Merry Christmas!
Category: Birds
Welcome to my first post….
In August of 2014, my wife and I decided on a momentous change in our lives—I’m going to severely compress the process we underwent—for her to join me in retirement, and move from The Coast(al region of BC) to The Interior, and the centre of the Okanagan Valley, Kelowna.
I’ll spare you all the real-estate related stories, but share that we were very fortunate, in our home-hunting phase in the late fall of 2014 to be able to house-sit right across the lane in a condominium complex in Kelowna’s Lower Mission district from the place we finally settled on in December and moved into at the end of February, 2015.
I toyed a year ago with a new blog—something to do when the skies turn gray from temperature inversion and bring occasional rain and snow. Started with a Google product, but could never get it up and going. This fall, with a year’s photographs and musings to draw upon, I am ready to start again, but have decided against using Google’s Blogger. I just find Google, as wonderful as its products are, to be too invasive of my privacy, too determined to force me to show the world everything I have online whether that really suits me or not.
So, I’ve elected to use this free version of WordPress, with which I am fairly familiar from days as a small entrepreneur who maintained his own website until I retired at the end of 2013. Hope those of you who visit these pages find something to enjoy, chuckle over, or even think about….
The purpose of this blog is to share what I do and what I think with anyone interested in what I have to offer. You’ll find photos, mostly of birds that I encounter on my daily walks in the neighbourhood and travels around the region and beyond. I’ll also contribute from time to time, pieces of writing from both past and present that reflect how I feel and what I think about the world I’m part of….
I’ll conclude this first post with 10 images, more or less in chronological order, created (with nature’s providence and my equipment’s capacities) in our first four months here….
To see enlarged images of these shots, right click on the photo and choose open image in a new tab.
Tryst with a Northern Flicker in Thomson Marsh
Dusky Grouse near the Kettle Valley Railway trestles high above Kelowna
American Dipper near the Nature Centre on Mission Creek
Great Horned Owl near Munson Pond
Winter Robin in Thomson Marsh, a short walk from home
Cooper’s Hawk on a high branch at Fascieux Creek
Great Blue Heron of Fascieux Creek on a damp, chilly winter afternoon
Male Belted Kingfisher near Mission Creek Greenway, Lower Mission
Common Goldeneyes in Mission Creek
White-tailed Deer near McCulloch Road
Idle Afternoon Idyl
July 13, 2015 (written to accompany photos of Spotted Sandpipers on my Flickr site.)
[Note: if you see a photo with a hand icon over it—like the map–kids set immediately below, you can click it to enlarge and scroll through the images of its group. To return to the full post, click the x in the top right of the image. Full size images, not in a set, will not show a hand icon….)
With the grandkids safely returned to their home in Yokohama, and us missing them terribly, my wife Nana and I decided to spend the last half of our first empty-nest afternoon at a favourite spot we’d enjoyed with them, Bertram Creek Park, on the east side of Okanagan Lake about 13 minutes south of our home.
We just wanted one of those “idle pleasures” times, where we sit and sip in the shade while enjoying the boaters in the distance and waves wandering in to lap the shoreline.
Of course, I took the camera—just in case the Osprey came around for a feeding as we’d seen her do before.
It was a lovely afternoon, with wonderfluffy clouds providing sudden moments of relief from the searing Okanagan sun and enabling us to stay put for another few moments before urging us further into the shore-shade up the beach. As the sun slowly rowed its way west, little happened. No Osprey, one distant gull (a “lakegull,” the kids had concluded, since there’s no tide here), a few ants and wasps that for the most part opted for co-existence, and a friendly pair of young Mallards that swam by, only 20 feet away, eschewing entreaties to come in for a chip (I know, I know!) as the lake provides plenty of natural duck food. 
Eventually, however, we found that we’d moved quite near to where the tiny creek flows into the lake, in the best shade of the day.
Nana noticed it first and called my attention to a small sandpiper bobbing as it foraged among the rocks on the shore near the creek mouth.
“Spotted,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so,” she replied, reminding me of our grandson who is so precise in his observations and never shy about setting me straight. “It’s so small—maybe a Least?”
I looked more closely. “It’s a chick!” I said. “A Spotted Sandpiper chick. No spots at this age, though.”
I extracted the camera and checked the bird through the lens. “Still a bundle of down. Worth a few shots, I think. Wonder where its mom is.”
While the baby kept a respectful distance, it nevertheless approached within range of my zoom, and I snapped a few shots. When I got up to get a better angle, it turned back towards the creek mouth. I decided to go up and over the creek and approach from the other side. I thought about how much our nine-year-old granddaughter would have loved this moment of the hunt.
That’s when I heard the mom. I wasn’t sure at first, as the peeps seemed to be coming from up in the bushes. “Could be a grey squirrel,” I muttered sotto voce, “or one of those ventriloquist Columbia Ground Squirrels…”. But I think I knew it was the mom.
It took only a few seconds to locate the second bird and to determine that it wasn’t another “peepling.” I watched as the chick withdrew towards the water and mom ventured towards me, squeaking with increasing urgency and doing her best to draw me up the creek, away from the shore.
In the precious late afternoon light, Mom gave me wonderful views both near the creek mouth, then in the shaded vale. I snapped a lot of shots, trying to take advantage without making her too anxious. She was a determined protector; I admired her courage and tenacity.
Several minutes later, when I returned to my perch on the shore, Nana spotted the chick again, and we watched as it searched for, then settled into a safe place to wait until Mom returned. It was inspiring to observe its survival skills and a joy to document them.
This would not have been a particularly remarkable encounter for most birders, I think, but it remains an ephemeral moment that we will hold dear, just as we treasure the three and a half weeks we enjoyed with our own grand-chicks!
If you’ve taken the time to read this only to find the ending rather anticlimactic, I apologize, but I hope you enjoyed the photos….
birds & musings 