I told you it involved passports! Not only that but on the way down we stopped off at the little tern colony at Baltray and put up the 150 for the year. The terns nest inside a protective fence and the colony has a warden to try and prevent disturbance.
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| Best I could do! |
Then it was Dublin airport, a flight to Vancouver and a cruise ship north via the inside passage. Unfortunately I could not salvage anything from the corrupted SD card so most of the better bird photos have gone as have views of two glaciers where I used the 200mm lens to get better landscape shots. What follows is more of a travelogue with scenic views and a quick roundup of birds spotted. If you see this symbol 😞 it means I lost photos of this bird. If the bird is in red it's a lifer
Vancouver kick started the bird list and scenic views. The default gull is the glaucous-winged gull 😞 which seemed to be everywhere. There were also double-crested cormorants, pelagic cormorants, great blue heron, Canada geese, barn swallow, north-western crow 😞 and a western gull.
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| Downtown Vancouver |
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| Canada Wharf and our cruise liner |
The first day was an "at sea" day which didn't add much to the list although we did have our first views of hump-backed whales behind the ship. Sooty shearwaters were seen - 40/50 at a time and then they disappeared and there was nothing for the next hour. The second day saw us with land on each side and an approach to Icy Strait Point and Hoonah where our on-shore excursion was a bird watching trip courtesy of Icy Strait Bird Tours. This was led by Hannah who is not your typical birding guide as you can see from the photographs below. Yes that is a mean looking gun rather than binoculars but when you are in bear country you go with the flow. Hannah was so good at scaring bears off we only saw one and it disappeared quickly. However she was good at finding birds and we had superb views of bald eagles. She was also good with using my phone on the telescope and while I snapped away she took a few shots through the scope. Thank goodness she did as these are the only bald eagle shots I now have, all mine were on the SD card. We saw glaucous-winged gulls, bald eagle, north-west crow, raven😞, American robin, dark-eyed junco, sharp-shinned hawk, barn swallow and tree swallow to our list. Hannah was also identifying bird song in the area but these were frustratingly hard to see. We were in thick forest and birds were hard to pin down, didn't sit around and were very happy to shoot across roads and tracks and disappear into the coniferous forest. I decided that Hannah saying that's a hermit thrush singing was not evidence enough for it to go on my list - I had to see it!! Consequently there were quite a few birds didn't make it. One that did make it was the rufous humming bird at a humming bird feeder in a glade where we parked the bus. Needless to say the photos were on the SD card😞. We had an excellent three hour tour and four sightings of bald eagles including two soaring birds.
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| Approaching Icy Strait Point |
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| One of three visiting ships |
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| Hannah with personal protection weapon |
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| The reason?? |
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| Thankyou Hannah |
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| Our bus and guide |
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| Typical view where birds disappeared into |
There were two liners in port that day, where 4000 visitors piled into a settlement of 600 people, despite this we had 6 people on our tour and did not see a lot of others until we were back nearer the ship. A good day with 10 species and 3 lifers.
The next day was an "at sea" day but included a view of the Hubbard glacier from the ship. Then we sailed for Juneau the state capital and a bus trip to the Meldenhall Glacier and Nuggett Falls followed by a salmon bake. More bald eagles, north-west crows, dark coloured junco, glaucous-winged gulls, barn and tree swallows but also saw arctic terns sitting on an iceberg which had broken off from the glacier and added a couple of lifers in American pipit and mew gull. We also spotted a belted kingfisher perched on a pier as we drove back into Juneau. The highlight however was seeing pigeon guillemots swimming and diving around the ship and giving nice close views. 😞They are the American equivalent of our black guillemot and are almost identical but not quite. From the ship we were able to watch two bald eagles soaring round the chair lift high above the town 😞.
Next day we headed for Ketchikan and spotted common guillemot and a red-throated diver on the way in. We had another tour on a small boat to a sea boil*. This trip again gave good views of a bald eagle nest, sea lions and hump-backed whales as well as Bonaparte's gulls. The eagle was very well trained and dived for fish thrown from the boat once! Second and third efforts it looked at us imperiously as if to say I am not your trained eagle! I didn't get shots of this which was gutting at the time but on reflection I would have lost them anyway. I did lose the whale shots.😞
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| Interesting totem pole |
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| Our vessel |
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| Sea boil * |
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| Typical view |
*A sea boil is a large pot boiled on a stove, drained and dumped on newspaper on a table. It contained crab claws, shrimp, mussels, clams, reindeer sausage, sweetcorn, and two varieties of potatoes. Eating implements are provided and six of us got stuck in.
Another "at sea" followed with hump-backed whales, sooty shearwaters, glaucous-winged gulls and guillemot and then it was back to Vancouver and voyage over. I'll do a separate post for our three days in Vancouver. In the meantime I'll pass on a lesson I have learned:
Download your photos every evening and re-format your SD card
There is no point in putting up the lists, they will be updated later.
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