Davis Bird Count

It’s raining again this evening, but fortunately there was a break in the weather pattern earlier and we woke up to partly cloudy skies for our local bird count. This was the Woodland-Davis Christmas Bird Count. This is a relatively new Christmas Bird Count which started in 2022. In prior years we would do the Putah Creek Christmas Bird Count which is centered west of Winters, but lacking a car we prefer doing a count closer to home.

We were assigned to bird the Wildhorse Golf Course which is on the northeast edge of Davis. Despite having lived in Davis 27 years we’ve never birded around that area before, since golf courses aren’t our thing. But it was surprisingly birdy there. In part this is because the course is bordered by a naturally vegetated open space buffer at the edge of the agricultural lands to the north. We walked the perimeter of the golf course, a two-and-a-half mile route, and saw forty species in total. Our most abundant bird species was the red-winged blackbird. Our favorite sighting was an overflight of 17 tundra swans.

Once home (we got home in time to feed the cats their expected meal at 11 AM) I tallied up our counts and entered them into eBird to share with the count compilers. I thereupon noticed that I made exactly one entry in eBird in 2025 — maybe I can improve on that this year?