Vancouver Big Year 2015: Rock 'Piper & Rosy-Finch Combo

It sort of felt like Rob ready my last blog post and thought to himself, “You know what would really gripe Ilya off? If I went out mid-week and found the two birds he whined so emphatically about missing.” And so he did just that, first finding two Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches at Mount Seymour on Tuesday, then finding a Rock Sandpiper at Whytecliff Park on Wednesday!

You can probably imagine what happened next: a lot of humming and hawing between Mike and I, before we eventually pressured each other in to being at Whytecliff Park first thing Thursday morning. As I found myself staring at some turnstones and surfbirds foraging along a very distant shoreline, waiting for them to spread their wings in order to make an identification, I began to wonder if Mike hadn’t come to his better senses and stayed in bed. As a matter of fact, he had just simply timed thing better because about 10 minutes after his arrival the ROCK SANDPIPER flew past with ~15 Surfbirds and landed out of view on the back side of Whyte Islet. Although we waited almost an hour for the tide to encourage the birds to move in to view, they never did. It was frustrating to get such brief views, but at least they were got.

Since I was already on the north shore, I decided the only sensible thing to do was to make a stop for the Rosy-Finches on my way to work, which represented only a slight detour up a mountain. Rob had sent me a photo showing the gang lined up with optics pointed at the Rosy-Finches, captioned "how to find a Rosy-Finch". This was exactly how we found them; by walking the perimeter of the parking lot until we encountered a horde of admirers watching our rare alpine visitors.