North to Bodega Bay

We woke up this morning after a restful night in Novato. The complimentary breakfast offered in the hotel was not to our liking, so we grabbed coffee at McDonald’s and headed about 15 miles to the Point Reyes National Seashore, in Marin County, California.

Our first stop along the road was at the cute little Tomales River. Here we saw three large Turkey Vultures dozing in a tree. We saw three cute little River Otters in the water. They dove and looped around each other, playing in the water. In the Reyes Wildlife Area we saw American White Pelicans paddling together in a line, which scares up fish, which are promptly gobbled by the pelicans. All day long we saw hundreds of Common Ravens, Great Egrets, Double Crested Cormorants and Sanderlings. We found a Chipping Sparrow in the underbrush, several Ospreys and a Prairie Flacon.

Berry identified the Brewer’s Blackbird, which was a life bird for us. We found the Heermann’s Gull, which was another life bird for us. Turkey Vultures and Elegant Terns we have seen many times before. The crashing waves of the blue water of the Pacific Ocean on the rocky shore in the northern California are truly awe inspiring.

We drove to the small town of Inverness. I pulled off the road and stopped behind a general store. We aimed my spotting scope at the water, where we spotted a Mute Swan with two Grebes in the middle of the bay. This was significant to us, because according to the Sibley bird guide, the Mute Swan is actually a very rare visitor to northern California. The Mute Swan is usually seen in the eastern United States. Both of us are certain in this identification. We surmise that this single Mute Swan got off of his migration path somewhere in Canada and migrated anyway, ending up in front of us in California.

We stopped at a hundred birding sites during the entire day. At one stop, we spotted a single gull. It turns out that this gull was a hybrid of the Western Gull and the Glaucous Gull. We saw the Red Tailed Hawk, the Red Shouldered Hawk and the American Kestrel.

Not only do we enjoy the birds we see, but we also enjoy the other animals seen along the way. At Point Reyes we saw the California Mule Deer, a herd of large Elk with impressive racks, two skinny little Coyotes and a herd of shaggy Highland Cattle.

Around 2pm, it dawned on us that we had not eaten lunch, because we were having so much fun. We drove back to Inverness and ate lunch at Vladimirs’ Restaurant. The food was interesting because they served dishes of Czech origin, but we both thought the quality was lacking. The rye bread was certainly not as good as Robert makes at home. The czech dumplings needed salt, the brown sauce was bland. Berry thought the sweetened Czech coffee with chocolate was wonderful. Robert was frankly outraged when the waitress said at the end of the meal that they took only cash. Poor Robert had used his credit card everywhere in Iceland. But, here, no.

After a long morning and lunch, we began our drive north on Highway One, heading to Bodega Bay. We stopped at a small nature reserve along the way and identified the American Goldfinch and the Black Phoebe. Bodega Bay was covered in whitecaps. The Bodega area has many different habitats. Huge windswept cliffs, the roiling ocean itself, long fertile mudflats and thickly populated reed beds.

Our first stop in Bodega Bay was a large mudflat, where we saw a large number of shorebirds. Our favorites were the large flocks of Marbled Godwit. As we continued toward the ocean, we encountered large flocks of hungry Common Ravens. The White Crowned Sparrows and the Red Tailed Hawk we often see back in Tennessee.

Our final birding stop of the day was a huge peninsula called Hole-in-the-Head. The gale strength winds there were very strong. Walking along a steep path along the high rocky cliffs was actually dangerous. Berry looked at the Pelagic Cormorant and correctly identified another life bird. Bodega Head, at the end of the main road into the area, is a popular whale watching spot in winter, when Gray Whales migrate back and forth, from Alaska to Mexico and back. We did not see any whales in late September.

One final bit of local trivia that we learned was that Bodega Bay’s claim to fame is that Alfred Hitchcock directed his film, The Birds, in Bodega Bay in 1963. Neither of us were attacked by birds in Bodega Bay.

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of wikipedia

Birdically Interesting Highway One

We woke up this morning in Oyster Bay to a soft rain which stopped before we were ready to leave. Robert wanted to dial into a work teleconference. During the conference call we ate a continental breakfast of bagel with cream cheese, fresh fruit and hot coffee.

After the conference call we went to San Bruno Mountain in a suburb of San Francisco and drove slowly to the summit. There we saw our first life bird of this trip, the red shafted Northern Flicker of the western United States. We have seen the yellow shafted Northern Flickers in our own backyard in Memphis. The markings of the two Flickers are very similar. We identified the red shafted Northern Flicker by its beautiful red tear drop shaped markings under each eye. Unmistakable.

Other birds we saw at this site included several House Finch in a bush, a pair of Fox Sparrow on the road, a Western Scrub Jay at the top of a Dogwood tree and several rather pale breasted American Robins.

We were still getting into our groove, what we usually do on vacation, so, on the way to Golden Gate Park, we stopped to get a white styrofoam cooler, some drinks and some munchies. Traffic quickly became an irritation as we got into downtown San Francisco. Golden Gate park was too crowded with cars and people for birding, which requires relative solitude and quiet. We made our way to Stow Lake at the famous Presidio Park. There, at the little Stow Lake with its red Chinese style pagoda, we saw many Mallard male and female either sleeping or dabbling peacefully in the water, Ring Billed Gulls perched on a log, a Pied Billed Grebe diving in the deeper water and a Black Crowned Night Heron hiding in a tree along the bank.

Leaving San Francisco we drove across the famous Golden Gate Bridge. There were thousands of tourists standing on this bridge. We drove across the bridge and turned to Sausalito. This is is a very touristy town, which reminded us of Gatlinburg in Tennessee. We ate lunch at a crab shack, then headed northwest toward the Pacific Ocean to continue our birding adventure.

We drove northwest along the Pacific coast to the Marin Headlands and Fort Cronkite. We walked to the lighthouse there along a tremendously steep path. We walked on the brown sand there and identified the Western Gull.

We continued driving along the birdically interesting Highway One.

• Brown Pelicans
• American White Pelican
• Wimbrel
• Black Crowned Night Heron
• Belted Kingfisher
• Willet
• Long Billed Curlew
• Black Phoebe
• Acorn Woodpecker
• Bar Tailed Godwit
• Common Raven
• Red Head Duck
• Blue Wing Teal
• Cinnamon Teal

Mule Eared Deer were munching their way through the gorse in the area around the lighthouse. Seals lounged on rocks in the water near the lighthouse while Sea Lions played in the water.

We enjoyed a lovely Italian dinner of Rigatoni Bolognese and Pork Chop Milanese in Novato, California.

Robert and Berry

photo courtesy of wikipedia

To Bird Around San Francisco

Robert and I hugged Cosmo the Dog and told him goodbye. He was going to the doggie spa at the Pleasant View Kennel. Robert's sister drove us to the airport in Memphis in a snappy rental car; her own car was in the shop. Memphis airport is almost deserted.

The first leg of our cross-country journey to San Francisco was an uncomfortable flight in a smallish plane into the Houston traffic jam that they call the airport. We ate lunch inside the airport. Berry was served a bowl of unintentionally cool potato soup and Robert ate his way through too many onion rings. It is so much easier and healthier to cook and eat at home.

We then left on the second leg of today's long journey, a three hour flight which crossed the enormous Grand Canyon, soared over the Rocky Mountains, then landed in San Francisco around 5:15 pm. It had to happen; Robert's duffel bag was not on the luggage carousel with Berry's. He waited in line behind an Australian with a broken suitcase handle and finally was told that the duffel bag would arrive from Houston on a later flight. We decided to wait at the airport.

After getting the bag and fetching a rental car, we chose to stay the night in San Francisco. We found a room at the Inn at Oyster Bay on the southern San Francisco Bay. We ate Halibut and Red Snapper for dinner and retired to our room to write our blog post.

Robert and Berry

photo courtesy of wikipedia

Sunday

Berry spent the afternoon glued to the hammock in the backyard. When I joined her, we saw a beautiful Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), checking all along the back of the house for sustenance.

Berry and I were walking the dog at 8:40pm and we heard the distinctive hooting call of the Barred Owl (Strix varia).

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of wikipedia

Orange and Gold

We took time before the World Cup game to check for birds at Arkabutla Lake in northern Mississippi. We packed a picnic lunch and took the expressway from Memphis to Hernando, Mississippi. The entrance to the dam area was on the other side of the city.

• Red Winged Blackbird
• Great Egret
• Northern Cardinal
• American Crow
• Northern Parula
• Indigo Bunting
• Purple Martin
• Mississippi Kite
• Northern Mockingbird
• Eastern Kingbird
• Bluejay
• Eastern Wood Pewee
• Eastern Bluebird
• English Sparrow
• Red Headed Woodpecker
• Canada Goose
• Wood Thrush
• Cedar Waxwing
• American White Pelican
• American Robin
• Yellow Shafted Northern Flicker
• Turkey Vulture
• Red Bellied Woodpecker
• American Goldfinch
• Brown Headed Cowbird
• Baltimore Oriole

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of wikipedia

A Life Bird on a Cold, Wet Day

Saturday May 17, 2014 and it was raining off and on. After eating a bowl of Robert’s very nice asparagus soup for lunch, we decided to go for a drive. We went to the Wolf River Greenland area in east Memphis and walked down the paved path into the woods next to the Wolf River.

We heard many birds singing in the dense woods. Robert spotted a Summer Tanager (Piranga Rubra) high in the canopy of a hardwood tree. The Summer Tanager is a medium sized songbird in the Cardinal family. They eat bees and wasps. Adult males are red. Females are orangish on the underparts and olive on top, with olive-brown wings and tail.

As we continued to walk down the path, while we were looking out at the Wolf River, we heard a song we don’t usually hear. Spotting this bird was a challenge, but Robert finally found the Swainson’s Warbler (Limnothlypis Swainsonii) perching on a branch. Swainson's Warblers are a small bird with olive brown above and white below. It has a brown crown. We had never seen this bird before. This was a life bird for us.

While we were still zooming on the idea of having seen the Swainson’s Warbler, we bumped into the Prothonatory Warbler (Protonotaria Citrea) on a limb high in a tree next to the Wolf River.

The Prothonotary Warbler has an olive back with blue-grey wings and tail with yellow underparts. It is the only warbler in the eastern United States that nests in natural cavities in trees, sometimes using holes made by the Downy Woodpecker (Picoides Pubescens).

Further down the same path, we started hearing the familiar zipper like song of the Northern Parula (Setophaga Americana).

As we were heading back to the car, we heard the liquid whistle of the Indigo Bunting (Passerina Cyanea). It was sitting out in the open on a branch without any leaves, making him very easy to spot and identify. The Indigo Bunting is a small bird. The male is a vibrant blue and the female is brown. The diet of the Indigo Bunting consists primarily of insects during the summer months and seeds during the winter months.

Of course, the "Bird of the Day" is the Swainson’s Warbler because it was a "Life Bird" for us.

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of wikipedia, audubon.com

Bird in the Boot

My sister and her husband left a pair of large boots on the front porch of their house near Nashville. They went on a short trip and came back and peeked into one of the boots. Surprise ! There was a small nest built right inside the boot. My sister noticed a small brown bird flitting around the rim of the boot, which she could not identify, so she telephoned us.

She described to us a Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus), which is so common a bird in this area that we also have one in our backyard. It is a smallish bird, reddish brown in color with a distinctive white stripe above its eye. It forages for insects in the dry leaves under bushes and in the undergrowth of forested places.

After several e-mails discussing the nest in the boot situation, my sister noticed that there were five eggs inside the small grass nest constructed inside the boot. The gray eggs had a dark strip on one end of the egg. She described a Carolina Wren flying to and from the boot, fetching worms and insects to the boot.

We started making calculations for a gestational calendar for the Carolina Wren, when my sister reported finding another nest inside her horse barn. It is springtime and birds are busy making babies. We told my sister that after breaking out of the egg, a Carolina Wren nestling usually takes ten to sixteen days to fledge. She tried to calculate when they might leave the boot. She was scared that something had happened to the boot babies. Even though the other nestlings inside the barn had left the nest and were gone, thewren babies back on the porch inside the boot were deathly quiet. What was wrong ?!? Where were the birds ?

My sister telephoned me with updates about a pencil sized stick having been brought to boot and stretched across the top of the boot. She surmised that this looked like some kind of perch for a bird. Then, she reported that the Carolina Wren had dragged one end of the stick down into the boot. This was perhaps her step ladder for the nestlings to get out of the boot.

Today, we are pleased to report that the babies have left the nest. The hiking boot is empty. Nature took its course. The pregnant Ms. Carolina Wren had just borrowed the boot.

Robert and Berry

photos courtesy of cfowler, wikipedia

Blue Grosbeak

Berry and I went to the Shelby Farms Park in Memphis. This large city park has open grasslands and stands of hardwood trees. There is a plot of bamboo which provides food for the pandas at the zoo. In the hardwood and pine trees, next to its agricultural experimentation plots, we saw the bird of the day. The Blue Grosbeak(Passerina caerulea) is a beautiful blue bird with a brown wing bar. It is in the Cardinal family. We found it flitting around the base of a pine tree, foraging for pine cones on the needle strewn floor of a pine copse there at Shelby Farms.

Robert and Berry

photo courtesy of wikipedia

An Owl in the Backyard

This is simply a short note of a bird that I heard from inside my house on 03-22-2014 at 3:45am. It was an owl, hooting in our backyard. We do not keep an official list of all the birds we've seen or heard in the backyard. That would be a "Yard List". Neither Berry nor I keep such a list. But this is the first time that I have ever heard an owl in my yard. The only detail I know is that I can exclude the Barred Owl (Strix Varia), because I heard it hooting.

What was I doing up at 3:45am, you are wondering. I was aroused from deep sleep by a sinus congestion. I was standing there in my kitchen, quietly pickling vegetables, when the owl hooted in my backyard.

Robert

March 15 at Arkabutla Lake

It is time to build a nest and we took a trip to Arkabutla Lake in Northern Mississippi to see them being built. The drive from Memphis to Arkabutla was uneventful except for the speeders on the way to the Tunica casinos. Our first stop was the Pleasant Hill boat ramp and picnic area. This is a nice secluded boat ramp that we enjoy just west of the city of Hernando. The American Coots and Pelicans dominated the water and the Killdeer dominated the rocks.

We made our way to the dam area where we saw the first of three birds gathering material for a nest. The brightly colored red headed woodpecker was dropping twigs and grass down into a hole on the side of a large tree. He went to the ground, gatherd the material then flew back up to the tree to deposit it. Off to one side of the swimming area, we saw an English Sparrow making its nest in the Purple Martin apartment house. We left the dam area and drove to the campground where we saw 4 different species of woodpecker, the Red headed Woodpecker, the Red-bellied Woodpecker, several Yellow-shafted Northern Flickers and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker was busy making its nest. We hope when we go back next time, that all of these little bird homes will have babies in them. Eastern Pheobe (Sayonaris Phoebe)

• Red Tailed Hawk
• Hermit Thrush
• Rock Dove
• Common Grackle
• European Starling
• American Robin
• American Crow
• Northern Cardinal
• Black Vulture
• Northern Mockingbird
• Eastern Bluebird
• Red Winged Blackbird
• American White Pelican
• American Coot
• Mallard
• Great Blue Herron
• Song Sparrow
• Killdeer
• Turkey Vulture
• Bluejay
• Eastern Phoebe
• Ring Billed Gull
• Red Headed Woodpecker
• Red Bellied Woodpecker
• Canada Goose
• Northern Flicker (Yellow Shafted)
• Yellow Bellied Sapsucker

We stopped at a pub in Hernando, Mississippi for lunch and wrote this post for our blog.

Berry and Robert