Common Birds and L-Pod Returns

When I was going through my bird photos to pick some of my favorites to feature in my new Zenfolio bird photo gallery, I realized that there are a lot of bird species I see all the time that I don't have great or even decent pictures of. Today, I decided to go out and focus on photographing some of these species.

White-crowned sparrow - the tip of the beak usually isn't that dark!

Brown-headed cowbird - a whole flock of them were down near the tidepools at Cattle Point, which was odd...you're more likely to see them in a farm field

One of the four brown creepers I saw near Third Lagoon

As is usually the case when you go out looking for one type of animal on San Juan Island, I ended up seeing a lot more wildlife than just birds today. I saw harbor seals, red foxes, and my first deer fawns of the season. These twin babies were running away from a fox. The fox wasn't interested in them, and mama deer followed behind at a more leisurely pace.

And, of course, orcas! Some L-Pod whales were seen coming down the Inside Passage on the east side of Vancouver Island yesterday, and as expected they made their way as far south as the Salish Sea today. At about 7:30 PM the 20 or so whales started passing Lime Kiln Point State Park on the westside of San Juan Island. The seas were a bit rough and they were moving quickly, so it was hard to track them let alone get IDs. I was able to identify L27 Ophelia, L47 Marina, and L53 Lulu. Here is L47 bursting through the surface:

It didn't look like these newly returned whales were going to stay around very long....they looked ready to blast out west the Strait of Juan de Fuca back to the Pacific Ocean. This was the first time L-Pod has been spotted in the San Juans in 2011. Last year, some L-Pod whales did the same thing in May: came down the Inside Passage, sped through the San Juans, and disappeared out west again. It was a few more weeks before they started spending regular time here. We'll just have to wait and see what these Ls do this year!

Mixed Flock at British Camp

This afternoon I took a hike at British Camp to see what sort of bird activity was going on there. There was surprisingly little activity on the water - the regular gathering of double-crested cormorants hanging out on the pilings across the bay and a few unidentified gulls, and that was it. The woods, however, were much busier, and I came across a large mixed flock of birds. I knew they were there because I heard them up in the treetops, but the first one to come down and check me out was this golden-crowned kinglet:

The kinglets seemed to make up the majority of the flock, but I also saw the expected chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches. I was looking for any ruby-crowned kinglets that might be mixed in when a ruby-crowned kinglet look-alike popped into view: a Hutton's vireo. These guys look very similar to the ruby-crowned kinglet, but have a much stouter beak (compare to the golden-crowned kinglet's beak above) and also lack the black behind the second wing bar.

There was one other species I thought was likely to be in this flock, and sure enough just before I moved on I saw three or four brown creepers. They can be difficult to photograph, but this one was quite obliging for a moment, allowing me to get this photograph:

I heard a few spotted towhees and a northern flicker, and saw an American goldfinch in the parking lot as I was leaving, but that little hotspot was definitely the highlight of my birding walk.