In a wild place on the west coast of Vancouver Island, author, photographer, and birdwatcher, Adrian Dorst, tells of a time he witnessed fifty or sixty thousand migrating Western Sandpipers: “It looked like snow – except that the snow was drifting upwards! It was just an amazing sight – so many birds in the air. I mean it’s quite overwhelming to try to estimate, when there are so many birds in the air at once. But based on doing bird counts here for so many years, that’s the figure that we came up with ... fifty or sixty thousand. Quite a sight!”
What wild place have you experienced? What stays with you from that time? Leave a comment, and let us know!
BirdNote®
Experience Wildness with Adrian Dorst
Interviewed by Todd and Chris Peterson
This is BirdNote!
[Light waves on a mudflats]
In a wild place, where nature still dominates, on the rugged west coast of British
Columbia’s Vancouver Island, wild things move across mudflats and meadows [calls of Western Sandpipers]. Author, photographer, and birdwatcher, Adrian Dorst, tells of a time he witnessed fifty or sixty thousand migrating Western Sandpipers:
[Huge flock of Western Sandpipers calling in flight + Whimbrels in background]
“It looked like snow – except that the snow was drifting upwards! It was just an amazing sight – so many birds in the air, I mean it’s quite overwhelming you know to try to estimate, when there are so many birds in the air at once, but based on doing bird counts here for so many years, that’s the figure that we came up with…. Yah, like snow! Like snow up against the mountains of Meares Island – it was just all this white, drifting upwards. It was quite a sight!”
How wild is this place? Well, here Adrian describes what his friend saw while counting birds on the mudflats:
“…and on this particular day, he looked down and six wolves are walking right by the viewing platform – they just kind of look up at him and then walk on by.”
[Calls of sandpipers again]
Sixty thousand sandpipers…. see Adrian’s photo of them on our website birdnote.org. [Pause]
###
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Western Sandpipers (combined with Semi-palmated Sandpipers) 26621 recorded by O. Hewitt; Whimbrel recorded by G. Vyn (as ambient as Dorst is speaking).
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org July 2012 / 2021 Narrator: Mary McCann
ID# dorsta-01-2012-07-16 dorsta-01
Sights & Sounds
