April 18, 2005
Hooded Oriole grudge match
And so back to birding... Spring migration is now in full swing, with Wilson's Warbler and Bullock's Oriole both showing up in my yard yesterday. After hearing that Hooded Orioles were showing up in the Central Valley, I decided to do the hour-long bike ride over to Winters to check up on some palms just over the county line where the birds nested last year (in spite of multiple visits to the site last year, the birds stubbornly refused to make it over the border and on to my county list). I stopped at Putah Creek Park en route to pick up my first Nashville Warbler and singing Black-headed Grosbeaks of the year.
Over the course of a very dull three-hour vigil, I saw no sign of the female and encountered the male perhaps five or six times - this bird was seriously camera-shy! The monotony was eased a little by my first of season Pacific-slope Flycatcher and Western Tanager. Finally, in the sweltering mid-day heat, the bird flew over my head and into Yolo county airspace to become my 239th county bird. I wasted no time in heading to the Putah Creek Cafe for a well-earned breakfast.
Earlier in the week I met up with Betty Berteaux to practise digiscoping the assorted feral geese at North Davis Pond. This Mockingbird posed obligingly on top of a lamp-post...
... until he was rudely displaced by this Yellow-billed Magpie.
Trips to the Woodland sewer ponds and City of Davis Wetlands produced my first of season Whimbrel, Clark's Grebe and a lingering (injured?) White-fronted Goose. At Joan's house, a pair of Cooper's Hawks are constructing a (very obscured) nest.
