Geotripper's California Birds

  It was the biggest weather event of our year, in which we received about a third of our yearly precipitation in just two days. In the afte...

I've had some pleasant finds of late on our birding journeys of late. We ventured out on Monday to the prairies that lie east of our t...

I was on my way to collect some very big rocks today in the Mother Lode foothills when I passed by a familiar bird on a fencepost. It was ...

We saw quite a few species on our short excursions through the California prairie last weekend. As we drove south from the Willms Ranch st...

It's been a whole two weeks since I posted some pictures of a Pied-billed Grebe ( Podilymbus podiceps ) at the Merced National Wildl...

California has some special landscapes that are not part of the usual tourist routes. One of those unheralded ecosystems is the prairie l...

I don't usually post about the same bird on successive days, but it turns out that Mrs. Geotripper was not with me yesterday when I sa...

I don't know why this is...Burrowing Owls ( Athene cunicularia ) live all over North and South America, especially on grasslands of th...

The western foothills of the Sierra Nevada are one of the least-known parts of the range. Every year, millions of tourists drive quickly t...

Although I no doubt had seen them, I didn't recognize Horned Larks (Eremophila alpestris) until early last year during my travels thro...

It was a rich weekend for finding birds on the California Prairie. I think I'm finally starting to run short of species from my trip l...

We had a rather productive trip to the prairielands east of our little village at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. In addition t...

One has to start somewhere. I've noticed that the first chance I ever have to shoot a new species, it is usually under less than ideal...

After torturing you with fuzzy indistinct photos of the Burrowing Owl I saw on Sunday in the prairielands, I thought it only fair to shar...

The California prairielands used to extend in an unbroken band across the lower reaches of the Sierra Mother Lode and the four-hundred mil...