Santa Clara County Salt Ponds and Bay Area birding

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.

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…

Winter birdwatching…

I’ve been doing a bunch of early year winter birding, trying to get the winter birds on my list before the wander off. It’s been a lot of fun (my first winter “rush”) and I’ve had some pretty good luck; so far, my year list is at 120 species, about six weeks ahead of last year, and I’ve added a couple of new life birds to the list as well (Red-breasted merganser and ring-necked duck). It almost feels like the birds are parading for me now; I went up to Redwood Shores where I knew a spotted sandpiper had hung out in the past, and in it flew and wandered around a bit (and for good measure, I’ve since seen them twice more, at Vasona and Alviso).

I went off to Sunnyvale Water Polution Control Plant on Monday since the weather was good. I haven’t been there in over a year since I whacked the knee, but now that I’m starting to build in some mileage again, I figured I’d try out to the radar dish and back.

As I got there, a couple of hunters were putting a boat into the channel right where the parking lot is. I figured they would probably scare up anything in the channel as they paddled out (which they did… more in a sec). Down where the pump station is and the channel heads north past the old landfill I had a nice red-tail on the power pole and a california towhee scratching in the leaf mould. Much to my amusement, just as I was thinking “I’ve seen green heron here before”, one flew in and landed. It flex back out towards the water plant when I tried to get a better angle on it, kvetching the whole way. That, of course, didn’t help, because the hunters flushed it twice more before it got really annoyed and flew north up that channel and away from all of us, loudly protesting.

Not much in the reeds — lots of crowned sparrows and some yellow-rumps (mostly heard). On the pond were coots, pied-billed grebes, a few ducks, two snowy egrets, and the occasional d-c cormorant flying by, as well as a single great blue near the landfill channel. Up the hill on the landfill area was a flock of about 25 canada geese.

After making the turn out towards the radar disk, I noticed a black-crowned night heron in the reeds in the channe between the two paths (looking out towards the salt pond to the south). Realizing the hunters were headed out into that area, I decided to stop and watch the show. Ever wonder how many herons hang out in that area? The answer is 35-40 (two were visible to me before the hunters showed up). They also flushed a 2nd green heron and annoyed the blackbirds and two marsh wrens.

After that, I headed back in because I had to deal with some email. I had two probable common yellowthroats, but not enough of a look at either to make them definitive to my tastes.

Oh, out in the field at disk drive trying to convince me they were burrowing owls were a small flock of marbled godwits. Out at state and spreckles I saw a spotted sandpiper, a few western sandpipers a couple of killdeer and the usual suspects (at least one mew gull, no glaucous among the gulls). Out at shoreline I mostly saw people fighting over parking places because it’s a holiday, so I didn’t stick around..

On Sunday, Laurie and I went out for our January trip to O’Neill Forebay and Merced National Wildlife Refuge, before the cranes and geese leave for the northern trip. It was a fun trip, the the drought we’re seeing in California was horribly obvious; the reservoir very empty, the hills already browning into the spring golden colors. Bird numbers at the forebay were light, and numbers at Merced were much lighter than normal. We saw few sandhill cranes at all until the sunset fly-in, and geese were in the thousands vs.  the tens of thousands. Talked to a couple of other birders there who felt the same way.

As I write this, it’s actually raining. we really need it; here’s hoping it makes a dent.

My 2008 goals for birding were fairly straightforward; 220 species to the life list for the year, 200 species for the year list, and my long-term goal, which was to find a bird that was a notable addition to the birding group — it’s one thing to chase birds other people find and add them to the list, for me, the real goal is to start finding birds that other birders can then also find.

I missed the 200 for the year by three, partly because of weather and partyl because of holiday time issues; I could have made it but it seemed an artificial thing to do, so I focussed on other things. I’ve since covered the life list with birds that were available in 2008 where I found them, so I don’t feel bad about it.

And I finally found that “special” bird; a red-breasted sapsucker showed up in Redwood Shores and was first seen by me and later refound by others. Even nicer, the photos I got of the bird indicate it’s actually a likely hybrid — red-breasted sapsucker x red-naped sapsucker is the most likely candidate. That made my day, and turned into a really nice find. I’ve got photos on flickr for those interested.

When I went down to Vasona, I ran into a couple from the East Coast birding the lake, and we had a nice chat. One thing I like to do when I run into non-local birders is share what I know and help them better see the area — it’s a real joy to see birds we see here as common in fresh eyes. In Vasona, that was talking about snowy and great egrets, as well as showing off black phoebes, one of those birds you basically have to shoo off around here — but to someone from back east, they’re true joys to sit and watch as they chase bugs and flit around.  It’s a fun way to step back and see the hobby from a different viewpoint.

My birding goals for 2009?

I’m not settting any hard goals right now. I want to continue improving my ID capabilities and see what I can accomplish. My current hope is to explore more of Santa Clara County (where I do about 60% of my birding) and San Mateo County (where I do about 30%) and visit a wider variety of habitats. Now that the knee and ankle are to the point I can start doing more walking (and I need to start building my mileage and conditioning again) it’ll open up more places to go walk and bird. I still want to do this mostly for enjoyment and the challenge, and not turn it into a chore.

One of the things I’m experimenting with is using Google Maps do document birding areas and sighting locations. Once I get that under control I’ll start posting those maps here; when I get enough content to make sense, I plan on relaunching siliconvalleybirders.org sometime this year (why the first one failed is a story I’ll write about one of these days, but the domain is currently parked waiting for V2). I think there are some nice capabilities for helping people bird the area, and we’ll see how it goes.

So 2009 has started out really well; the ability to show up and have species like Green Heron just pop up and say hello won’t continue — but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.