Birding and a Potluck

Richard of A Brit Abroad is coming to the end of his two-year postdoc here at UC Davis, and decided to organize a birding trip followed by a potluck at his house. He is unquestionably the person who has seen most birds in Yolo County in the space of two years without knowing how to drive a car, and managed to hit 250 such species this morning with an Eastern Phoebe we all saw along Putah Creek. (Later in the day he finally caught up with a swamp sparrow, but by that point we had come home to make couscous for the potluck.)

Richard then shared some slides of birds he’d seen this year, which ran like some kind of advertisement for the airline industry: UK to Davis to British Columbia to Texas to Australia to Ontario to UK to Oregon to Arizona, etc. (I’m sure I have these in the wrong order but you get the idea.)

He’s been wonderful to have around these past two years. The first bird we shared was the scissor-tailed flycatcher, seen within a week or two of his arrival in Davis; the commotion around that bird slotted him straight into the birding zeitgeist here and it’s going to be tough when he finally heads off to Paris later this month…