Rare Bird Alert Trip to Greater Victoria

There’s nothing like the thrill of the hunt – even if your quarry is a slim and gregarious grey bird with a long tail and a penchant for flitting through dense brush while you circle around and around on the ground through brambles, mud, low branches, and dense vexation.

Our quarry, on a chilly November morning along Dallas Road in Victoria, was a blue-gray gnatcatcher that was not supposed to be anywhere around there. The last one I spotted had been near a sewage treatment plant in the suburbs of Las Vegas many years ago. Yes, I know. Most people experience Sin City in a much different way. But when you’re a birder…

There were four of us and one of it… or so we had been told. The lost little bird had been spotted every day for the past two weeks in the company of chickadees and kinglets. We managed to find many of those, along with a beautiful little downy woodpecker, but other than a fleeting glimpse or two or what we thought might or might not have been the gnatcatcher, we were skunked. I’m not sure what all of the passing dog walkers thought of the four adults skulking through the bushes, but I imagined they were glad to see us move on to another place with other rare birds to locate.

We had started the day at Martindale Flats near Michel’s Farm. Large flocks of Canada geese and giant white trumpeter swans were the most obvious birds upon arrival, but a stop along the road and a scan across the fields revealed two gaggles of greater white fronted geese. Further along, we flushed a couple dozen medium-sized birds that turned out to be a flock of more than thirty western meadowlarks. Our Rare Bird day was well underway.

As with many birding trips, the birds we had come to find were nowhere to be seen, yet other exciting species managed to fill the gaps. I had been scanning the Rare Bird Alert websites all week, and besides the blue-grey gnatcatcher, we were on the lookout for a golden eagle, a Lapland longspur, a rock sandpiper, a rock wren, a short-billed dowitcher, and a palm warbler.

After Dallas Road, we headed for McMicking Point with a view across to Little Trial Island. As luck would have it, an avid local birder had set up a spotting scope he was happy to share. He’ d seen a little bird flitting through the rocks that might or might not have been the rock wren, but since it was on private property, we couldn’t investigate further. A small group of black oystercatchers flew by to land on some rocks where beautiful harlequin ducks floated nearby, and then it was my turn at the scope.

I had been told that the dowitcher, the rock sandpiper, and a plethora of turnstones, dunlins, and other shore birds could be seen on the shore of the little island, but I couldn’t be sure of what I was seeing through the tiny hole. My binoculars were not quite powerful enough to scan the island, so I turned my attention to the trails through the gorse to spot a yellow-rumped warbler, a small flock of golden-crowned sparrow, and an Anna’s hummingbird catching the sun’s rays in its sparkling gorget.

Some might say that we failed in our mission to find rare birds, yet the greater white-fronted geese, the meadowlarks, and two Eurasian wigeons we identified in Beacon Hill Park during our lunch break, made the day a success for us. Actually, just getting outside on a beautiful fall morning in beautiful places to look for birds, was a guaranteed win.