Steve and Judy's Travels!

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.

Different strokes. A few days ago, we were surrounded by travel trailers. Now we have a
quarter million dollar Monaco on one side, and a half million dollar Beaver
Coach on the other. We’re the small one in the middle.
We all three agree on tow vehicles though.

Then we saw the Condor. We got to see the giant California Condor. They
live here at Pinnacles. They used to live here. Then they didn’t. Now
they do again. Not everybody gets to see them. The condors hang out
wherever they want during the day. Sometimes they come back in the
afternoon to the pinnacles to spend the night. Sometimes they don’t. Today
they did. There are a lot of turkey vultures here. You watch them in the binoculars,
making sure there is not a condor in there anywhere. There are two hints I
have read about identifying California Condors that I really like: “If you
think you might have seen a giant condor, you haven’t.” That’s a good one.
It suggests you’ll know it as soon as you see it. The other: “From a
distance, can be mistaken for a small plane.” Ooh. Turkey vultures are big birds. Their wingspan is over five feet. They are
so good at soaring. They hardly ever flap. They look like magnificent
birds. Until the condor soars into view. The condor has a wingspan of
almost ten feet, and never flaps. The condor is deliberate in its
movements, it is perfectly steady and makes wide sweeping turns. By
contrast, the turkey vultures look downright unstable. The condor rises
from the horizon like the mother ship on Close Encounters. Two new birds today. Tonight we drive home for an hour to a forty degree temperature drop. A
hundred degrees here. Sixty degrees at the ocean’s shore. Tomorrow, we
paddle the slough.

Mission accomplished. Not the mission of welcoming the new baby Erin. That
didn’t happen. Jacob hasn’t gone into seclusion, but Yousun and Baby Erin
have. We don’t get to see her until some other time. Well, they get to do
what they choose to do, and we get to accommodate. We did get the bassinette delivered. We met up with Jacob at Mike and
Katie’s in San Jose, had a nice visit with them and kids Jack and Allison,
and passed on the baton. We left about lunch time, and headed south for
Pinnacles National Monument. What a gorgeous drive! The California Savannah.
Gently rolling hills covered with grass so dry and brown it’s crispy, dotted
with California Live Oaks. Inland. Hot. A hundred degrees. We saw the
yellow-billed magpies again, a California Specialty. You can’t see them
anywhere but here, but once you get to the right place, they are conspicuous
and common. Just like black billed magpies everywhere else. We have gone all these years without ever seeing California Quail. Well, we
saw them as kids, but we havent seen them since we started couting birds.
Today we saw fifty of them. Not fifty, one at a time, but a giant flock of
fifty of them all around us, clicking, and calling, and clucking. They
nurdle and chortle, scurry about, and kick and scratch dirt and grass into
the air. They are so cute! They are so cute, I want to chase them down to
hug and cuddle them. I refrain. The perfect feeding station. The oak tree extends over the road. Acorns
fall from the tree onto the road. Cars drive past and crush the acorns.
Quail scurry out onto the road and eat the acorns. Not many cars drive
past, so the quail get all the time they need to eat.