I spent a couple of hours after work this afternoon searching for fry in Byrne Creek in SE Burnaby. Success!
I spotted one near the wooden footbridge at the bottom end of the ravine, and half a dozen upstream and downstream of the Meadow Ave. bridge.
Din’t get any clear shots, but judging by the orange tails they were coho.
It’s always so rewarding to spot fry in the spring, for that means that salmon that came back to spawn in this stressed urban creek the previous autumn were successful in starting a new generation. Yay!
If we’re on the north shore in Vancouver and have a bit of time, we love the quick and easy Rice Lake loop. It’s a fairly short, flat trail, yet the lake and the towering trees refresh the soul.
This female mallard was almost overly friendly — very conditioned to humans. No handouts from us!
We didn’t see any water life until Yumi spotted this caddisfly larva crawling along the bottom. These creatures are so cool — they build “shells” out of bark, leaf litter, sand, tiny stones, etc.
Merganser
That’s some excavating! Perhaps the work of a Pileated Woodpecker?
I came across this Northern Flicker in Taylor Park on my pre-dinner walk late this afternoon. It was drumming on this metal can on a pole. If the guys are making noise, does that mean spring must be around the corner? : -)
An inch of two of snow is enough to transform the glorious outdoors — without really getting in your face because you know it’s not going to last long : -). And if you want serious snow, the north shore mountains are close.
Yumi and I took a 3 hour and 40 minute walk starting from SE Burnaby all the way to Deer Lake, around the lake and home again. We capped the glorious afternoon with delicious Japanese food at the Nikkei Seniors Centre restaurant.
For the photographers out there, all of these were shot with a Sigma 10-20mm ultrawide zoom on a Nikon D5200 body.
And if you want to be let in on a secret, for the first half of the walk or so, somehow the autofocus got turned off on the lens. But with a lens that wide, set at F8 with aperture priority, depth of field is massive so pretty much everything is in focus anyway, eh?
Deer Lake dock
Gull soaring over the beach with Metrotown on the horizon
Deer Lake Brook
Over two hours into the walk and Yumi’s still got lots of energy : -)
Shot with a Canon SX730 HS at max 40X optical zoom, handheld out the car window on my way to work at 4:40 am this morning in south Burnaby, BC. I ran out when I first got up at 3:45 to see if there was anything to shoot with Big Bertha (Tamron 150-600mm zoom) mounted on a DSLR and a tripod, but the moon was clouded over.
Happy to get this modest shot with the pocket cam a few minutes later .
