Summer is coming!!!

I went on my first birding bike ride today on Boundary Bay wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. It was sunny and clear, and mostly, there were lots of birds! Seeing how much I love lists, I made a list of all of the birds that I saw on Boundary Bay today. Boundary Bay is Canada's top bird area, with over 333 different species of birds (including 16 species of gull, for anyone who cares about gulls) , more than 10,000 wintering waterfowl and 22 different species of raptors (one of Canada's largest winter populations). I was starting to get pretty excited by the time we pulled up in the parking lot, and there were two bald eagles sitting in the tree next to our parked truck. Things only got better from there, and on the return trip alone we saw:

45 bald eagles
10 great blue herons
3 northern harriers
1 barn owl
4 unidentified hawks (2 small greyish birds, about the size of a Cooper's hawk, and 2 birds about the same size as a kestrel)
2 kestrels
many ducks- mallards, goldeneye and another kind I'd never seen before
thousands of gulls
thousands of snow geese
hundreds of thousands of shorebirds (mostly dowitchers I think)
and, the one bird that I waited more than an hour to find and was most excited to see, 5 snowy owls!!!!!

I couldn't believe it. I actually saw wild snowy owls! It was the kind of thrill that makes me understand the peculiarities of birders a little better. We could not get close enough to take good pictures, but I'll post some the eagles up as soon as I get my new camera plugged in!!