What is Christmas Without Surfbirds and Centipedes?

There's a wide, wide world out there. At one extreme there are folks who if asked what they like best about Christmas will tell you it's rubbing elbows with the hoi-polloi at the neighbourhood mall, 'Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer' looping endlessly from the mall's woofers and tweeters. Others claim the season summit is the luxury of spending all day indoors, getting stuffed on turkey and egg nog, watching Alistair Sim's Scrooge for the umpteenth time. At another extreme there are those who think that the best the season has to offer is standing gumbooted at the edge of a muddy slough, under a heavy drizzle, waiting for a bird to fly by. Count me among the latter.

It is Christmas Bird Count season in greater Victoria. On Saturday, for the eighteenth straight year, I savoured another Stewart Mountain-Scafe Hill CBC with Jan and spiritual kinfolk Mary and Bruce. In unimportant ways it was an unexceptional count -- our aggregate species total of 24 was utterly routine -- but the routine is partly what I like about this event: predictably good conversation, guaranteed boon companionship, assurance that we'll have the hills to ourselves. What's more, it is rare for the routine not to be varied by something special. We started the day with a coup, luring first one then another northern pygmy-owl into responding to our whistled impersonations of the pygmy's call note. A pygmy owl is tiny, utterly charming, and well-named: you can fit one into a teacup and have room to spare. Jan might never have taken to me at all had it not been for the memorable time, years ago, that I summoned one out of the ether and persuaded it to land at eye level in a bush right in front of our noses.

We added a new species to our all-time zone list, a Wilson's snipe, and not just one of them, but sixteen. In terms of simple volume it was a slow day: we counted barely 200 individual birds but the conversation never flagged, Stewart's western flank provided an excellent vantage point for watching the world go by, the tea and salmon sandwiches kept body and soul intact.

Some folks are bird count gluttons. We were out again Sunday to do our duty with long-time pal Andrew in the Patricia Bay zone of the Saanich-Saltspring CBC. We added a wrinkle to this particular routine, leaving the vehicle at the side of the road and doing most of our counting on foot. We wandered more than 11 km in the aforementioned gumboots. There is plenty of routine in this zone too, albeit a different routine from that offered in the hills. We know what to expect and we generally find what we expect to find. But is always a surprise or two. Yesterday we added two species to our over-the-years aggregate: Eurasian collared-dove, lately invaded in our region, and a gang of 20 surfbirds, a lovely and dignified sandpiper whose habitat preference is rocky shorelines.

We have another count to look forward to, the Drinkwater-Prevost zone of the New Year's Day Duncan CBC. There we expect another pleasant combination of routine and surprise with long-time birding pal, Ann.

But before that last CBC unfolds there will have been opportunity for indoor turkey and egg nog, in Coquitlam, with Lexi and Ben and the other folks they live with. My faithful reader may rest assured, however, that I will seek opportunity to take the children outdoors for a bit of stealth naturalizing. What Lexi likes best about 'Pappy' is his proclivity for suggesting we go outside to turn over rocks and rotted logs to see how many centipedes, spiders and sowbugs we might find, maybe even a salamander or two. Ah yes, that's when Christmas works best for me.