind us, we started moving counterclockwise around the…

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Fourteen birders joined Harvey and Michelle at Jericho Beach at 8am on a bright and sunny Saturday for a morning of birding.  We began our observations right by our meeting spot when Harvey spotted a California gull lounging alongside some Ring-billed Gulls on the beach.  California Gulls share black wing tips with Ring-billed gulls, but have a large orange spot on their lower mandible rather than the black ring of the Ring-billed. After preliminaries were concluded, we made our way…

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