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.

A Trip to MacWorld

Although our Bigby is a self-propelled one, I thought it might be interesting to try a public transportation sequence that would take me from Davis to San Francisco on the train via the Suisun Marsh and San Pablo Bay, and try to record the birds I saw.

I left the house at around 7:25 am on the bike and returned on the bike as it was getting dark. I had a wonderful day, some of which was due to MacWorld, some of which was due to the Samovar Tea Lounge, but most of which was due to the fact that it was almost 60 degrees and I saw a ton of birds (mostly non-passerine at this speed!). A list follows in order seen not taxonomic. Of very great note: American bittern, rising from the marsh just beyond the Suisun-Fairfield station, yellow-headed blackbirds close by, and Western and Clark’s grebes, which we haven’t yet seen from the bike. I’m sure there were other duck species I just couldn’t identify quickly enough…

Killdeer
Yellowrump
Goose sp. (white-fronted?)
Red-tailed hawk
American crow
Anna’s hummingbird
American kestrel
Ruby-crowned kinglet
Starling
Common merganser
Great blue heron
Mourning dove
Bushtit
California gull
Nuttall’s woodpecker
Black phoebe
Rock pigeon
White-crowned sparrow
Western scrub-jay
Yellow-billed magpie
White-tailed kite
Northern flicker
Canada goose
House finch
House sparrow
Double-crested cormorant
Great egret
Northern harrier
Brewer’s blackbird
Bufflehead
Western meadowlark
White pelican
Mallard
Ring-billed gull
American coot
Yellow-headed blackbird
Shoveler
American wigeon
Ruddy duck
Northern pintail
Snowy egret
Common moorhen
Greater yellowlegs
American avocet
Black-necked stilt
Sandpiper sp. (least?)
Red-winged blackbird
Cinnamon teal
American bittern
Tundra swan
Canvasback
Western gull
Surf scoter
Scaup sp.
American robin
Common goldeneye
Belted kingfisher
Clark’s grebe
Spotted sandpiper
Eared grebe
Willet
Glaucous-winged gull
Common raven
Forster’s tern
Herring gull
Red-shouldered hawk
Wood duck
Green heron
Cooper’s hawk

Sketching in the Dark

Last night Yolo Audubon hosted Larry Arbanas, a brilliant bird videographer from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who now lives in Bishop. He showed us lots of mini-movies with gorgeous shots of birds. I started sketching, though I was sitting at the back and it was very dark.

It’s a good exercise: you learn to look at the bird, not your paper, which you can’t see. My scribbles are hard to decipher but I’m pleased with a few of these lines (I think it’s a white-tailed kite in case you’re wondering).

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.

Cooper's Hawk in the Garden

We rode our bikes north today to try and see some gulls for our BIGBY. We saw plenty, but I didn’t sketch them. Instead, I’m offering a few feathers that were out back. An immature Cooper’s hawk has been hanging around. Unwary sparrows are dinner, fast.

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…