March 2025
And some clever quip...
Reifel Bird Sanctuary
I had a Friday off so after I got the kids
to school I decided to take a short walk at Reifel Bird
Sanctuary. The weather was cold and windy and it's pretty
early in the spring, but it was still nice to get outside and
listen to birds.
There were no wading birds (I assume they are still south) and
there were lots of American Widgeons which will be leaving soon to
go North
Reifel is famous for the family of Sandhill cranes that are
habituated to people. Perhaps the next thing on the "must
see" list are owls. I have seen a barn owl and great horned
owls in the trees but I've heard Northern Saw Whet Owls can be
seen here as well. As I walked the back row of trees I
noticed two other photographers looking into the trees.
Turns out there was a Northern Saw Whet owl hanging out in the
tree trying to ignore it's audience.
I have seen Northern Saw Whet Owls at a
banding
station on Vancouver Island. These birds are an open
area of study and the banding is showing that the population of
these small owls may be much larger that we thought.
Victoria For the Weekend
The
kids have two weeks of Spring Break in March. The kids chose
to have badminton camp for the first week (they take the skytrain to
Richmond every day to go to class) and then on the weekend we took
the kids to Victoria so they could spend a week with their
grandparents. Traffic out of Vancouver was crazy (Oak Street
is down to one lane with construction) so we were lucky to get on
the 7pm ferry. We were also quite luck to see a sunset
rainbow.
I'm working
on a "fun" project of making an underwater trail camera. The
project is far enough along that we could do a presure test. I
picked some cord at Princess Auto and we went for a walk on the
breakwater to throw the empty enclosure into the ocean to see if it
water tight. The kids like walking on the uneven blocks so we
walk a ways out to the stairs and got ready to toss it into the
ocean.
The
enclosure is roughly 2 liters in size and my dad had some handy mini
bar bells so we put them inside so the who package sinks. We
threw it in, let it sit for a minute and then pulled it back. Sadly,
after the second throw, there was a few milliliters of water inside
the enclosure. Back to the drawing board.
We made it to the end of the breakwater, took the cliche
family photo and turned back. There is a little cafe (The
Breakwater Cafe) that my Dad said had good hot chocolate. This
kids agreed with him.
The next morning I took a brief walk around Uplands Park. It
rained the whole time and the spring flowers I wanted to see weren't
out yet so I'll leave it for a few more weeks.
Tags: Ogden Point Breakwater(4), rainbow(2), Uplands Park(2), barge(1), crane(1), sunset(1)
People: Nara(3), Claira(2), Lloyd(2), Helen(1), Janet(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2025 to 2005 > March 2025
Last Modified Saturday, April 5th, 2025 at 23:43:34 Edit
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