Birder Peter Nielsen is a shooter, not a lister.
The IT professional, who works for Dueck Auto Group, looks forward to the fall birding season on the Fraser River estuary as the shift in weather brings with it hundreds of unique bird species from as far away as Russia.
“I don’t keep a list, I try to get the best photographs I can,” says Nielsen while walking along one of the many paths of the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Westham Island in Ladner, just a home run across the river from Richmond’s south dyke.
Birders such as Nielsen rely on the sanctuary as a central hub for bird watching in the Lower Mainland. But even for the most casual wildlife observer, a first-time walk through the sanctuary provides an enlightening experience.
On the path, Nielsen bumps into always-busy sanctuary manager, Kathleen Fry.
“What have you found Peter?” she asks.
Nielsen notes there’s a northern saw-whet owl just ahead and despite her decades working as a biologist in the estuary, it brings a jump to Fry.
“Ooo, I’ll have to go get my binoculars!”
After fetching them, Fry leads the Richmond News to a pine tree and her naked eyes point out the small, brown owl nestled on a branch, sleeping.
It’s one of 79 species that has been counted at Reifel over the past week (every week, a new list appears as birds come and go).
“All the little birdies, they don’t want him in the neighbourhood,” chuckles Fry.
“They like to bug them and make them move on,” she says.
“Here, we’ll leave a little reward for the chickadees,” says Fry, sprinkling some of her seeds from the $1 bag available at reception.
Meanwhile, a brown creeper, the size of a baby’s hand, scurries up a tree at lightning speed.
“He’s got a curved beak to poke into the bark,” says Fry. As the songbird disappears a big, fat squirrel — aka owl food — scurries across the path and Fry is off to look for the next big attraction, a great horned owl.
With ease she spots it sleeping in a tree with one eye open.
“Hello big owl!” she says.
Fry’s enthusiasm to protect birds is matched by her small, committed army of staff and volunteers who, last year, ushered a record 77,000 visitors to the increasingly popular sanctuary. Fry is expecting to best that number in 2014.
“As soon as fall weather sets in we get thousands of ducks who have been nesting anywhere from Alberta to the high Arctic and the snow geese are coming in from Russia and everyone’s piling in. But we also get the birds of prey, you get the hawks and eagles, and you kind of get a thrill watching a peregrine falcon (dive into) a group of ducks and watch it come away with one,” says Fry.
She and Nielsen note there are elements of serenity, safety, socialness and natural wonder from bird watching.
“People are always inspired by birds because there are very few birds that are actually going to hurt us. It’s easy to watch them without thinking anything’s going to happen to you,” she says.
“I’m an IT manager so it’s nice to get outdoors. It’s always a challenge to find something new so there’s competition with photographers and others,” says Nielsen, a former professional photographer.
To the casual observer, peak birding season at the sanctuary as well as across the estuary, including Richmond, is highlighted by one big ticket item — the aforementioned, migrating lesser snow geese, which come from the eastern reaches of Siberia to seek warmer weather and fatten up for the spring by eating the rich bounty of the marshes.
The 50,000 or so white geese set up shop on Iona Island, Terra Nova, Garry Point and at Reifel, all of which are small but equally critical components of the Pacific Flyway, a highway of migrating birds from Patagonia to Alaska.
But there’s more to bird season than geese; hundreds of rare species make the estuary their home.
And it’s those species — such as the two owls spotted by Nielsen — that attracts another unique species: bird watching hobbyists, known as birders. Fry points out that birders have evolved over the past few decades and some of the biggest changes are the photography equipment and the growth of the online birding community.
Some birders have big bucks to spend on large, zoom lenses and impressive state-of-the-art digital SLR cameras, all of which is used to capture that perfect shot of, say, a raptor swooping down to the ground and capturing a mouse with its talons.
“It used to be a serious birder would have just a small camera, but the binoculars would be the big tool. Nowadays, if you see something, you want to record it as well, so you quite often have the hybrids; those who have both. So they’re birders but they have big cameras,” explains Fry.
She said some birders are just in it for the photos (shooters) while others (perhaps the purists or the most hardcore) still stick to a pen and paper or, nowadays, a mobile tracking app (listers).
Social media has afforded birders the opportunity to connect with one another on a daily basis. A website titled ebird.org tracks and documents bird sightings on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for each particular area in the estuary.
Online forums and Twitter are used to give hourly updates if a particularly rare bird — known as a “lifer” because it’s on someone’s lifetime list — is spotted.
If a lifer is spotted at Reifel, Fry expects a small convoy to show up at reception within hours.
The toque and vest clad birders pile out of cars with thousands of dollars of photography equipment. Some have lenses so large that they require special heavy-duty tripods, themselves costing upwards of a thousand dollars each.
“Some of them show up with baby strollers. ‘Oh, I see you brought your baby, oh no, it’s just your camera’ I say to them,” Fry chuckles.
“My wife would kill me if I had a $9,000 lens,” says Nielsen, who’s packing a modest set of equipment worth about $2,500.
He and Fry chuckle about all the photos they have; Nielsen just bought an eight terabyte hard drive.
“I do what my wife says and keep the best of every bird and get rid of the rest,” chuckles Nielsen.
Sometimes it can get pretty intense. On rare occasions, Fry has had to play peacekeeper amongst birders who fight for the best shot.
“We almost had a fight between two photographers because they disagreed with how close you could get to a bird,” says Fry.
Some birders will build devices, such as fake mice on fishing line, to lure birds for the perfect shot.
Traditionalists prefer to observe bird behaviour without intervening and wait for the perfect moment, say, two birds kissing one another as they share a seed.
“There’s a lot of mentoring in bird watching,” says Fry.
Nielsen notes how some photographers have broken tree branches with nests on them to get at certain shots.
While he considers himself a photographer first and foremost he and Fry say a small minority of birders need to show more respect.
One of the problems may be the fact Reifel is slowly becoming a true last sanctuary for birds in the region, given all the man-made development.
“I remember back in the 1970s when I was doing bird surveys a lot of Richmond wasn’t nearly as developed than it was now,” says Fry, who previously worked with Ducks Unlimited Canada.
That organization has partnered with the City of Richmond to preserve parts of the Grauer Lands, near Terra Nova Rural Park, which used to be a much bigger marsh habitat for birds until condos and mansions were built on it.
With less land to graze on throughout the estuary, more birds flock to Reifel, thus bringing more birders.
The Alaksen National Wildlife Area envelops the sanctuary. Because of the increased popularity and demand for such areas, the federal government announced funding on Nov. 12 to improve public access to the site.
Putting competition between shooters and listers aside, Reifel provides a wheelchair-accessible and family-friendly environment for young children.
While there are birding opportunities in Richmond at the sites mentioned previously and the drive out to Ladner may provide some difficulties traffic wise, a beautiful backdrop of farms is provided on the journey, which includes crossing a 100-year-old one-lane wooden trestle bridge to Westham Island.
At the sanctuary, one will be welcomed by several flocks of ducks and as you walk out to the foreshore it’s common to spot a wood duck, which Fry says is possibly the most ornamental duck in the region.
The sanctuary’s paths all lead to a three-storey tower that looks out over the Salish Sea. On a clear day, you can see from the San Juan Islands to Howe Sound.
Impressive are the sandhill cranes, some of which nest in golf courses in Richmond but live mostly on Westham. Right now, a “gang” of five or so teenage sandhills are perusing around the reception area like their stuff doesn’t stink. If you’re brave enough to engage their pointed beaks, the dollar seed bags can provide for some good feeding entertainment.
According to Fry they’ve been receiving some tough love of late.
“There was the beginnings of a nest this year between two of them until our resident pair came along — the male is 23 years-old and he came and said ‘Ooo what are you doing trying to nest in my territory?’ And he chased all five of them out and they weren’t seen in the sanctuary for 10 days.”
Anyone interested in learning more about the birds of the northern Pacific Flyway, leave the dog at home and visit the sanctuary weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $3-5. School groups are welcome.
