Neil's Daily Bird: 303 : American Wood Duck

American Wood Duck - Aix Sponsa

The Daily Bird really is depleted - all its vital signs are at the lowest on record so I guess I should use my jet lag and early morning wakefulness to catch up a bit. All of course dependant on getting the shots. Here a delightful North American Duck that frequents beaver lakes as a preference. One of those Northern arboreal ducks that nests in tree holes. I caught up with this female with ducklings on the Beaver Pond in Stanley Park. I had a great fly past with the ducklings at no more than 2-3 metres.

The male is a handsome individual something akin to a Mandarin if you know that species but sadly at this time of year likely to be in eclipse plumage. In layman's terms eclipse is a mess of a plumage the male (most noticeably) adopts during molt and after breeding - it is typically something drabber like the female plumage and has the advantage of affording better camouflage while the bird is less able to escape a predator during molt (they can't fly very well while wing feathers replace). Jolly inconvenient it is though as typically eclipse plumages coincide with Summer holidays in the Northern hemisphere. All ducks become a mess and life turns brown ! It makes identifying ducks a right royal pain.

Easier to identify was this work of engineering at the North end of Stanley Park linking across to the "mainland" (it is hard not to think of Vancouver City as an island even though is is only surrounded by water on 3 sides). The Lion's Gate Bridge.

Hard to photograph bridges without a wide angle lens and since the second camera body is playing up at the moment I had to try and jam it into the frame as I couldn't be bothered to swap lenses while on a trek (not so for a bird :-)). I think this was built in 1910 or so ?

Bridges always look better with a boat going under them in my humble opinion if you are aiming for a photograph that sets them off. .

I am not sure of the length of this bridge - jumping on the the internet I find is it 1,823 m in length. That's impressive - over a mile of optimistic Edwardian steel laid across the Sound shortly before the First World War.

Other things of beauty encountered on our first day of holiday were perhaps a bit controversial. I get that the Vancouver Aquarium is a very worthy not for profit organisation that funds a huge amount of research into cetaceans, marine wildlife, study of fish stocks and so on. I am not sure how they justify having 2 Beluga Whales in captivity though. Eiry ghost like creatures with a strange bulbous form. One Whale really was doing a circuit that struck as me as something like a bear pacing. We had a short debate as to why a white whale was not an albino whale. They do need this camouflage - polar bears will have a go evidently !

I read somewhere (or made up in a dream let night ?) that the Russians were training these highly intelligent whales to attach limpet mines to NATO ships during the cold war. All very Soviet. I expect they had striking cold war code names and little decorations like Xmas baubles. Again a quick search of the net discovers that the US were doing it as well with over 100 whales and dolphins enlisted to perform various tasks including retrieving equipment and guarding boats at anchor during the Vietnam War ! So the dolphin shows of today were the military drills of yesterday. I wonder if these two Belugas are reformed communists or honest to goodness capitalists ?

If you have ever seen the the film of the book "Dune" they reminded me of a "Navigator" - the strange spice sniffing pilots that bend space to equip mankind for interstellar travel. They are "out of this world" but sadly I concluded they very much belong in the Arctic and not a "zoo" however worthy the institute.