Zmudowski Birds Identified

Here's a few of the birds I remember or have identified looking them up in a guide book. If I'm wrong, let me know so I can correct it and learn :) Click on the image for a full screen view.

Be sure and check out my mom's blog for a real birder's point of view. Me, I've decided I'm definitely not a birder. I just like all the animals and the views and the plants, etc., more of a naturalist instead.

These two pics are of the same bird. I'm certain it's a female house finch. Someone else in the birding group called out song sparrow, and more than one agreed, but I've looked everywhere for a distinctive spot that a song sparrow should have and from mid-chest to rump, it ought to be less striped. It also didn't look like any other sparrow in the NGS Birds of North America and it looks so much like our backyard house finch - of which I've seen plenty. It MIGHT be a female house sparrow, but it would have a more distinctive bar over the eye. This bird was in the brush right off the path between the pond and the dunes on the way to the beach.

The next bird I was able to get something of a picture of was a barn swallow. They're cool, but move WWAAYYY too fast, lol. Sorry about the quality, but it's my first swallow pic, so I'll keep it for now :D

The next bird was an egret - Great Egret. It's odd though because all guidebooks have it listed as having black legs. This bird definitely does not have black legs and with the naked eye I remember yellow legs as well as you can see it in this picture. Crazy!
This image looks a heckuva lot like my mom's in this post.

Here's a Great Blue Heron standing out on the spit in the lagoon with some kind of gull. Maybe I'll try to ID it later. Cool bird. I think before this, he was perched on a bit of driftwood at the edge of the lagoon on the housing side of the beach.

Shortly after that image was snapped, he started flying off. I tried to track him, but even in landing couldn't get a good focus fast enough, so it's a bit blurry. But here you can really see his wingspan. I think that's a duck (mallard?) floating on the green stuff (moss I believe) in the lagoon.
At the edge of the lagoon on the surf-side, a flock of Snowy Plovers were feeding. They weren't moving quite as fast as the first time I saw them down at Morro Bay this past March. Probably because this was daytime and they were also older.
Here's a decent shot of a Brown Pelican flying. They're changing over to their winter coats now.
Here's one coming in for a landing with the rest of its flock - and some miscellaneous gulls.
In this shot (between the trees) I have what I believe is a Long-billed Curlew. That's a Monterey Cypress on the right. Cool looking wind-swept trees :)
A bunch of Double-crested Cormorants were hanging out on the spit in the lagoon with some gulls. The cormorants were apparently drying off their feathers in the sunshine.
Still doing it.

I'm pretty darn sure these two birds below are surf scoters. I couldn't get a good picture because they were so far out - and it was foggy - that they were nothing but black dots to the naked eye and weren't much bigger in my viewfinder. But they appear to have whitish wide beaks and are all black and their behavior is much like a surf scoter. Plus (although apparently they are unreliable) someone else with a scope said "scoter".
I took a lot of pictures this first day - first morning. In the next post, I'll be posting the birds I haven't yet identified, and may never do so. Hopefully the birdy-bloggers out there will check this post out and can give it a shot!