Vancouver Island Nature Tours

I recently ran across a couple at Victoria Quay in Port Alberni. They had the tell-tale sign of a birder and a visitor - binoculars hanging from their necks and hanging around the signs by the Somass River. I approached them and they started asking about how to get to the bird sanctuary on [...]

A herring skiff
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
Each year herring spawns around Vancouver Island in early March. This year is no exception. Just this morning I heard that the herring were spawning near French Creek between Parksville and Qualicum Beach. this attracts tens of thousands of birds, of all kinds as well as seals, and sea lions. [...]

How many birds in the flock?
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird

With Christmas Bird Counts starting all across North America next week it is timely to begin thinking about how good you are at counting birds in a flock. In this case, it is a flock of Starlings congregating in the evening before settling on a roost for [...]

Curious Violet-green Swallow
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
It’s been a long cold winter on Vancouver Island. and in some respects it isn’t over. We woke up to snow on the ground on April Fool’s Day, and again last this morning. Despite that, there was a large flock of Violet-green swallows over the far side of the Somass [...]

Hairy Woodpecker
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
Woodpeckers around our place have started drilling. For some people it ca be a taxing experience when they are woken up far earlier than they want to be by a lovely Northern Flicker who has found a wonderful bit of flashing in their roof to drum away on. To a Flicker, [...]

It’s an odd mix of birds that start thier breeding activity in the middle of a Canadian winter. But when you live of the west coast of Canada you can understand it a little better.
This line of thought started last evening when I went over to the estuary of the Somass River and found a [...]

Northern Flicker
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
My wife took this pretty darn good image while she was doing a feeder count for the Christmas Bird Count here in Port Alberni. You can just see one red shaft on the flight feather indicating that it is of the western race.
The bird is sitting on a suet feeder specifically [...]

It is at this time of year a small but growing number of people sit back and think about all the birds they saw over the last year. They pull out their records and count their year list of species seen.
A great many birders are inveterate listers - a list for [...]

Christmas Waxwing
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
Bohemian Waxwings are very unusual for Vancouver Island. They are birds of the interior of British Columbia and the Prairies. But we have had record-breaking cold temperatures leading up to Christmas and for the first time in many years, a white Christmas. Perhaps these birds were driven here by fierce outflow [...]

Photographing a Cassin’s Auklet
Originally uploaded by TheRainbird
I just got back from a really successful pelagic birding trip to northern Vancouver Island.  The American Birding Association (ABA) had a regional conference in Vancouver, which moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island. ABA conferences usually have pre and post conference excursions which explore the region the conference is [...]