Cam-owl-flage

I headed out to the Nanaimo River estuary for the first couple of hours of daylight on Saturday morning. I arrived to find one hunter already out on the marsh, with another soon arriving after me.
There wasn't must shooting going in though, as the majority of wildfowl was staying offshore.
There wasn't a great deal of activity at all, to be honest, and I spent my time vainly searching for birds.

I didn't see a single shrike - most unusual here, and only a lone western meadowlark put in an appearance.
Two 'ring-tail' northern harriers were cruising the marsh but no owls were in hunting mode. I did manage to locate a single roosting short-eared owl, as pictured here. They can be tricky little blighters to find...
A couple of largish finch/sparrow flocks were deserving of thorough scrutiny but, alas, the best I could dig out from among the multitude of golden-crowned sparrows and juncos were a couple of white-crowned, a fox and a Lincoln's sparrow. Pah.