For the Birds

Why birdwatching?- Because they're always watching us. Flying around high in the sky or hiding in the trees with their beady little eyes always open and always watching everything we do, even at night the owls... and the bats are in on it too, and so are the squirrels.

But seriously, I watch birds because they fascinate me, the idea of migration,the cycle repeated for thousands of years, the knowlege that a flock of sandhill cranes I see high overhead in the Fall have come from the Peace/Athabasca delta and will spend the winter on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. The beauty of hawks and eagle riding thermals up 'til they are dots in the sky. The stupendous colours of Spring plumage on the ducks in my ponds, the lttle grebes climbing on their parents for protection from jackfish. A mother partridge hissing like a mad cat and charging straight at me on the bush trails to protect her young. Young phoebes being fed an apparently endless supply of bugs, worms, grasshoppers and keeping both parents on the hop from sunrise to sunset. Snipe "who-whoo-whoo" wingbeats as they catch insects in the evening, a kestrel hovering over a mouse trail in the meadow, osprey diving into the water to haul out a fish half his size and struggling to get airborne and haul it back to the nest. Grebes and loons diving and swimming like rockets under water to catch fish for the young who wait on the reed built mounds in Moonlight Bay. Sandpipers on the shore, Great Blue Herons standing in the shallows spearing minnows. Hummingbirds zipping around your head, chickadees flattening cranberries on birch stumps to dry for winter food, blue jays fighting squirrels just for the hell of it, pileated woodpeckers tearing chunks of wood from old trees in their hunt for bugs. Flocks of cedar wax wings in the fall getting pisseyed drunk on fermented mountain ash berries and acting like fratboys on the loose. Killdeer dressed like the Beagle Boys nesting in a gravel parking lot, the little ones like balls of fluff on stilts all following mama in a line as she runs.

Ducks- (On the dams) Bufflehead, Mallards, Northern Shoveller, Blue Wing Teal, Green Wing Teal, Pintail, Coots, Ruddy Duck, Goldeneye, American Widgeon (stay away from me) Canada geese.

Some years I have stood by the pond of dam #2 and counted over 5000 ducks coming in to roost at sunset, the wings aroar as they land and the cacaphony of quacks as they get sorted out for the night and talk over the days events.

Feeder Birds- chickadees (boreal and black-capped), redpolls, juncos, pine grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, gray jay, blue jay, hairy woodpecker, downy woodpecker,nuthatch.

Links to other pages on the Web.
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Alberta Fish and Game Association
British Columbia Field Ornithologists-BCFO Home Page
Canada Parks and Wilderness Society
Canadian Peregrine Foundation
Ducks Unlimited Canada

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Bird Whoopee!

As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. [In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design.] As a result, birds are very, very difficult to arouse sexually. You almost never see an aroused bird. So when they want to reproduce, birds fly up and stand on telephone lines, where they monitor telephone conversations with their feet. When they find a conversation in which people are talking dirty, they grip the line very tightly until they are both highly aroused, at which point the female gets pregnant.

[from "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"] -Dave Barry-