Bird of the Day: Wondering Where Your Robins Went For the Winter? They're Here!

I was back on campus this week preparing for the new semester. I haven't had many opportunities to check up on the activities in our little campus mini-wilderness, a drainage pond in a small pasture and oak/eucalyptus woodland that is sometimes used for grazing sheep, but which is usually ignored. It's been a pretty good site for seeing birds during lunchtime walks, but today it was positively hopping with bird life.

I thought from a distance that the swarming flocks were Brewer's or Red-winged Blackbirds. As I got closer I realized that they had red breasts. The hundreds, maybe thousands of birds were American Robins (Turdus migratorius)! I've never seen so many in one place.

The American Robin is of course one of the most common birds in North America, with an estimated population of around 300 million. Many of those from the north country migrate into the southern states and California for the winter. Apparently this crew likes our area for overwintering, or at least a brief stop. We'll see if they're still around in the coming weeks.

Birds of the Day: A Descent of Acorn Woodpeckers along the Tuolumne River

The naming for groupings of birds is a fascinating linguistic affair. Apparently they date from the Middle Ages or earlier. My favorites so are are an ostentation of peacocks and an exaltation of larks. In any case, I was walking along the Tuolumne River in my home village this morning and saw a descent of Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus). They made themselves known long before I could see them, causing a racket in the branches above. The lighting was a challenge with the sun behind them. I've had to work with the saturation and contrast to get them visible in these photos.

The Tuolumne River is famous as the "other" Yosemite river, with her headwaters in the beautiful Tuolumne Meadows area near Tioga Pass. I live where the river emerges from the Sierra Nevada foothills onto the plains of the Great Valley. Our town ignored the presence of the river for a long time, but recently constructed a half-mile walking path along the banks under a wonderful canopy of old oak trees. Apparently there are plans to extend it downstream. That would be a nice development!

Bird of the Day: White-faced Ibis at Merced National Wildlife Refuge

We've seen a White-faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi) before on these pages, but today is a twofer. Our recent visit at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge was a visual treat as usual, and we saw several dozen of these beautiful birds hanging out near the auto-tour road.

The White-faced Ibis is the only species of Ibis in the California region, although a second species is rapidly spreading from the east, having expanded into Texas so far. They are beautiful, if odd-shaped birds!

Those red eyes do freak me out just a little bit, though...

Bird of the Day: Sandhill Cranes amid California Gold

Gold made California a state, but the real gold, as I wrote a few weeks ago over in Geotripper, is in soil. The Great Valley is a geological oddity in the American West, an exceedingly flat landscape with abundant water resources, despite the aridity of the valley floor. Wet humid climates tend to form acidic soils deficient in plant nutrients, but the water in our valley doesn't come so much from precipitation so the nutrients don't wash away. The water comes from Sierra Nevada rivers, which wind their way across the valley floor. The valley soils are therefore some of the richest in the world. Given the snow-free climate, the growing season can last all year, depending on the crop.

Humans have known of the valley's richness for a bit more than a century and a half, but animals, and birds in particular, have known for much longer. Hundreds of thousands of years more. They've been migrating to and wintering in the valley since the plains rose above sea level a few million years ago. Agricultural and urban development have eliminated most of the original ecosystem, but a series of preserves provide refuge for millions of birds. One of my favorite bird-watching spots is an observation platform at the edge of the San Joaquin National Wildlife Refuge near the end of Beckwith Road just west of Modesto. It takes only a few extra minutes to check things out the way we did a couple of days ago. In the setting sun, the fields of cut cornstalks (grown to feed the birds) looked golden. A few dozen Sandhill Cranes (Grus candensis) were grazing among the stubs. It looked like they were sorting through gold bars.

Bird of the Day: A Winking Great Horned Owl at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

We were following the auto-tour at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge and the sun was getting low in the sky to the west. We were pretty much wrapping things up when the marsh area around the Bittern Trail came alive with the hooting of owls. There were several of them, but we could only locate one of them up in the trees. In the growing darkness, picture-taking was tricky.

The Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) is a familiar bird across both North and South America, but I've only seen a few of them in the time I've been birdwatching. Their nocturnal nature of course makes it a bit tough to see them easily. 

I caught a bit of the hooting on video, which can be seen and heard below...

Bird of the Day: Common Yellowthroat at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

Common, my foot. How many trips have I made looking for birds before I saw this one? Dozens? It may be "common", but it wasn't easy to see. This Common Yellowthroat  (Geothlypis trichas) was flitting about in the rushes at the viewing platform along the auto-tour of the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. And I mean "flitting" in the most active sense of the word.

As I am sure that any bird photographer finds out immediately, birds can be exceedingly uncooperative when it comes to posing for pictures. This one was no exception, as I would actually see, try to focus, and then it was gone. And then it would reappear several yards away. Rinse, repeat, mumble mild obscenities. 

So, if you were set to complain that my first two pictures are fuzzy and all, here are some of the failed shots I got. It's a veritable "Where's Waldo?" kind of problem. I didn't think that bright yellow would be a good color for camouflage, but among the dead reeds it was excellent.

Despite my inability to see them, the Common Yellowthroat is in fact one of the most common types of warblers, with a range that extends across North America from Panama to Canada.  They breed in the northern states and Canada, and migrate to the southern states and Central America. Their numbers have decreased by about a third over the last few decades, probably from wetlands habitat loss.

More birds of the Merced Refuge to come!

Bird of the Day: Red-tailed Hawk at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

Mrs. Geotripper and I wanted to start out the new year with our favorite hobby these days: we headed out to the Merced National Wildlife Refuge to see what the winter migrants of our valley were up to. We saw a rich variety of bird species as we drove the auto-tour, but the most cooperative bird of the day was a beautiful Red-tailed Hawk. It was on a post next to the road keeping an eye on things, including us.

The Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is probably the most common raptor in North America, with a range that extends from Panama to Alaska and Canada. It's also one of the largest. They are highly adaptable to different climates, with fourteen subspecies across the continent.

The Merced National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1951, not so much to protect birds, but to prevent them from damaging adjacent croplands. It was one of the earliest refuges to be established in the Great Valley. It covers just over 10,000 acres (about 16 square miles) of wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitats, and as such is one of the few parts of the Great Valley that resembles the primeval environment that once existed here (though to be sure, it is highly managed to produce sufficient forage for the birds). It's a great place to visit, especially at this time of year. More posts to come!