Moorecroft Park

 Friday's gentle hike was at Moorecroft Park in Nanoose Bay - one of my favourite short and easy hikes/walks close to home, offering beautiful ocean vistas, lovely forest trails, a meadow, a boggy pond, and a few side trails to residential areas or little known coves.  

It was raining when we arrived, so we started with the forest trails where the trees offered some protection from the rain. We rambled past the pond and through the meadow and kept right on going to the La Selva Trailhead on a cul-de-sac, then backtracked and  took a main trail down through the forest and over to Vesper Point.  By then, the rain had stopped and the sun was attempting to appear. There was a cold wind blowing and the waves were dashing up against the rocks as an eagle called from the trees and a brave gull took his morning shower.  

We noted a new bench at the viewpoint, and stopped for a few minutes in the small grassey picnic area overlooking a quiet bay.  

The park property has an interesting history (https://moorecroft.org). It was first established as a girl's summer camp by Gertrude Moore in 1934. It interested me to learn that Moore was the first Director of Physical Education for Women at the University of British Columbia.  In the 1950s,  Moore sold the property to the United Church who ran it as a summer camp and eventually as a year round operation for camps and retreats and other events.  When the church sold the property to the regional district a dozen or so years ago, it was under a Conservation Covenant, held by the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and that covenant has guided its development. Eventually, most of the camp buildings were deemed unsafe and removed, but the old boathouse still stands. 

We decided to take another side trail, which led us out to a cove we'd not seen before.  There were "No Trespassing" signs high in the trees on either side of the trail, but the trail itself had a Regional District trail sign down by the cove, pointing up to the main park trail.  Our best guess is that the cove is a landing area for kayaks and canoeists and the trail is to provide them access to Moorecroft Park.  We spied a lovely old stone staircase in the rocky cliff to one side but chose to respect the No Trespassing sign rather than examine it more closely. 

We did, however, choose a log in the cove on which to have our lunch. In between bites of my sandwich, I photographed waves bursting over the rocky outcroppings.  

Our lunch spot in a quiet little cove

Sally, my hiking buddy,  spied some birds among the rocks (can you spot them in the photo above?) and I zoomed in as far as my small camera would allow - I have yet to buy a harness that might make possible bringing the new Canon with its more powerful zoom lens along.  We thought, from the way the birds moved, that they were sandpipers and we weren't far wrong. But when I uploaded the photos to the computer and zoomed in further, I could see they had bright yellow legs, yellow on the beak, and a shorter beak than the sandpipers I'm familiar with.  My bird book offered no clues so I posted the photos to a naturalist group I belong to on Facebook, and quickly had a name for them:  surfbirds, aka Calidris Virgata (formerly Aphriza Virgata) of the order Chardriformes, Family Scolopacidae (the same family as sandpipers).  

I also learned that it is not that common to see them here - they mostly winter further south and then move to Alaska and Yukon for breeding season, so were likely just passing through.  Surfbirds spend most of their lives "in the splash zone of rocky ocean shorelines" (allaboutbirds.org) where they feast on whatever the surf washes up as well as other plant and animal life.  These ones were certainly busy checking every nook and cranny of the rocks after each wave - and they certainly were in the splash zone!

Birds in the splash zone!

They don't seem to mind getting wet - they made
no attempt to run away from the waves. 

After lunch, we headed back up the trail and back through the forest, past the meadow, and alongside the pond.  We passed a tree covered with "witches butter" (a type of fungus), admired the bull rushes and talked about how the red-winged blackbirds will soon be here.  

Across from the pond was another new bench, with a beautiful inscription that really resonated with me.   I cannot find the verse on the internet , but I learned that Helga Schmitt was a local woman who passed away in 2017 at age 56, and she loved nature, dogs, and photography.  I think I would have liked her! 

And soon we were back at the parking lot.   Total distance: 3 miles. Total time (including lunch, nature discussions, and photo stops) 3 hours.  Total enjoyment: every minute of it.