CAL-GAL #2

More fine work from the lens of Barbara Bens on our PIB trip along the California Coast earlier this month:
Brown Pelicans at ease around the ocean.


Pair of Condors high over the ridge at the top of Pfeiffer-Burns State Park, Big Sur.

Elephant seals scuffling at Piedras Blancas.

Not all elephant seals are warlike all the time:

Great Horned Owl in flight at Drake’s Beach, Pt. Reyes

Heermann’s Gull thinking deeply. Could be anywhere in coastal California this time of year.

California Quail at Pt. Reyes National Seashore visitors center.

Rockpipers: Surfbird on left, Black Turnstone on right. Asilomar State Beach.

Red-shouldered Hawk in fog east of Morro Bay.

Western Scrub-Jay:

Warerfall at Pfeiifer-Burns:

White-crowned Sparrow in flight:

Flying Willet

CAL-GAL #1

Here is the first gallery of California photos (hence Cal-Gal) from birder Barbara Bens, one of the folks on my recent California Coastal birding trip for Partnership for Interantional Birding.
Female California Gnatcatcher near Pt. Vicente, LA County:
Ruyfous-crowned Sparrow, also at Pt. Vincente:

Hiding Cal Towhee:

Curlew in the fog, Morro Bay.

Diving Brown Pelican, Morro Bay State Park.

Santa Cruz Island:
Above: the endemic Island Scrub-Jay.

Banded Song Sparrow on Santa Cruz Island off Ventura:

Willet and friend at Moss Landing:


Yeloow-billed Magpie up Pine Canyon near King City in southern Monterey County.

Two of three Great Horned Owls in Monterey cypress trees, Pt. Reyes.
On this trip we got both North American endemics: Island Scrub-Jay and Yellow-billed Magpie, the latter requiring us to drive far from the coast in search of dog in an outdoor location. When we inquired about the species locally one woman told us she can only feed her dog at night because the magpies onto the food instantly in the daytime. These are farm dogs not fed in the house. Neither, presumably are the magpies fed indoors, though if you left the door open…

GONE, NOT FORGETTABLE

The destructive history of humanity’s war against nature stretches from the woolly mammoth to the tar sands of contemporary Canada and the increasing use of neo-nicotinoid poisons. The battle that led to the extermination of the Passenger Pigeon in North America lasted a few decades. No single battle in the war against nature was more ignominious. None was more fulsome with heedless human greed.
In his fine book on the Passenger Pigeon, Errol Fuller (no relation) describes the skirmish near Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. A local musician, H. B. Roney, was concerned that the bird was disappearing and he tried to expose the market hunting slaughter of the birds that had come to the area to nest. This pigeon nesting colony was estimated at 100,000 acres in extent. It would be one of the final large nesting colonies seen by man. Despite a state law supposed to protect the birds the slaughter by gun and net went on for days. Nest trees were chopped down to get at the chicks. Roney estimated a billion birds died.
The hunting and gun interests of the day immediately published a rejoinder to Roney’s outrage and exposes. Propaganda wars of the type we all know all too well in this age.
The startling parallel between those who warn and those who refuse to see has continued since the market hunting of the Passenger Pigeon through to today’s continued worship of petroleum and fracking and profits they bring. As the gunners who slaughtered the Passenger Pigeon by the millions, so do today’s energy corporations see profits…and little else matters.
This annihilated nesting attempt by the pigeons in Michigan is just one of the episodes gathered together in Fuller’s newly published book, a centennial remembrance in print. The book also reproduces fine drawings and paintings of the Passenger Pigeon from the 1700s on to today.
It was exactly one hundred years ago this month that the final, captive, Passenger Pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Today she and her kind are immortalized by a gigantic downtown mural there. But wouldn’t we prefer to see, instead, a couple hundred million of these birds fly across the sky, once again blot out the sun and leave behind pigeon poop a foot deep? I would.

When Alexander Wilson drew this image of the Passenger Pigeon it was the first decades of the 19th Century and the birds were still legion in the forests of North America. He once estimated seeing a flock overhead of more than a billion birds. Just over a hundred years later they were all dead.

The Passenger Pigeon By Errol Fuller (no relation).
Princeton University Press. Hardcover | 2015 | $29.95 / £19.95 | ISBN: 9780691162959. 184 pp. | 7 x 9 1/2 | |eBook | ISBN: 9781400852208 |

CALIFORNIA COASTING

Can birding the California Coast be called “coasting?” That’s what I was doing last week with a group of clients from Partnership for International Birding.California Towhee…in California.

Curlew in the fog, Morro Bay.

Diving Elegant Tern, Morro Bay.

Pelicans on rock northof Gorda, where we also saw a passing California Condor pursued by Peregrine.

Thus is what a sleeping sausage would look like…these happen to be only young elephant seals on the beach near Piedras Blancas.

Pfeiffer-Burns waterfall into the sea.

White-crowned Sparrow adult.

The spouting whale off Pfeiffer-Burns State Park in Big Sur. It was a humpback whale surrounded by attending Heermann’s Gulls and Sooty Shearwaters.
Above the park we saw a pair of soaring condors, giving us three on the day.
California zebra, a rare breed…actually exotic livestock on the Hearst Corporation property at San Simeon.

TRULY ELEGANT

Our recently-completed PIB birding trip along the California Coast had many highlights…here are about five hundred in one single frame. Elegant Terns loafing on a sandbar at Moss Landing in Monterey County.

No far from the madding crowd with its squawks and boistrous shoving, there was this contemplative soul having a snooze on the incoming tide:

VAUX’S SWIRL SWIFTLY

The evening of September 19th I got the chance to show some PIB clients the Vaux’s Swift phenomenon at McNear’s Brickyard in San Rafael, CA. I think the count that night exceeded 19-thousand birds…plus one Kestrel who didn’t apparently catch a swift.

As the light drops the swirling swifts become literally a blur to my camera:

Rusty Scalf was tere doing his count and said the Kestrel is rarely a successful swiftp-hunter, unlike his bigger, faster cousin, the Merlin.

McNear Brick and Block, Marin, US-CA
Sep 19, 2014 6:15 PM – 7:45 PM. 6 species

White-tailed Kite (Elanus leucurus) 1
Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularius) 1
Vaux’s Swift (Chaetura vauxi) 15000
American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) 1
Brewer’s Blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) X
House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) X

THE FEW AND THE ONLY

The U.S. has two endemic species. They are both Corvids. They are both California-only birds. Yesterday our PIB trip to the California Coast got close to one member of the Island Scrub-Jay species. This immature bird wanted to be fed in seems. He or she cam overhead and whispered sweet songs to us in the baked scrub on Santa Cruz Island off Ventura.

THE CULINARY CONCEPTS OF GULLS

This incident of gull vs. tourists took place at Limantour Beach, Pt. Reyes, a few days ago.

Today I was leading a group of birders and we stopped for dinner at an outdoor seafood cafe in Ventura. Some other diners left their table and a first-year Western Gull quickly swooped down to empty the small container of tartar sauce left on the table. That very same gull also proved adept at catching French fries with his beak.

Why Ventura? Tomorrow we take the Island Packers boat out to Santa Cruz Island for the endemic Island Scrub-Jay, an example of evolutionary giantism, like the Komodo monitor lizards, but not as dangerous.

If you;re interested in seeing some California specialties, PIB will work with you on a custom trip or you can join one of our standard ones. Just on this first day we’ve gotten California Gnatcatcher, Common Murre, Rufous-crowned Sparrow, Royal and Elegant Tern, Black Oystercatcher and Turnstone, Marbled Godwit, Red-necked Phalarope, Heermann’s Gull, Black-bellied Plover and California Towhee.