Another Uncommon Bird: A Merlin at the Ceres River Bluff Regional Park

It's been a rather extraordinary week for me. I got to see a truly rare visitor to our region, a Sage Thrasher, on Friday. And then today it was an uncommon bird (at least for me as I have only seen one of them previously). It was a falcon species called a Merlin (Falco columbarius).

I was running some midday errands in town and thought a bit about where to walk today. I settled on the fairly new sports complex in the area called the Ceres River Bluff Regional Park. It's mostly a bunch of soccer fields along Whitmore Avenue in the town of Ceres, but the park property includes a lower terrace that was once a walnut orchard adjacent to the Tuolumne River. The walnuts are mostly dying away but natural riparian vegetation is taking the place of the trees. A pond (stocked for fishing, apparently) captures runoff from the fields above and provides habitat for birds, turtles and fish and other wetlands species. It's a productive birding spot, with more than 140 species reported so far.

There was some construction going on with the access road to the "wilderness" so I walked along the top of the bluff only to discover an alternate trail down to the river. I explored for awhile finding a fair number of birds, but it wasn't until I was walking back up the bluff that I made my special discovery. I saw the bird in the distance and from the silhouette assumed it was the much more common American Kestrel, but as I got closer I realized the color and spotting was all wrong. I started snapping pictures.

The bird was pretty much unconcerned with me other than the one stern look you can see in the picture below.

The view was nice from the top of the bluff. After a long dry summer, the recent rains have brought some greenery to the pond area and the water level was up. There were Canada Geese, American Coots, and a Pied-billed Grebe hanging out in the water.