Birding O.D.

Hardly. Just making up for lost time.

The backyard birds have been doing well lately, despite my jaundiced eye. The two seed feeders need to be filled just about every other day. The most frequent visitors include house finch, house sparrow, pine siskin, dark-eyed junco, white-crowned sparrow and yellow-rumped warbler. Steller's jays, norther flickers and robins make regular appearances. A special leap year day bonus was a varied thrush, a first for our yard.

Varied thrush

On Saturday, I took a canoe trip down Hookton Slough with friends. Birding from the water level gives one a different perspective than birding from land, and the canoes acted as something of a disguise, allowing us to drift much closer to shorebirds than we could by approaching on foot. The weather was clear and sunny, and made for great birding and paddling: greater yellowlegs, marbled godwit, common and snowy egrets, willit, double-crested cormorant, American avocet, Western gull, Canada geese, ruddy and bufflehead ducks, green-winged teal, greater scaup, a merganser, brown pelican, pied-billed and Western grebes, peregrine falcon, northern harrier, raven and song sparrow. In the zone where the slough joins Humboldt Bay, we saw a dozen or more harbor seals sunning on mudflats, and several Bonaparte's gulls.

Birdspotting: Pia, Laura and Holly.
Photo by David Luckhardt

The Aleutian Goose Flyoff was hosted again at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge, so I took the opportunity to do more birding, this time with a co-worker/fellow bird enthusiast Drew and his girlfriend Angie. Thick fog diminished visibility but created a mysterious atmosphere -- geese, flying overhead, could be heard, growing louder and louder as they approched. Then they would gradually materialize overhead, pass overhead and disappear again into the gray. Decent birding, despite the weather: Aleutian, cackling and Western Canada geese, green winged teal, northern shoveler, willit, marbled godwit, American coot, least sandpiper, song sparrow, marsh wren, redwing blackbird, robin, house finch, raven, northern harrier, black-capped chickadee, yellow-rumped warbler and ruby-crowned kinglet. I caught a quick look at a non-harrier, non-red-tailed hawk, but the fog made identification difficult.

Three subspecies of Canada geese are in this flock:
Aleutian (foreground, with white neck ring),
cackling (mid-group, no neck ring) and
common/Western (tall, in back, no neck ring).

Least sandpiper, with crab

Waiting for the geese