August 9, 2007
Big sur Condor extravaganza
On Sunday I got to sleep in until 645am - a real treat! Today was the start of the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting, and I took part in their field trip to beautiful Big Sur.
The aim of this trip was to see California Condors the easy way, by radio-tracking them. We stopped at a place overlooking a rocky beach holding several California Sealions. Amongst them was this golden Steller Sealion, complete with yellow flipper-tag (unfortunately too distant to read).
The radios indicated that condors were in the vicinity, but we saw nothing for a good 15 minutes. Were the birds perched out of sight, the other side of the ridge? In the end we found a group of 5 birds sitting with Turkey Vultures on the cliffs below. I got 3 of them and a tiny-looking TV in the same scope view.
However, the best was yet to come - a huge adult (no 94, a 9 year old male) flew directly underneath us and landed in a clump of pines not too far away, treating everyone to scope-filling views.
Here's the bird with wings spread digiscoped...
... and as viewed without the scope, to give an impression of size.
Just as we were due to leave, the bird took off and gave us dazzling overhead views. It was much better seeing them here than my last encounter of a bird eating a black refuse sack on the edge of LA!
After an enormous lunch we had a tour of the bird banding facilities of Big Sur Ornithology Lab. Unsurprisingly, no birds were mist-netted in the late afternoon, but a Golden Eagle over the ridgetops was some compensation. We decided to spend the rest of our time birding around Andrew Molera state park.
We still got a reasonable selection of the local birds (Nuttall's Woodpecker was a lifer for many), plus a couple of majestic Monarch butterflies.
Nick, a sharp-eyed birder from Missouri, pointed out a Bobcat to us, but it disappeared before I could brandish the camera. A covey of California Quail flushed into the middle of the bushes, allowing us decent scope views.
The journey back produced a couple of new birds (though confusion reigned when my announcement of Heerman's Gull was misheard as 'human skull'!) and some more fantastic Big Sur scenery.
