Vancouver Island Nature Tours

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 the back yard; [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A couple of days ago a fellow birder from nearby Parksville, announced that he had found a male three-toed woodpecker on the slopes of Mount Arrowsmith. This is a rare bird for Vancouver Island! Later he gave out the UTM coordinates for those with GPSs. So today, I thought I would look for it since [...]

The pelagic trip I wrote about earlier this month is now officially going to happen. The date of the trip is Sept 7th. It will be the only pelagic birding trip in a boat with a heated cabin and on-board washroom facilities offered on the west coast of Canada this summer. For those of you [...]

If you are a birder, you probably keep a life list of all the birds you have ever seen. Many other birders keep a yard list of the birds they have found from within the boundaries of their yard. Others have lists for certain places the visit regularly, for each province, state and country they [...]

Not much content on this one, I’m afraid. Just pictures. Last November my wife and I took a trip to the west coast of Mexico. Before the trip we bought a new camera, a Canon S5. It’s go a very powerful 15x zoom on it. So now I can take bird pictures that are actually [...]

It’s way past time for another entry. I’ve got plenty of irons in the fire these days. One promising iron is a pelagic birding trip for the American Birding Association. They are having a regional convention in Vancouver and Victoria from 30 August to 6 September 2008. And they have asked Rainbird Excursions to put [...]