During a breeding bird survey with my birder friend Gerhard, I don’t usually photograph many birds. There are many reasons for that not the least of which is the fact that the trees now have plenty of leaves and the birds are difficult to see in the foliage.
For the survey, most of the counting is based on identifying the birds by their songs with only a glimpse from time to time of an actual bird for identification confirmation. Also, as the primary driver, the responsibility falls on me to swat the mosquitoes and black flies that get into the car at each stop and to record details such as location information. In the 5 minutes or so that we are stopped on the side of the road for each survey point, it is often a bit dangerous to just hop of the car on the driver’s side, with camera in hand, since logging trucks don’t like to slow down for mere humans with cameras.
The black flies and mosquitoes had been absolutely miserable pests when we had set up the night before, but were a bit more tolerable when we started the survey route in the early morning hours.
Early in the survey route, the road passes through a large deforested area where it was interesting to see where signs of a small aboriginal encampment remained. I expect that, later in the year, it will be put to good use again as a base camp when blueberries are being harvested, or as a temporary hunting camp.
Today, there were still plenty of Swallowtail butterflies around to photograph and a nice big frog let me get eyeball to eyeball with him.
For the most part, the area of this survey is quite heavily wooded with a limited amount of light reaching the forest floor. Therefore, flowering plants tend to be just along the edge of the road and somewhat limited in number.
