Dear heavens. After our misadventure with the wild turkey in our Gabriola yard, I hope that Guinea fowl don’t move onto a nearby property and ruin the neighbourhood.
Are they, by the way, the kind of birds that hang out behind the seniors’ place on North Road, and at the end of Church Street?
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I’m not good at identifying birds, but I think this must be a downy woodpecker. This one is at Drumbeg, but of course they’re all over Gabriola. They’re hard (for me) to photograph because they don’t sit still for very long.
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We’ve been amused by peacocks in other people’s neighbourhoods around Gabriola, because — ha ha! — it’s funny and the birds are interesting. I’ve even blogged about Morri H. Mostow’s Gabriola peacocks. We’ve been equally amused at other kinds of free-range fowl who seem to wander anywhere they please on other parts of the island.
Meanwhile, [...]
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I’ve read about eagles in other parts of North America getting sick on food they eat because of lead poisoning. Do eagles on the BC coast suffer from lead poisoning, too? Apparently. According to a Canwest article, two Vancouver Island eagles died from lead poisoning last year:
Two Vancouver Island eagles that died last spring were [...]
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I don’t know what they are, and I’m too tired to look them up. But aren’t they pretty? Up and down the waves they go. I wish I were as immune to cold water as they must be.
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One morning a few years ago I found over five dozen golf balls on a Gabriola beach. Some were lodged between rocks, some were half-buried in sand, some were tangled in seaweed. Lots were just perched on the sand.
The tide had brought them in, but from where? I had visions of a flock of golf [...]
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Aha! I found the name of the woodpecker who has been leaving patterns of little holes on Gabriola’s alder trees – the bird I’ve been thinking of as the tattoo woodpecker. It’s the red-breasted sapsucker. From Birds of Coastal British Columbia:
Sapsuckers have adopted a variation on the woodpecker theme. They drill tidy, parallel lines [...]
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These holes must be the work of a woodpecker, and I wish I knew which one — this creature is all over the Gabriola forest. Whatever the bird is, I’d call it the tattoo woodpecker if I were naming it. Two reasons:
This woodpecker creates tiny holes in the tree’s skin and injects something (more on [...]
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Today at Folklife there was an unusual amount of birdsong, so I wandered back and forth to see where it was all coming from. This is the answer: some bird has built a nest above the boardwalk, just between the Gabriola Library and the Jeremy Maude Studio and Gallery.
Any idea what kind of bird built [...]
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Do you suppose our Gabriola geese ever fly upside-down, the way this one can?
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We’ve got lots of woodpeckers on Gabriola, and until now I’ve just seen them doing woodpecker-type things. Like, you know, pecking wood. So why did one woodpecker suddenly decide that our window needed pecking? What’s the appeal of pecking glass? And how can I send him back to the trees?
Somebody on Metafilter asked the [...]
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I’ve tried to take photos of Gabriola’s eagles, but it’s difficult because they don’t stand still for me. Don Butt has no such problems with the eagles at his place; he overlooks trees where a pair of eagles hang out, and even gets to see what goes on in their nest. He’s got lots of [...]
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I was walking back from Sandwell when an owl swooped down right in front of me, and startled me into the next century. Then at Drumbeg — same thing, and same kind of owl.
I’ve learned that these birds are called barred owls, and that they’re all over the place. They’re interesting for lots of reasons, [...]
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Have you come across Gabriola’s peacocks? Morri Mostow explains what it’s like to live with them:
Five tame male peacocks of varying sizes and ages, all with magnificent plumage, roam and roost on our modest one-acre Gabriola Island property. They aren’t officially ours, of course. Based on local lore, we gather that they escaped from a [...]
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What I learned about woodpeckers this week is that different kinds of woodpeckers make different kind of holes. (I guess this makes perfect sense; I’d just never thought of it before.) The rectangular holes in this cedar tree were made by a pileated woodpecker.
Mr Pileated Woodpecker is the fellow shown here in the blackberry [...]
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