On a day of heavy rain

What a miserable, rainy day it was yesterday, 14 August 2015. I went with five friends on a drive east of the city to see what birds we could find. At the meeting place, we weren't sure whether to go or not, but in the end decided that we would. I tried taking a few photos, but I think this is the only one even remotely fit to post - and I'm only posting it to remind myself of this outing. I will add our leader, Andrew Hart's. account of the day along with his list of what birds were seen (most not by me, as I stayed in the car while the others stood outside with binoculars and scope, getting drenched). Thanks so much for the three hours out, Andrew!

"Six of us met at Carburn Park this morning during what turned out to be a brief enough interlude in the rain to persuade us to actually set out on this trip.

Our first stop was at the Langdon Corner Slough. Water level there is fairly low with some large expanses of shore available for shorebirds. When I scouted this area yesterday, there were not too many birds taking advantage of that, but today there were a few hundred shorebirds hunkered down. While there was not much variety, and it was not too easy to make birds out in the dark and increasingly heavy rain, Tony
Timmons did manage to locate a Western Sandpiper. There could easily have been more than one in the various groups of Semi-Palmeated and Baird's Sandpipers, but if so we could not make it out in the gloom. The Dowitchers were starting to transition out of breeding plumage. As far as we could tell they were all Long Billed.

Our complete(ish) list for that stop was:

Mallard 500
Northern Shoveler 100
Black-necked Stilt 1
American Avocet 6
Killdeer 1
Spotted Sandpiper 1
Lesser Yellowlegs 10
Baird's Sandpiper 30
Semipalmated Sandpiper 35
Western Sandpiper 1
Long-billed Dowitcher 220
Bonaparte's Gull 1
Franklin's Gull 10
Tree Swallow 4
Savannah Sparrow 1

View this checklist online athttp://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S24625117

There were likely some other duck species, but they were further off in the rain and we could not ID any others.

After that we went around to the Weed Lake south access. By now the rain was even heavier and we had seen lightning and heard thunder. So we retreated to the new Tim Horton's in Langdon before calling it a day."