This weekend’s birding adventures…

I had yard work that I needed to do this weekend, so of course I got in the car and drove out to the coast to do some birding. The voles had a bumper crop this year at a couple of raptor hangouts, and I wanted to see if I could do some photography. (here are a couple of shots from a couple of years ago, the last time we had this kind of irruption:

Blufftop Park was, of course, fogged out, no activity at all. I’ll have to try again later.

Instead, I hit up a new place for me, Gazos Creek down near Ano Nuevo, I’d visited it once before to explore and found it very inviting, and even had some nice opportunities for photography:

(lots of folks wouldn’t believe a shot like that exists around here…)

this time I spent my time birding rather than photography, and when I got there, I ran into another birder who was studying a mixed migrant flock of about 25 birds. Lots of interesting birds. My list:

Turkey Vulture 1
Anna’s Hummingbird 1
Nuttall’s Woodpecker 1 heard only
Willow Flycatcher 1 okay, “Western”, but…
Black Phoebe 1
Warbling Vireo 1
Steller’s Jay X
Chestnut-backed Chickadee 2
Yellow Warbler 2
Black-throated Gray Warbler 1
Townsend’s Warbler 1
Wilson’s Warbler 1
Western Tanager 1
Lark Sparrow 1 immature in a mixed flock. Sat up for good looks for over a minute.
Song Sparrow 4
Dark-eyed Junco 2

which includes a new lifer (the black-throated grey warbler), and a number of first of fall birds. About 11:30 the marine layer broke up and so did the flock, but until then, it was fascinating — birds just kept rolling around from tree to tree, and you never quite knew what you were going to see. The Lark Sparrow was an especially nice (and unusual for the area) find, and was nice enough to sit up in a tree for over a minute, allowing me to get the other birder a chance to see it as well.

I then headed out to Fitzgerald, my favorite place on the coast. There’s a small creek that enteres the ocean there through a small ravine, and sometimes it can be a wonderful birding area, and sometimes it’s absolutely dead. This trip, it was busy — more white-crowned sparrows, always fun. A nice surprise and unexpected was a house wren that led me on a significant chase before I was comfortable with the ID — I spent about 20 minutes staking out the bird before I trusted the call, and then came home and reviewed it with a couple of guides and flickr. It spend a lot of time skulking in the foliage and never really making itself visible out of the shadows, but ultimately patience won (for once). another nice treat was having a small flock of bushtits come in, and suddenly seeing a yellow bird flying with them — it was a Wilson’s warbler, which had attached itself to the bushtit flock. While I normally see bushtits as a reason to stop looking (they make lots of noise and lots of movement, and make finding other birds a challenge), that was enough to make my afternoon….

Location: Fitzgerald Marine Reserve
Observation date: 9/19/09
Number of species: 18

Brown Pelican 3
Double-crested Cormorant X
Pelagic Cormorant X
Heermann’s Gull 1
gull sp. X
Anna’s Hummingbird 1
Black Phoebe 2
Western Scrub-Jay (Coastal) 1
Chestnut-backed Chickadee X
Bushtit 6
House Wren 1
Orange-crowned Warbler 1
Yellow Warbler 2
Wilson’s Warbler 1
Western Tanager 1
California Towhee 2
White-crowned Sparrow 5
Golden-crowned Sparrow 2

It’s been an on and off birding year so far; I more or less missed spring migration due to various things, but I’m hoping to be able to spend more time during fall migration and looking around more widely. My species list is at 179, well behind this time last year, but last year I was doing a lot more travelling back and forth to SoCal and that gave me chances to bird different areas. This year’s been really heads-down at work, and that’s limited what I can do, although that’s hopefully going to mellow out somewhat soon.

At the same time, I’ve added a number of birds to the list list — Red-Breasted Merganser and Pacific Loon were accounting additions (things I’d seen before, but not logged formally), others have been real treats: Ring-Necked ducks as they wintered on the pond at the Gates of Heaven cemetary, and a White-Throated swift while out trying to figure out swallows at Ed Levin, I finally tracked down one of the Eurasian Collared Doves in Alviso.

I also finally added California Condor to my list on a trip back from SoCal when I decided to take the coast route — hoping to see one in Big Sur, I succeeded, with two condors playing in the thermals and a half dozen cars on the side of the road full of birders watching. (what’s the best way to find rare birds? Look for birders and have them point). I also finally added Violet-Green Swallow to the list thanks to the juvenile flocks in Sunnyvale (and spending the time to get comfortable picking them out) — and in the last week, two more (for a total of ten), Western Wood-Peewee at Palo Alto Baylands while spending a lunch trying to find a Spizella sparrow that was reported, and the Black-Throated Grey yesterday morning.

If I can get back in the swing of birding regularly (and early), 200 species for the year is quite possible. I definitely need to get to Bolsa Chica to add a few terns to the list, which I’ll try to do this next visit. And my life list is now at 229 — maybe I’ll add one or two before the end of the year, but I’m not planning any trips out of the area, and I don’t twitch, so I don’t think it’s likely I’ll do something too significant here. Which is fine.

Although I really hope I can see a California Quail in the county before year end; they’ve been hiding — I had to see it down in morro bay to get it on the list this year. Of all the birds to miss….

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