Author: Steve

You probably can’t tell, but I’ve gone back to work. We’re still on the
road. We haven’t left California. We still admire and enjoy the scenery of
the day, but thoughts have shifted back to work. I think there is a lot I
can do without being right at the office. I’ve updated some mailing lists
for the September mailing. I can update some website pages. I have 2005
financial and capacity projections to make. I can do that stuff from here. Here, by the way, has moved. We left the coast and headed off to the
desert. We’re parked out in the middle of the Mojave, east of Barstow.
Blue sky. Ninety-five degrees. We get full hookups, shade, a small lake,
two islands, and friendly neighbors.

Deep in Elkhorn Slough. I can only guess at how much life goes on
underwater and in the mud. It supports a massive churning swirl of life on
the surface and in the air. Thousands of birds. Paddling and drifting with
the tide within twenty feet of the bank we watch with binoculars that make
them all seem within reach. Western Sandpipers and Least Sandpipers.
They’re the tiniest littlest peeps: smaller than baby chicks. Sanderlings.
Plovers. Godwits. Willets. Curlews. Egrets. Herons. Terns. Gulls.
Falcons. Hawks. The smallest birds in the largest numbers. Progressively
fewer as the birds get larger or more predatory. A single peregrine falcon.
A red-tailed hawk. A northern harrier. This time we got bombed by terns. Boom splash. A tern hits the water
within six inches of the dock. A look at him with the binocs. Long thin
orange bill. If it were a large orange bill it would be a Royal Tern. If
it were a very heavy red bill, it would be a Caspian Tern. Long thin bill?
Elegant Tern. A new bird. A seal swam to see us.

Judy’s nephew, John Jacobs. He and his wife are both in Iraq. They’re in
different places in Iraq, but they’re both there, as Marine Officers.
John’s dad and wife drove down from Livermore to join us in a paddle of the
Elkhorn Slough. Sunshine. Shorebirds. We paddled into a school of
baitfish and drifted while a flock of brown pelicans pounded the water all
around us. That was pretty cool. Tidal creeks. During high tide, creeks
form along the edges of the slough. They have no flow in them other than
the tides. We get to paddle all through them, finding the main channel
through, to come back out into the slough in a different place. Marbled
godwits. Western sandpipers. Least sandpipers. Long billed curlews.
Seals and sea otters. A nice paddle. A nice way to spend the day. Thanks John and Trish.

The rocky coastline of Big Sur. The cool shadows of the coastal redwood forest. Another set of tide pools. More black oystercatchers. More black turnstones.

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.