Hurricane Oho brushed against Vancouver Island last weekend, bringing hopes of southern and offshore birds. Although the winds weren’t too strong in the Victoria area, they were pretty intense on the exposed coast, so a trip to Port Renfrew was the order of the day on Sunday.
I stopped briefly at Whiffin Spit to do a wellness check on the Black-throated Sparrow (still there, but not looking too hot), and at several other viewpoints along the way west.
It seemed that birders aren’t the only people interested in the coast after a big storm. Although I have made many trips out to Jordan River and Port Renfrew this year, the beaches have never been as crowded as they were last weekend. Some places, I think there were more people than birds!
The aftermath of the storm wasn’t as significant as either the surfers or I expected. Despite scanning carefully through hundreds of gulls, I couldn’t turn up anything unusual, and the surfers tried desperately to find a wave. Port Renfrew had better surf, but fewer surfers. Interestingly, a large flock of Black Turnstones (with a few Surfbirds and a couple of Dunlin) were pretending to be Sanderling, running along the sandy beach on the south side of Harris Cove.
It was fun to watch them try to outrun the waves as they came up the beach. Even the local marinas had prepared for the incoming storm season by pulling many of their docks out of the water.
I was a little surprised to not see birds pecking away at the now-stranded marine life on the floats.
With not much happening in town , I headed up to Botany Bay to attempt a seawatch. The Steller’s Jays were predictably in the parking lot. No surprises to be found!
Down in the bay, the surf was high and entertaining, but still not much in the way of birds–not even any shearwaters.
I headed back to town and another look from the Port Renfrew pier. I stop there a couple of times each trip to use the pub’s wifi to get messages, and this time there was a doozy! Cathy Carlson had photographed a Brown Booby not far from Sooke. I only had about an hour to bird on my way back in that direction as I was scheduled to be bander-in-charge at Pedder Bay for our owl project at dusk.
An hour’s not a lot of time to look for a booby, so I focussed on the marinas, stopping at as many of them as I could on my way back towards Victoria. But there was something nagging me. When driving back down the hill from Botany Bay, I had seen an odd shape out of the corner of my eye, through the trees, soaring over the entrance to Harris Cove. I hadn’t been able to relocate it. Could that have been a booby? I’d been a little focussed on pelicans and wondered if I might have missed something even better.
The marina search was fruitless, but I did make it to the banding station on time. We banded 27 Northern Saw-whet Owls before shutting down at about 2 am. Now I had a dilemma. Go home to my own bed (almost an hour away) and go looking for the booby on Monday, or heading back to Port Renfrew (more than 2 hours away) to get an early start on a re-do. I opted for the latter, knowing that I would have to stop en route to sleep.
My car is pretty comfortable to sleep in and I found a quiet and dark spot on Sheringham Point Road at about 3 am. I’ve been keeping a pillow and blanket in the car (along with a few clothes), so grabbed them and settled in. I expected it to get quite cold. I fell asleep quickly, but was awakened only a few minutes later by someone pounding on my window. One of the street’s residents must have seen me pull up and wanted to know what I was doing there. I would have thought that was pretty obvious, and I’m not sure what his issue was, because when I said I’d pulled over to avoid driving while too tired, he was fine with that. Apparently, there had been a fatal “falling asleep” accident just down the road a few days earlier.
My visitor left, and I went back to sleep. Until I heard an animal on the roof of my car. In the dark, everything sounds bigger than it is, so although the noise seemed like it was being made by something the size of a cougar, I suspected it was a housecat or a raccoon. Sure enough, after a few minutes a cat slid down my windshield. The rest of the night was quiet and uneventful, and I was back on the road before 7. Then it started to rain…
I was very grateful for an open coffee shop in Port Renfrew, even though it was early and a statutory holiday in Canada. The second Monday of October is our Thanksgiving. I wasn’t looking for a turkey, though. I wanted a Brown Booby!
With the rain, sometimes an absolute downpour, birds were even more scarce than the day before, and my trip to several places in Renfrew and on the way back to Victoria didn’t turn up anything more exciting than a very wet grouse on the side of the road.
By the time I reached Sooke and telephone reception, word was out that a juvenile Brown Booby had been sighted at Dungeness Bay in Washington. Was it the same bird that Cathy had seen? Or had Oho blown in a whole flock of boobies? I continued my search, albeit with a little less enthusiasm. When I reached Colwood and the first chance for a Tim Hortons tea, my phone rang. It was Jeremy Gatten, out in East Sooke, and he’d just watched a distant Brown Booby for about an hour and a half. There were two birds! I headed back west and spent the last two hours of daylight waiting for fog to lift and hoping that the bird would drift back my way. It didn’t. I put my Thanksgiving turkey in the oven after 9 pm.
Wednesday morning, Cathy and Ted Carlson were gracious enough to take Jeremy, Daniel Donncke and me out in their boat on a marine search for the missing booby. It was a gorgeous day and I can’t think of a better way to spend five hours. We found several Northern Fulmars and a few Red-necked Phalaropes, but generally speaking, it was a desert out there. Not many birds at all.
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We raised binoculars and joked about finding a Tropical Kingbird at Whiffin Spit as we passed. We saw a good number of raptors getting ready for their migration south. A kettle of about a dozen Red-tailed Hawks, along with an assortment of other raptors, was a pretty interesting sight for the Sooke Basin! I dropped Jeremy and Daniel off and was running an errand when my phone pinged. Heather Tronsden had found a Tropical Kingbird at Whiffin Spit, just about the time that we were going by! It was too late to go back before sunset, but I knew where I’d be in the morning.
Mary Robichaud, Mike Ashbee, and Tim Zurowski were already at the tip of the spit when I arrived, and had been there since sunrise. No sign of the kingbird. We all looked around for a while then started to drift away, Sea lions were hanging out fishing at the entrance to the harbour. Their barking and snorting created quite the show. Humans were still able to catch a fish or two, even with about half a dozen of these competitors nearby.
It was around 11 when I finally threw in the towel. I did manage to get a nice shot of a young Cooper’s Hawk overhead.
I headed to Tower Point where Daniel was doing a waterbird survey, in the hopes that two sets of eyes might have a better chance of seeing the booby. It may have been better, but it still didn’t turn up the bird.
I was giving a slide show to the Cowichan Valley Garden Club that evening, so figured I’d get to Duncan early to avoid traffic issues on the Malahat. Not to mention that my slide show wasn’t quite ready for presentation! Everything worked out, though, and the slide show went off without a hitch.
Thursday was another day on the water to do more booby searching. Ben van Drimmelen once again offered up his sailboat for the birding cause, and Jeremy and Mike got their first sailing experience. We were less than a half kilometre away from the dock when my phone rang. It was Mary relaying a message that John Woods had found a Tropical Kingbird at Esquimalt Lagoon!
It was a great day for sailing, but a lousy day for birding. The conditions were perfect, but we couldn’t find a feeding flock or drifting logs anywhere. We went from Oak Bay to Clover Point and beyond, crossing over the shipping lanes to check both near and offshore waters. Nothing! Eventually, we did see a good flock of Bonaparte’s Gulls, but that was about it. There were a few other gulls, and the occasional alcid, but it was hard to believe that these waters were filled with thousands of birds just a couple of weeks ago.
When we landed, I braved the rush hour traffic to try to get to Esquimalt Lagoon before dark. The trip took pretty much twice as long as I thought it would, and I was starting to feel that it was a useless cause. I would only have about 15 minutes of dusky light when I got there, and I had a meeting to attend in the opposite direction shortly after sunset. When I arrived, I scanned the treetops. Nothing. I scanned the shrubs. Only a kingfisher. Treetops again. Still nothing. Shrubs again. In the same shrub as the kingfisher now sat a kingbird. And then it was off up into a taller tree. I got some VERY bad record shots, but evidence that I’d seen my 258th bird for the year. I went back on Friday and got a few better pictures.
Also on Friday, I joined a group of students from Pearson College of the Pacific on a trip to Race Rocks.
This is an ecological reserve, and permission has to be granted for a landing. I was very fortunate to be invited along. A search of the islands did not turn up the elusive booby, but it was an interesting visit none the less. Like most lighthouse locations, Race Rocks turns up more than its fair share of rarities. Sadly, none today. I did get good looks of Savannah Sparrows cavorting with Elephant Seals, though, and that doesn’t happen every day!
Among the many hundreds of sea lions, two showed evidence of entanglement in fishing gear. Professionals are coming to the reserve later this month to attempt to free them.
Saturday and Sunday, I will be back out on the water. Keep your fingers crossed for a booby or something else spectacular!