We meet at the Ballpark in Gillies Bay at 10:00am.
I am now home again on Texada after spending two weeks doing some birdwatching on Vancouver Island. I do this every spring and concentrate on helping out with a natural history project that was started over twenty-five years ago by the US and Canadian governments. It deals with the life history of the Black Brant Goose and studies their movements, feeding habits, population numbers and threats to their survival. In recent years there have been cutbacks in funding for the project, but a key part of the study, the attaching of ID leg bands to some of the Brant geese every summer has been continued. This year while out on the beaches on the east side of Vancouver Island I was able to read leg bands, some new but many older ones, on over one hundred different geese.
The Brant also visit Gillies Bay every spring and there are fifty or sixty here just now, but they are usually all gone by the end of April. My photos shows a few of them feeding on a soft green seaweed called sea lettuce which grows mainly where a seepage of fresh water flows out onto the beaches below the high tide line. One of the birds in my photo has a black plastic leg band with the code KRG and I know it's an older individual as I saw it myself once before this back in March 2009.
JD.
Some small Brant geese feeding on soft green seaweed on a Vancouver Island beach.
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