AN INTIMATE AVIAN EXPERIENCE

For a unique and intimate experience with waterfowl and other birds, visit George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary west of Ladner, British Columbia.

Reifel Refuge, as it’s called by many, is a 300-hectare (740-acre) plot of land on Westham Island on the Fraser River, about an hour’s drive from the metropolis of Vancouver. George Reifel bought the land in 1927 and established a family recreational retreat on it, creating waterfowl habitats as well as road access by a series of dikes and causeways.

In the 1960s, the Reifel family granted a lease to the British Columbia Waterfowl Society to create a bird sanctuary on the land. Helped by the management of Ducks Unlimited Canada, wildlife habitat was preserved and expanded with the provincial government establishing a game reserve on adjacent land. In 1972, the family further donated and sold the land to the federal government on the condition that it would be maintained as a sanctuary.

The government designated part of the sanctuary and the area adjacent to it, some 328 hectares, as the Alaksen National Wildlife Area. Some activities are permitted on this land but not the free access to the public that characterizes the sanctuary.

The sanctuary charges a nominal entrance fee and is open from 9 am to 4 pm every day. Sometimes it has quite large crowds, not a place to go if you want to get away from people for your nature experience. However, the high density of humans day after day is what has conditioned the birds to be as unafraid of us as they are.

The sanctuary was set up for waterfowl, and there is always a good representation of local waterfowl species, both dabbling and diving ducks. Large numbers of Snow Geese migrate through the adjacent wetlands, some of them remaining for the winter, and mostly those will be seen overhead moving between feeding areas. All the ducks present are somewhat used to people and will furnish close viewing and great photo opportunities.

There is a small population of resident Sandhill Cranes, most of them not pinioned, and some of them will feed from the hand. Some of them are good at gently taking seeds from an open palm, but be aware that you’re taking the chance of a poke with a sharp beak from those that aren’t. There are also Black-crowned Night-Herons roosting near the entrance to provide good looks at another unexpected species.

There are feeding stations everywhere, and during the winter they attract great numbers of seed-eating birds, for example Black-capped Chickadees, Red-winged Blackbirds, Spotted Towhees, Fox, Song, and Golden-crowned Sparrows, House Finches and House Sparrows. The chickadees are so tame that anywhere along the trails they will land on your hand if you open it with sunflower seeds on it. Occasionally a Red-breasted Nuthatch may do the same.

Brown Creepers and kinglets are also often seen, and like other birds there are quite tame. Quite a few other passerines inhabit the patches of woodland, and unusual visitors are seen with some regularity, for example Bohemian Waxwings and Pine Grosbeaks recently. And it’s always worth watching for less common sparrows such as Swamp, Harris’s, and White-throated along the path.

Because of all the feeders and seeds, rats and mice and Eastern Gray Squirrels (including the black morph, established in the Vancouver area) are also attracted to the area, and the local owls know it. A pair of Great Horned Owls is regularly seen, and there are always Northern Saw-whet Owls present, if very hard to see in the dense foliage where they roost. Other species of owls are seen from time to time, and there are usually hawks and falcons about, interested in the songbirds as well as the rodents.

You can buy sunflower seeds at the office and carry them around to feed to whichever birds you like. You may give them all to chickadees, as there is something wonderful about one of these tiny birds landing on your hand. You may be attacked by Mallards before you barely get going onto the trail, and Mallards are the most abundant and insistent ducks in the place. But look closely, and among the Mallards there will be at least a few American Wigeons and a few Northern Pintails.

More than these, there are Wood Ducks scattered around the area, and they too are interested in handouts if they can get to them before the omnipresent Mallards. They are shy enough that you’ll have to seek them out, but one way to feed them is to put seeds on top of fence posts, which the Wood ducks—tree dwellers that they are—can easily get to. Of course they have to beat the chickadees and Song Sparrows to them.

Dennis Paulson

it's sparrow time!

It’s September, and the days are getting shorter at great speed. Today is the first day of fall, notwithstanding that the temperatures will be in the 80s in the Puget Sound area. Bird migration has been in full swing for almost three months, and most of the insect-eating birds have moved on southward. But the sparrows are still passing through at this time, some heading as far south as Mexico, others intending to hang around our area.

Why are there so many sparrows? Simple answer is that they eat the small seeds of small plants, and there are an awful lot of small plants out there. The seeds of many herbaceous plants are formed during the summer or fall, then hang around at or near ground level before sprouting into young plants the following spring. Before that happens, however, there is a whole winter of predation ahead of them and a whole array of predators lurking to pounce on an unsuspecting seed.

Insects eat the seeds, chipmunks and mice eat the seeds, and birds eat the seeds. Predominant among the birds are our native sparrows. Song Sparrows are probably the most common, but there are lots of wintering White-crowned, Golden-crowned, and Fox Sparrows as well, with smaller numbers of American Tree, Savannah, and Lincoln’s Sparrows.

Although not sharing the name, Dark-eyed Juncos and Spotted Towhees are common wintering birds also closely related to the native sparrows. In fact, all of them are closely related to the Old World buntings, and we should have called them buntings when common names were coined for them several hundred years ago. But we didn’t. Instead, we co-opted the name of an unrelated European seed-eating bird, the House Sparrow.

As all of these small birds eat small seeds, how do they avoid intense competition with one another? Turns out that each sparrow species has its own habitat preference, which means they’re not all feeding in the same place. Savannah Sparrows like open country and live and feed happily among grasses. American Tree, Golden-crowned, and White-crowned Sparrows like to feed in the open but need dense shrubbery to retreat into when threatened or spending the night. Song, Fox, and Lincoln’s Sparrows prefer dense shrubbery all the time, although they will often come out to the edge where they can be seen by birdwatchers.

Many of us—in fact, hundreds or thousands of us—feed these birds, putting out millet and mixed bird seed on the ground or in feeders, and they respond readily. If you’re lucky, you might have most or all of these species at your feeder if you live in the suburbs with good plant cover around your house. Watch them with binoculars to see how quickly and efficiently they crack and eat those seeds.

Dennis Paulson