“Look for the golf balls in the tops of the trees,” said our guide, Mark, and so we did, in our float plane, flying in low over the forests of western hemlock and cedar, the steep hills, the bottomless fiords they call inlets. And there they were. Bald eagles.
Knight Inlet: Bald eagles and other birding in British Columbia wilderness
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Bald eagles at Knight Inlet in the wilderness of British Columbia, Canada. Photo / Jason Drake / Knight Inlet Lodge
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This is Knight Inlet Lodge, a collection of buildings moored on a floating raft, metres out from the shore. The heart of the place, its central purpose, is grizzly bear watching. (I wrote about that last month.) But this corner of British Columbia, an hour’s flight and some north of Vancouver, is full of so much more wildlife. Wolves, cougars, deer, and in the water, orca, dolphins, humpbacks, seals and sea lions. And all around, on the water, in the woods and in the air, there are birds.
Birding is a big part of this kind of adventure tourism. I’m a rank amateur; some of the other guests have very serious cameras.
Some of the birds are completely familiar: cormorants, which we call shags. Some are utterly not: those eagles. Most are similar and yet subtly, delightfully, different.
The large seagull is not black-backed like ours, but soft grey. The blue heron is bigger than ours, and out on the water there is all manner of waterfowl, several with a weird and scruffy looks about their heads and necks: mergansers, that look like two birds joined together, and grebes, shovelers, trumpeters, scaup, teals, wigeons, murrelets, loons, guillemots and scoters, which have very fancy beaks. Such names. Such looks.
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The days are busy with excursions, by boat and on foot. Early one evening, we climb into the skiffs and head up the inlet.
High in a dead cedar, a pair of eagles keep watch, their enormous nest of sticks wedged into the forks of the tree.
We pass deer foraging in the sedge grass and enter the mouth of a river that will be thick with salmon come the fall. The forest is overhead and all around, and it is not silent: several species of thrush and other songbirds are singing their hearts out.
With the motor off, we glide along the gentle creek, mossy rocks beneath, the birdsong piercingly sweet on the air. Does this evening chorus mean there are no bears, or have the bears and the birds come to an accommodation?
“The universe has granted us permission,” says Emma, our guide today, and it’s easy to believe. It’s a perfect moment.
One night, in lieu of an after-dinner lecture, the man with the moustache, Dean, invites us to hear a story. He’s 60-something, much older than the other guides, and he tells his tale with enormous theatricality.
It’s about a boy who wants to go duck hunting, but he can’t because the wind gets up. So he complains to his grandmother, who tells him that if he wants to know why this is, he will have to ask the Thunderbird: a giant bald eagle who lives at the top of the mountain.
It’s a journey, there’s much hardship, all of it exceptionally entertaining in the telling, with Dean roaming all over the gloomily lit room, and the boy learns the great lesson of the wilderness: when the wind blows, it blows, and you can go duck hunting when it doesn’t. You live with the elements, connected to the world, not outside it, trying to bend it to your puny will.
Later on, Dean tells me there are 250 different species of birds in Knight Inlet, and they know this because they brought in an ornithological expert to identify them.
More marvellous names. There are nighthawks, buffleheads, hairy woodpeckers, chestnut-backed chickadees, brown-headed cowbirds. And killdeers, which are not what you think, but small harmless plovers whose call sounds like “kill deer”.
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And Canada geese, which I thought might have another name around here, or simply be called geese. But no. They also have snow geese and greater white-fronted geese and ordinary geese geese.
Bald eagles are the only eagles, but there are other birds of prey: ospreys, turkey vultures, nighthawks, kestrels, merlins, hawks, harriers and various owls.
Bald eagles, by the way, don’t start out bald. Actually, they’re never bald, but the feathers covering their heads are brown for the first four years, then they turn snowy.
Crows and ravens are everywhere, and you can play a game with the locals: What’s the difference?
Some will tell you the crows caw more and their beaks are different; others will say ravens are bigger and beat their wings less. These things are true, but when you point at a bird, they can’t tell you how they know it’s big enough to be a raven or if its wings flap often enough for a crow.
The most gorgeous birds are rufous hummingbirds. The lodge sets out bird feeders to help these visitors on their astonishing migration from Mexico to Alaska.
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Rufous is a word invented to mean reddish brown or possibly brownish red, but it doesn’t capture the way these birds shine. They weigh less than 4 grams, and the whirr of those wings defies all logic about the conservation of energy.
There are dozens of them, poised in midair, flitting about, darting at the honey. A group of us are watching. We look up, and there’s an eagle hanging in the sky, and down again at these silent, tiny, iridescent wonders. We’re transfixed.
Checklist
CANADA
GETTING THERE
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DETAILS
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Where to stay: Knight Inlet Lodge.
What to do: Destination British Columbia.
New Zealand Herald Travel visited courtesy of Knight Inlet Lodge, Destination British Columbia and Air New Zealand.