Thursday.
Birding. World class birding. Not just birding, but birding with a guide.
A trained professional. A guide whose home base is Elkhorn Slough. Before
we started he asked us which birds we wanted to see most. I didn't know.
He volunteered that if we wanted, he could just do a general tour, but if we
gave him a list of birds we were most interested in, he would tailor the
trip to that. He will tailor a trip to produce views of the birds we pick?
I sent him a list of thirty-eight birds, known to be in this area, that we
haven't seen yet. Here is a chance to add a few birds to our list.
Wow! What a day. A Big Day. I drove, and Rick the guide directed. He
told us where to stop, where to look, and set up the scope when we needed
it. We watched, we looked, Rick kept track of the birds we saw. The end of
the day count? 40? 50? Wrong! Eighty-six. An eighty-six bird day! And
of those eighty-six birds, twenty-three were life birds for us!
Twenty-three! We added twenty-three birds to our life-list today.
We started with the rocky shoreline birds at Monterey. Seventeen mile
drive. Rocky shoreline birds, headlined by the Black Oystercatcher. What a
bird. What a beauty. He looks just like an American Oystercatcher, except
he's all black. Heavy orange bill with a bright yellow tip. He has a
bright orange ring around a bright yellow eye. It's like identifying a
great kiskadee. A great kiskadee is bright yellow and black, stands on the
top of the tallest tree around, and yells. Nothing subtle about field marks
to distinguish it from some similar bird. There is no mistaking a great
kiskadee. There is no mistaking a black oystercatcher.
Picked up some forest birds, some mud flats birds, some raptors. It was a
ten raptor day. We watched so many phalaropes swimming and wading in a
pond, they looked like busy little water bugs. We got two new kinds of
cormorants. We saw a wandering tattler, a black turnstone, and a surfbird.
We saw a band-tailed pigeon, and acorn woodpecker, a pygmy nuthatch, and a
chestnut backed chickadee.
Wow! What a day.
Anybody spending some time in Moss Landing? We have a birding guide to
recommend. A good guy to spend an entire day with. He would be a good guy
to spend an entire day with even if you didn't want to go birding.
More clam chowder than we could eat from Phil's for dinner.
We ate it anyway.
Oof.
Today, it only took a minute to find Rags in the cabinet under the dinette
seat.
This is a file photo I got of a Black Oystercatcher.
