Oregon Junco

A minor break in the rain: a flock of juncos works busily through the cut branches and mud, looking for new goodies.

American Goldfinch

It rained for much of the day, a strange rain out of the north that left water on my window. So when I saw a bird at all, it was not well. This one perched briefly on the cut branches outside…

Creeper, Yellow-headed Blackbird, Brown-headed Cowbird

These were our new bigby birds today, but most of the day we were working on our Sketchcrawl. Tomorrow we’re meeting some friends at the sandhill crane preserve in Lodi; on Monday, we’re back to serious bicycling for birds. Stay tuned.

Bushtit

No matter what, bushtits always seem to travel in flocks of nineteen…

Cooper's Hawk

They have drastically hacked away at the tree outside my window on the grounds that it’s a storm hazard. The mockingbird that was sat on the branch now has to find somewhere else. I was heartbroken.

This evening a Cooper’s hawk flew in, though, looked around, and took off. It’s an angular bird. They always make me think of the god Horus. May Horus protect us from incompetent tree pruners electricians with chainsaws.

Rough-legged Hawk

We returned to the area north of Davis this morning where the hawks had been seen. We found the rough-legged perched on a tussock in a field; we found the Western gull preening along the berm where it had been seen yesterday; and Roger caught up with us in time to see the blue goose found by Gil and to take us to where he had seen the ferruginous hawk — which then put in a brief but unequivocal appearance.

Song sparrow, common moorhen, and a Wilson’s snipe at the North Davis Pond has brought my BIGBY total to exactly 100. In February, we’ll do laundry.

Mockingbird on Territory

Very few birds have cooperated in the sketching arena over the past few days, but I was determined to post something today even if it was scrawl. This is a 30-second sketch…

Crow Outside the Door

Worms have been fetching up all over the place with the flooding, and the birds are after them. This crow was right outside the door, wandering around and helping himself to whatever he found. The primary and secondary feathers were very brown — not sure if it was partial albinism or just very worn feathers.

Merlins

In between storms we got on our bikes to look for several BIGBY birds — wood ducks and merlins. Along the way we saw the female peregrine watching from the UC Davis water tower and several kestrels. We heard wood ducks but didn’t see any, though we did pick up pied-billed grebe and a male common merganser, a beauty. (Also green and black-crowned night-herons, a snowy egret, and double-crested cormorants.)

There have been two merlins roosting on Anza in North Davis for the past several winters, and they’re back. This is the first time we’ve actually made the trek up there to see them, and it was fun to do so on our bikes, taking a route that showed us a lot of the tree damage from Friday’s high winds. Arborists are going to be well employed over the next couple of weeks…

Weathering the Storm

When I went home at lunchtime, the wind was blowing hard, gusting VERY hard. The rain was horizontal. The road outside the office was almost flooded over. And just outside the driveway, a huge walnut tree was down across the road.

The magpies started foraging for something — worms? — outside the kitchen window. When I left to come back to work, the wind had died down and birds were flying everywhere: gulls, a red-tail, crows, warblers, magpies. There will be lots of hunting for the rest of the afternoon.

The wind may have died down but the rain’s still coming. A tree nearly hit the lab at work and they’re cutting through it now to retrieve the power line. Everyone’s gone home….