My First American Bittern! At the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge

There are lots of birds out there that are reasonably common, but for one reason or another I haven't seen a fair number of them yet. The American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) is an example. They are reasonably abundant in the wetlands of the Great Valley, but they are also solitary and secretive in their habits.

We've been exploring our local refuges for a few years now, and on Thursday we were following the Waterfowl Auto Tour at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge. I spotted a large bird who was too busy concentrating on dinner to run and hide as we drove by. I almost missed it entirely, as its colors blended in so well with the vegetation. I got the camera in position quickly enough to see the evening's dinner menu: crawdad. It swallowed the thing whole.

It shook off any remainders, and we moved on. I thought I had been watching a juvenile Black-crowned Night Heron. It wasn't until I was working with the pictures later on that I realized I had spied a new bird for my list. Next time I'll make sure the pictures are sharper!

Yellow-headed Blackbird at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, Bear Creek Unit

This was an absolute first for me. We've been going to the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge multiple times over the last two years or so, and not once have we seen a Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) along the way. Yesterday we saw perhaps a dozen of them. I'm pretty sure they weren't there on our previous visits, because they are really hard to miss, even from a distance.

See? Hard to miss.

It appears that these birds aren't seen all that often around here, as they are usually migrating through the area on their way to breeding grounds farther to the north in Nevada as far as southern Canada. They winter in Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas. There are a handful of breeding colonies in our Great Valley, although they were once more plentiful before 90% of the valley wetlands were plowed over.

I hope I'll have another chance to catch these beautiful birds a little more in the open. They were doing a good job of staying just behind the reeds, so that every picture had one piece or another of the bird missing. If they weren't hiding, they were flying overhead. I saw four at once on two different occasions in addition to the perching individuals, so we saw as many as a dozen of them in total.

It would be interesting if they were breeding right there at San Luis.

Birds of the Day: Sandhill Cranes at the Merced and San Luis National Wildlife Refuges

These beautiful birds have been spending the summer in the far north, but they have been arriving in the Great Valley to take up their winter residence at the Merced and San Luis National Wildlife Refuges a few miles south of Modesto (These pictures had their first appearance yesterday at Geotripper). The Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis) would be at home on the prairies and wetlands of the Great Valley, but most of their habitat has been co-opted by agriculture.

The string of wildlife refuges up and down the valley provide a safe place for them to survive the winter (at least outside of the hunting areas of the "refuges"). Around 20,000 of them will be spending the season at the Merced unit.

We paid what we thought was an early visit to the refuges on Sunday, but found that the wetlands had just been flooded, and that many birds were already in residence, including several hundred of the cranes. Dozens more were arriving for the evening every minute. I shot a few videos of the graceful birds coming in to land for the night.
It was a beautiful day and a beautiful evening!