March 2019

My kids have gymnastics for an hour and 25 minutes on Saturday mornings.  After I drop them off, I walk over the Queen Elizabeth Park and go looking for birds!  The real treats come later in the spring when all the migrants come through, but for now I am focusing on taking good photos of resident species.  Oh, and I'm always on the look out for hummingbirds because I would love to find a nest.

Today I spotted three different Red-breasted Nuthatches.  I was surprised I haven't seen any yet so far and three today, but that is the way it goes.  While watching the Nuthatches, I noticed a Chickadee was visiting the same tree.  Turns out it was a pair of chickadee's and they were excavating a future home for babies.  They tried pretty hard to release the wood chips away from the nest hole.

 
I walked around to where I saw the Variable Thrush a few weeks ago, and it was back in roughly the same bunch of trees.  Last time I saw it, it was eating fruit out of the canopy.  This week it was on the ground flipping over leaves looking for insects.  These birds will be gone in the summer - up in the mountains finding food and making babies.

We booked 4 lessons over Christmas.  One morning was canceled because it was too windy for the gondola's to go up.  Grouse mountain was good - they offered replacement lessons, lift tickets and rentals but finding an open lesson turned out to be hard.  We wound up booking a semi-private lesson (an upgrade we paid for) so that we could get the lesson in before the season ended.

Kids can only ski for so long.  Helen dropped us off at the base of the mountain around 11am and then we took the gondola up and rented skis.  It was almost 1pm by the time we had lunch and had everyone ready to go.  We got in two runs before our 2:30 lesson started.  I dropped the kids off with the instructor and went to the Olympic Express chair and the more challenging terrain.  Much to my surprise, the kids were behind me by just a few chairs!
 

We tried getting one more run in, but that turned out to be a mistake.  Claira was exhausted.  After getting back, we returned our rental gear (I almost forgot my skis at the top of the mountain) and returned back to the base where Helen picked us up.  A big day.  I felt proud of myself for taking the kids skiing.  I asked Nara if her friends go skiing in the local mountains on the week.  She replied - "No - they go skiing at Whistler".  Oh well.

 
The second bird I saw (from the same standing position) roughly resembled a song sparrow (spotted breast) but behaved very differently.  iNaturalist steered me in the right direction - it was a Hermit Thrush.  This bird was very brave - it came quite close to me in open disturbed soil.  (I looks like Vancouver Parks pulled up a huge expanse of blackberry and English Ivy).
 

 
What surprised me about QE park is how every week I see different birds.  Chickadees and Song Sparrows are reliable, but many other species I have only seen one time.  Perhaps I saw them before but incorrectly identified them and ignored the actual diversity of the park.