Northern Most Point of our Birding Vacation

In Eureka

Breakfast at Kristina’s was steak and eggs with A1 sauce for Robert and scrambled eggs and bacon for Berry. Breakfast is one time on a birding vacation when it is not the journey, but the destination.

As we drove down highways, through thick, forested stretches of Redwood, or down country roads, looking for birds, we got into a thousand interesting philosophic discussions. What was the source of all the homelessness in the Pacific Northwest ? We see a lot of homeless men and women in northern California. Why do the local girls here wear their hair in ratty, unattractive gnarls painted sky blue, flamingo pink or just plain orange ? Even little old ladies here dye their hair bizarre colors. And why do restaurants always fry seafood items, instead of baking them or broiling them or poaching them ? It is easier, of course, to bread something and fry it, but our preferences ran from being covered in nuts and broiled to my favorite being poached carefully in white wine. The discussions went on in the car between the pauses to look at birds.

Humboldt Bay

At Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge, we saw one of the best birds of the day. This was the Chestnut Backed Chickadee. We stopped the car on a downhill slope because the tree beside us was buzzing with life. There were fifty of these little chickadees eating berries off this tree. We see the Black Capped Chickadee in the eastern United States and the Carolina Chickadee at home in the South. This was a Chestnut Backed Chickadee.

Patrick's Point

At Patrick’s Point State Park, we saw a Golden Retriever walking with its master through the fern strewn Redwood forest. When we first saw the light brown dog, Berry thought it was a Mountain Lion. There are warnings everywhere in northern California for the dangers of Mountain Lions, which eat you, the dangers of rutting Elk, which gore and stomp you and the dangers of Tsunamis (this is an earthquake zone ), which drown you. They put signs at the high water limits of hypothetical tsunamis from hypothetical earthquakes. In the middle of all the excitement, we found a pair of Brown Creepers climbing a tree trunk.

Crescent City

On Highway One outside of Crescent City, a California Highway Patrol cop turned his lights on to signal me to pull over and let him by. I did so and he roared forward, but it really spooked me. The squad car roared around a truck and arrested a third car in front of the truck. Just as this was happening, a group of young teens standing on the shoulder of the highway tossed a skateboard at the truck in front of me. The large wheels of the truck crushed the skateboard for them. We had to dodge the remains of the destroyed skateboard which tumbled across the highway. It was a weird birding interlude.

We took a well needed afternoon nap at a nice hotel in Crescent City, California. It was listed in our GPS as a Hampton Inn, but when we got here it was something different. Using the spotting scope from the balcony of our room, we saw seals playing in the water near boulders in the ocean, poking their cute noses up for air, then descending again. On shore there was a squirrel so still that Berry thought it was a statue. Brown Pelicans were floating sleepily on the waves. Then Berry spotted three grebes, which led to a discussion of the difference between the Clark’s Grebes and the Western Grebes. The three in front of us in the Pacific Ocean were Western Grebe because their beaks were grayish, not yellowish.

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of utahbirds, wikipedia