Category: Birds

We dodged rain and managed to get to Bodega Bay on our last day in Santa Rosa.  It seemed a little bit busier than usual because of how much rain they had recently.  Unfortunately, that meant there were less birds than usual, or at least fewer than I have been lucky enough to see in recent visits.  

Still, I’m never one to complain about a sunny day at the beach, no matter how few birds I might see.  This Willet was the only large bird I saw on the beach, and he insisted on running every time a walker came by.  

We saw far more birds in the wetlands across from the beach than we did on the beach itself, possibly because there were few birders than beach walkers. 

There were several Red-Breasted Mergansers, but this immature male was the only one who stuck around long enough to get his picture taken.

There were several Great Egrets, and they were as indifferent to people as Great Blue Herons are.  

The last photo of our trip to Santa Rosa was this Snow Egret on the docks by the restaurant where we stopped for lunch.

After sighting the American Avocets on our walk in Broomfield, I started looking for Avocet chicks since I had seen them there on previous visits.  I didn’t find any. Instead, I found this  Killdeer

that seemed particularly aware of us but didn’t give an alert or leave the area. That inspired me to start looking for chicks, but  I didn’t see any for quite a while.  Eventually, I sighted this little guy who stood out in the dark-green foliage.

Apparently he hadn’t mastered the art of camouflage as well as his fellow chicks, which turned out to be quite a bit closer to us than he was.

Most of the chicks were good enough at hiding themselves that my Canon R5 wouldn’t focus on them, so I ended up with a lot of blurry shots of foliage.  Still, I ended up with a couple of good shots like this

and this.

I’ll never know if other chicks were so good at camouflaging that they just disappeared, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if there were.

The highlight of our short visit to Salmon Creek had to be seeing the pair of Wood Ducks that had obviously become too acclimated to people.

A few weeks before in Fresno I was disappointed that I didn’t have a camera because of the rain when we saw two pairs of Wood Ducks in the park.  

It’s been a long time since I’ve photographed a Wood Duck, and I don’t think I’ve ever photographed one as cooperative as this one.

So, I couldn’t resist taking more shots from different angles 

than I usually would.  

I found it difficult to decide which shots to process and post here.  Usually I delete any photos I don’t post, but in this case, I’ll save all the pictures I took of this guy.

On our way down to Arizona we stopped at the Sacramento NWR but didn’t feel like we had time to stop at Colusa, just a few miles away from the Sacramento NWR.  Leaving from Fresno, though, I thought we would have time to do Merced, Colusa and Sacramento. Unfortunately, birding was so good at Merced that we didn’t see a lot of birds at Colusa that we hadn’t seen a few hours before.  

Snow Geese were the most common birds at Colusa, even though they weren’t there in the same numbers as we had seen them in the past.

The Snow Geese at Colusa are distinctive in that they all seem to have rust-colored heads, which must come from clay in the water.  Strangely enough, the Snow Geese at Sacramento NWR, just 30 miles north, don’t have those rust-colored heads. 

nor do the Greater White-fronted Geese at Colusa, probably because they mostly eat seeds and waste grain in fields, and graze on new growth.

As usual in California, we saw Great Egrets throughout our trip, but this is a nice closeup Leslie took.

The highlight of this visit was the discovery that the Black-crowned Night-heron rookery seems to be coming back.  

There aren’t nearly as many Night-heron as there was when we first sighted them several years ago, but there weren’t any on our last two visits. We’re hoping there will be a resurgence by our next visit. 

Even though there is a lot of overlap between birds observed at Sacramento NWR and the Colusa NWR, I’ve never seen a Night Heron at Sacramento and I’ve usually seen them at Colusa.  On the other hand, I have often seen Avocets at Sacramento, but can’t remember ever seeing one at Colusa. More importantly, we get to see bird we seldom see at home.