Birding Destinations

Loons are one of my favorite birds, and have a strong connection with Canada — look at the back of the dollar coins. Morro Bay is one of the places on the California Coast where it’s trivially easy to get photographs of loons, albeit never in breeding plumage (like most of us, birds rarely carry their fanciest clothes on vacation..)

This loon is exhibiting a common behavior, which is sitting back on its tail in the water and flapping like crazy. It’s more or less like what we do when we stretch after a couple of hours hunched over a computer. Loons, however, tend to look like funky turtles when they do it. Well, they do to me…

June 5th, 2009 by chuq

Black-Crowned Night Heron

Birdwatching, Photography Birding Destinations black-crowned night heron Morro Bay Comments Off

My collection seems full of pictures of these herons. Does the world really need another?

Yes, if it’s a good one.

This one was hanging out on the rocks in the fog, moderately cooperative but as always, with that “you aren’t going to eat me, right?” look.

January 24th, 2009 by chuq

Santa Clara County Salt Ponds and Bay Area birding

Birdwatching Birding Destinations California San Francisco Bay Area Santa Clara County View Comments

I’ve been adding more sites to the Links page (well worth a browse if you haven’t, and which I’m going to continue to add to for a while as I remember what I forgot).

I’m getting around to cleaning up some of the loose ends to when I shut down siliconvalleybirders.org (for now). I do plan on relaunching the site in 2009, and hopefully, version 2 won’t suck (why it did and why I parked it is its own “learning experience” which I’ll talk about down the road).

For those of you looking to do birdwatching in the Santa Clara County area, the best places to get started are:

South Bay Birders Unlimited: Birding in Santa Clara County.
There’s also the Santa Clara Valley Audubon web site for local birders
if you’re a photographer, don’t forget the Bay Area Bird Photographers group that meets monthly in Palo Alto.
Finally, a key resource is the South Bay Birds mailing list, now hosted on Yahoo, which is where the sighting reports happen. If you bird in this area, you really should keep an eye on that list for the interesting birds showing up.

With the bay access in the county, the wetlands are a huge part of the county birding environment. Much of the bay edges were converted over the years into a series of salt ponds for harvesting salt; this is slowly being reversed over time, fortunately. There is a web site with information on the restoration project and maps of the areas being restored

We’ve had maps of the salt ponds available, but when I fired up my site, I did some experimenting of re-doing the maps in Google Maps. My Google Map version of the Salt Ponds is available here.

Ashok Khosla, who’s a board member with SCV Audubon, did a version of the maps that’s really pretty neat in Google Earth. It’s a free download from Google, and if you have Google Earth installed, you can download this file and load it into Google Earth and fly through the area and see how the ponds are laid out.

This is a neat hack, if you ask me. I’ve been experimenting with some of the Google Maps I did and trying to figure out how to improve them and make them more useful and start building an updated listing of the common birding spots here in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, where I do about 95% of my birding. Until I relaunch the birders site, I’m going to post that information here and make it available, because I think for now, it’s better to focus on the content and then migrate it to a site when it’s complete than build a site and then fight to populate it with content.

One of my goals for 2009 is to spend more time birding new areas in the counties and exploring the area more widely. As I do, I’ll be writing about it here and documenting the locations. It seems every time I write about a birding trip right now, I get one or two “how do I get there?” questions, so I’m going to try to make that information more available and see how best to use modern technologies like Google Maps and Google Earth to document the birding areas I frequent and help other birders find and explore them as well.

Aleutian Cackling Goose, Vasona Lake, Santa Clara County

One way I’ve been doing that for a while is that I make sure to geotag my Flickr Photos. If you look at, say, my picture of our friend the Aleutian Cackling Goose (they look like toy geese! Such a cute button nose…), the main page of the photo as an entry for “Taken in”, and a link that will take you to a map that will show you where the photo was taken. I strive to make sure that this information will at least get you to the location the bird was found; depending on the rarity of the bird and the difficulty in finding it, I try to locate it to a specific tree, but more generally, that information will get you to the area so you can wander around and enjoy. A lot of people don’t notice that this information exists on the photo (flickr doesn’t exactly hide it, but it isnt’ exactly screaming at you from the page, either), and that’s a useful tool for people interested in exploring as well.

Ultimately, I hope to have things set up so that all my photos are geotagged with a latitude/longitude so the location can be found, and that Santa Clara and San Mateo counties have tagged maps that can be used as birding guides for those counties, at least in Google Maps, but hopefully in Google Earth as well. I have some other interesting ideas I want to explore, including seeing if we can interface to eBird in various ways and mapping out notable birds and rarities into some kind of automated map. Lots of ways we can take advantage of today’s online environment to make birding more fun and make birders better informed. All it takes is time and energy…

January 9th, 2009 by chuq

Olompali State Historic Park is fantastic

Birdwatching, Recreation and Relaxation Birding Destinations San Francisco Bay Area Comments Off

Bay Area Bird Blog » Olompali State Historic Park is fantastic:

Over the sixteen years I’ve lived in the Bay Area, I have driven past Olompali State Historic Park — on US 101 about fifteen miles north of the Richmond Bridge — over 150 times. At least thirty of those times, my wife and I have agreed that “we really have to stop by this place sometime.” Yesterday, we finally did…and I’m sure we’ll be back a few times every year from now on. There are some historic buildings ranging from 80 to 150 years old, with several interesting stories attached…that alone would be enough to make a single visit worthwhile; for example, there are some remains of the adobe house of the last Miwok Indian leader, dating from the mid-1800s.

This one is now on my “must visit” list.

About

Subscribe to this blog via RSS

To contact me, send email to chuqvr --at-- gmail.com.

Where to find me

Photo licensing and prints
For information on buying prints or licensing my images please see my Photography section. Many of my images are available for non-commercial use for no charge. I am also making some of them available free as mobile and desktop wallpapers.

This site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Stuff to Read

Here are a few items I think you'll be interested in checking out while you visit:

Backups: I've talked a fair bit about backing up your data and why you should. Most people don't. Most people don't. Most people regret that some day. Don't be most people. To understand why or how, check out more than you wanted to know about backups, and even more. Then I decided to follow my own advice, and then I started running out of disk and had to solve the problem. Which is all really more than you want to know about backups -- but you need to know it, or you'll regret it.
Doing Good: I donated some images to Images without Borders, who are raising funds for Doctors Without Borders to support operations in Haiti. The least you could do is go take a look, and maybe put a few bucks down for a nice print by someone in support of this cause.
Photography: There are three rules they tell photographers. I explain why those rules are wrong (at least some of the time).
Teachable Moments: I love teachable moments as a way to take mistakes and turn them into something postive. I just wish I didn't make them quite so teachable some days, as I did the day I convinced myself a ring-necked pheasant was really a blue grouse. Birders will understand...
Paying Forward: Here's where I make the case for paying forward instead of paying back.
Blogging: and because I know I'll need it, here are 50 reasons why I haven't been blogging. For when i stop blogging for a while.
Apple: And finally, an explanation of what I did for a living when I was working for Mama Apple.

Looking for Something?

Here are a couple of companies that I purchase from and can recommend to you.

In some places on this site I use links that take you to a page where you can buy a product I talk about. If you use that link and make a purchase, I'll earn a small commission and you'll earn my thanks for doing so. You don't pay more when you do this and I get a few dollars to help pay for this site's fees or to put away for that 800mm lens I'd love to buy. If you choose to use these affiliate links, thank you. If you would rather not, that's fine as well.