February 9, 2025
Trying to Stay Active
From an initial idea about February 7, we pushed our departure date for Spain back to February 18. We needed to do that because the plan as previously described , has us catching the first ferry from Mallorca to France, April 10. Out of our 90 day permitted total in Europe, we could not have too many days in Spain, before April 10, which would leave too few for France and Germany. But now when I fire up the draft blog for the trip, it is saying 44 days until start. Yikes, that's a while to wait. (And just a week ago, it was even saying 51 days!). By the time you actually are reading this, we will be more in panic mode about departure coming soon, (only a bit more than one week when this is posted), but the story below still has its place in the leadup for the trip.
We typically have rain every day, and over 90% cloud cover even when it is not raining. And the day length is 8 hours and 26 minutes. Daily highs can reach 7°C, but lows are still not below freezing. Those 8 hours and 26 minutes are not as bad as at the solstice, where we bottomed out at 8 hours and 16 minutes, but there still does not seem like a lot of daylight to do much in. Also 7°C is below our 10 degree minimum standard for cycling, and rain all day every day is not very encouraging. Ok, I realize that readers in snow and cold zones will laugh at these complaints, but they at least know for sure they have no hope of cycling, and can not go outdoors except for silly activities like skiing or skating. We are on the edge of being able too play outside, but the dark and rain works well to dissuade us.
Enthusiastic internet graphic rain forecasts greet us most days. (But look, in this particular screen shot, their confidence in the rain is dropping. By 3 a.m. they are down to 40% probability. OK, let's get up at 3 and see if we can go out and do something!)
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In these conditions we found we were steadily losing initiative, getting depressed. I do remember my father's take on this. "Don't fight Winter", he said, "It's the natural time for rest, so just relax". Sorry Dad - can't do that.
That's where a casual comment from Scott Anderson came into play. Reading that he was starting to count birds spotted in December to the benefit of 2025, we asked if he was using eBird. eBird, we had noticed, in December was cleverly not offering 2025 as a date when a bird could be recorded as spotted. Scott replied that he was only using eBird for "research". That led us to discover that in eBird we could watch the activity of local birders, importantly seeing where in our region they were going each day. That uncovered for us a pile of birding sites not far from us, ones we could try to find and explore. "Find and explore" - that's an outdoor activity. And since we are proud owners of official "La Selva Research Station" ponchos from the Costa Rican rainforest, we and our cameras should be able to laugh at the rain.
Well that's the theory, and for a while now we have been getting up before dawn and heading out to various lakes and flooded marshes in our area. We are finding there some pretty fun birds, and also a species that we encountered in Costa Rica - the birder with the camo coated 200-800 mm zoom lens, or equivalent. It fun stopping to chat on the trail, and we know some of the lingo: "Ah, the Canon EOS 5 with 200-800", not bad. "Is that waterproof or is it going to die out here?" and "Yeah the Marsh Harrier - we just saw it fly by" and "You just saw saw a Kingfisher? That would be the Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon), it's blue, eh!" (And in the back of my mind the recognition that we were translating for these folks, because truly this was the Pêcheur Martin, that we had searched for all over France last year.) Anyway, lots of fun, and better than scratching days off the calendar to see when our bike trip will begin!
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Here are some of our new birding walks around our region. We have found quite a few more as well.
In these spots we have seen some pretty interesting birds. Cooper's Hawks seem to be much in evidence these days, but the Sewage Lagoons even yielded something like the gaudy Wood Duck, which previously we had only seen somewhere in Netherlands:
Update: Since writing the above in early January, the weather as might be expected got colder. But we also discovered lots more walks around our region - mostly in the estuary of the Cowichan River. And we spotted quite a few birds that are new for 2025, as well as a few "lifers". These local walks, sometimes even in sunshine, have kept us from becoming too depressed. We can't really say they have kept us in shape, though. That will have to wait until we get to Spain. But that day is coming, real soon now!
The rain has changed to snow. Big fluffy flakes can be very entertaining, until you have to shovel them.
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If you have fb access, here's a link to one of my recent photo postings:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10235179757570896&set=a.10235012117339995
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Can't figure out how to attach a picture to a comment... maybe not possible of this site?
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