Sightings

I never seem to notice that the robins have gone until they come back.  This time of year they are spending a lot of time hanging out in the trees, like big orange fruit leftover from last fall.  A small group of them appeared in our yard on New Year's Day and have been passing through each morning since then.  It will be some week before we hear our first robin song of spring, though, announcing the time when they are beginning to nest.

Driving through Kenmore at twilight yesterday, just past the Hwy 522 and Hwy 405 interchange, the kids and I happened upon a tremendous flock of crows doing their pre-roosting aerobatics.  This is something I have seen crows do many times before, and have observed that it is something apparently triggered by the light levels at sunset, but never have I seen so many crows flocking at once.  A little research reveals that in the fall and winter, crows gather to roost in large numbers, undoubtedly what we were seeing.   There were easily thousands of them, filling the sky and swirling around, not behaving like a flock of starlings or a school of fish with synchronized turns but just milling about in the sky.  We pulled to the side of the highway to watch for a while, and even over the roar of traffic we could hear the cacophony of their calls.  It was spectacular, but also little eerie...anyone else who has ever seen The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock would have had a shiver down their back, too.

We're in the midst of another cold snap here, hard frosts in the morning and inches of ice on top of the rain barrels.  I even heard that all of the inner harbour in Victoria, BC, was iced over on New Year's Eve, a highly unusual thing. The cold weather is beautiful, offering crystal clear views of the snowy Olympics and Cascades against a perfect blue sky.  The sun doesn't offer much warmth, but at least it's shining.  A local news outlet reported that it rained here on every holiday last year, which is really only true if you celebrate the holidays they were looking at, but does indicate that our skies last year were not as sunny as they sometimes are, and that makes the sun all the more welcome now.