18 December 05
Christmas Bird Count + 2.35 Inches of Rain = Soggy People
You sort of knew it was going to be one of those kinds of days when the only conceivable footwear was your Bean Boots that had been outside all summer collecting whatever was out there (including, it turned out, a black widow spider I thought was dead but resurrected itself in the sink). The tarps over Johnny’s beekeeping stuff were swirling wildly in the gales. Oh well. At least we didn’t have owling duty. (The folks who did got there at 3 am with howling gales, horizontal rain, and no owls.)
Our portion of the count was actually fairly easy: count all the birds along Putah Creek Road from the diversion dam to Winters, a distance of only about three miles. It was fine when we were walking. When we stopped we all got frozen. One of the walkie-talkies shorted out and started buzzing and carrying on in Numenius’ backpack. We counted surprisingly high numbers of birds considering the weather and the fact that most of the walnut groves were lakes by the end of our stint, including a fox sparrow and a red-breasted sapsucker, as well as a merlin later in the day.
We ended our count at the Putah Creek Cafe, dripping puddles of water all over the floor and removing wallets, binoculars, gloves, and anything else we could wring out or attempt to wring out…
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Comes to that, congrats your numbers and on surviving the count. Saturday, we had a morning of pissing-down-rain, and Joe and I were both wiped out enough to quit by 1, 1:30 and skipped the countdown dinner. Don’t know if it’s age, current physical condition, or some complex demoralization from other stuff: We’ve had rainy counts, stormy counts, cold counts, balmy counts, but this was the first one I actually felt bad about.
My personal favorite was varied thrush, which started showing up in the woods above the Bear Valley Visitor Center about the time I said out loud, “I know there are varied thrushes here somewhere.”