October 7, 2004
One good tern...
When Joan Humphrey called suggesting a lunchtime trip out to Woodland Wastewater Ponds I didn't need much persuading! The water levels have dropped since last week, and the whole place was carpeted with shorebirds. After a brief scan I quickly picked up a Common Tern (my 225th Yolo County bird). Apparently this is only the third documented county record, making it somewhat rarer than last week's Blackpoll Warbler (6th record)! This is about the best picture I could manage through the heat haze, but I've included a few more shots at the end of this article to prove that the carpal bar wasn't just an artefact of the strong lighting.
The heat this lunchtime was pretty intense, so we had the bright idea of combining Joan's garden umbrella with a traffic cone to make an impromptu sunshade!
In the process of moving the traffic cone, we found something far more exciting (to me) than the Common Tern - my first Black Widow Spider!
We moved it a safe distance using the umbrella stand, after which it assumed this odd posture - was it playing dead, or showing the red hourglass on its underside as some sort of threat?
A number of Pectoral Sandpipers were still present, giving amazingly close views. The first picture shows a bird adopting a crouch posture in response to an aerial threat.
More Common Tern pics:
