Monday, July 14, 2008

Annual Christmas bird count brings interesting sightings

By Dan Hilborn
Published Dec. 21, 2005


Icy cold weather failed to keep Burnaby birders from visiting the city's parks, trails and other hiding places on Sunday morning during the Lower Mainland's annual Christmas bird count.

George Clulow, organizer of the Burnaby Lake bird count, part of the annual Christmas bird count sponsored by the Vancouver Natural History Society, said unusual sightings this year included a swamp sparrow and two sightings of the same peregrine falcon, plus a reported 50 per cent increase in the size of what many people believe is the largest crow roost in British Columbia.

"It was a beautiful day for counting birds," said Clulow, a Burnaby resident. "And we also probably got the rarest bird for the entire Vancouver count - the swamp sparrow. I've been doing this count for 15 years and I've never seen a swamp sparrow before."

Clulow said the Lower Mainland probably only sees two or three swamp sparrows all winter long and they're usually out on Boundary Bay. The Burnaby sighting was on the boardwalk on the north side of Deer Lake.

"It's smaller and daintier than our typical song sparrow," Clulow said. "It's got a bright rufous red colour on its wings, and it's very smartly streaked on its face and head. It's just a very spiffy looking little sparrow."

Another notable change this year was the disappearance of the city's once-thriving community of pine siskins, who apparently stayed in the north.

"Usually we get a few hundred pine siskins. This year we got six," Clulow said.

"But it's regionwide. Pine siskin numbers are down throughout the whole of southern B.C. They've stayed further north, and nobody really knows why."

But when one population goes down, often another rises in its place, said Clulow. This year's surprise guest at Burnaby Lake was a small brood of 30 American goldfinches, which typically winter further south and are generally seen in smaller numbers, Clulow said.

Burnaby Lake was also home to its usual large number of mallards and other ducks, including the largest concentration of wood ducks in the Lower Mainland.

Other, more unusual, waterfowl spotted at the lake included five ring-necked ducks, a "good number" of hooded and common mergansers and eight Virginia rails - a secretive little bird.

Clulow, who used a tape recording of a rail's song to call the birds out of the marshes, said the '"laterally compressed" birds are specially adapted to push between the stems and reeds of the marshland plants.

The counters, who included a large group of students from BCIT, also spotted a single belted kingfisher at the west side of Burnaby Lake, four hermit thrushes and five cedar waxwings.

In total, the count found 58 species of birds around Burnaby and Deer lakes, while a second group of counters working with Brian Self in South Burnaby counted another 65 species of birds.

The Burnaby NOW was unable to contact a third group of bird-counters, who looked through the North Burnaby neighbourhoods.

Another unusual songbird - the savannah sparrow - that typically winters farther south was spotted near the Fraser River, said Self, who is responsible for the count in the region from Central Park to New Westminster.

Self, a Vancouver resident, lauded the city planners who left the six South Slope ravines intact when neighbourhoods were subdivided over the last 100 years.

"These ravines provide little corridors of habitat that is fast disappearing in other parts of the region," Self said. "Whoever decided not to put these streams underground was a man with vision."

And while much of the marshland in the Big Bend region has been developed into new industrial parks, Self noted that the developers have kept open small corridors of green space to provide habitat for bids.

Slightly more unusual sightings in south Burnaby included another peregrine falcon - possibly the same one from central Burnaby - and a merlin, another variety of bird-hunting falcon.

Self said bird-lovers are fortunate to live in the Lower Mainland, which is home to upwards of 400 different species of birds throughout the year and fully two-thirds of all the bird species found in Canada.

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