August 21, 2004
Another two tick day
While places like Willowbank Ditch in Davis get their fair share of migrants, this pales into insignificance compared with the number of birds migrating along the Sacramento River corridor. Yesterday Joan, Maureen and I birded at the Wood Duck Ponds and Babel Slough in eastern Yolo County. As well as excellent numbers of common migrants, these sites produced two new county birds for me - Willow Flycatcher (217) and Nashville Warbler (218)! In fact, the former was probably more abundant than Pacific-slopes today. My first Cedar Waxwings of the fall also flew over here. Inspired by the abundance of migrants, I birded the shaded canopy of College Park en route to work. Again, migrants were everywhere including Western Tanager, Pac-slope, BG Gnatcatcher, Warbling Vireo, Wilson's and Yellow Warblers.
On a grimmer note, I also spotted my first suspected case of West Nile - a dead American Crow on the sidewalk, showing no signs of having been hit by a car or predated. This virus has killed millions of birds on the east coast and unfortunately looks set to do the same here - bad news indeed for our internationally important numbers of Yellow-billed Magpies and Swainson's Hawks.
This morning I returned to do the rounds at Willowbank Ditch - not much in the way of migrants, but did manage to add Willow Flycatcher to the bike list (153).
Rufous Hummingbirds were much in evidence...
... and amazingly this MacGillivray's Warbler stayed put for long enough for me to grab a record shot.
