Sunday, June 08, 2014

Looking For Baby Swans

gorge1

A warm sunny morning greeted Louise and I as we rolled our kayaks down the hill for a paddle. The object of today's paddle was our annual pilgrimage up The Gorge to look for baby swans. There's two local swan couples, one in The Gorge that have lived there for a couple of years, and another couple in Portage Inlet that have been there for at least six or seven years. So be warned; there's possibly lots of cute feathered goodness ahead in this post.

First, we noticed a heron preening in the morning sun near our launch point.
IMG_2176 copy

We kayaked by the first swan nest. Mom was sitting on the nest, and there was no sign of baby swans. Or dad for that matter. We'd thought we might have seen mom and some babies a few days ago from a distance when we were on a walk, but we really weren't sure. And with the the high grasses, mom could be hiding almost anything in there. But if she had any baby swans in there, we saw no sign of them today.
IMG_2193
A few minutes later we spotted dad out for his Sunday morning walk, er, swim.
IMG_2198 copy

Soon, we paddled by some geese and clearly they had had some luck on the baby front.
IMG_2203 copy
IMG_2209 copy
IMG_2207 copy

Another heron was fishing for breakfast.
IMG_2217

Then we headed for our first trip under the new Craigflower Bridge after its official opening a few weeks ago.
IMG_2220 copy
IMGP0367 copy
IMGP0369
This fancy new bridge replaces an 80 year-old bridge that looked like this:
IMGP0073 copy

Going under the bridge moves you from The Gorge to Portage Inlet and we headed for the nest of the the other swan couple. But disappointingly, there was no sign of them. The beach area where they've nest for years looked undisturbed, so we wonder if they are still around. Perhaps they've moved on.
So, no swan babies. But as we looked in vain for them, we saw a pair of youngish looking herons.
IMG_2274 copy
IMG_2224
IMG_2238 copy

It was high noon, but low tide and we were getting stuck in the mud and silt botton of the Inlet. Time to head back.
IMGP0377 copy

Trip length: 6.83 km
YTD: 25.58 km
More pictures are here.
2014-06-08 The Gorge

No comments:

Post a Comment