Bird Photography Weekly #11

Before I went to the Monterey Bay Birding Festival and on the field trip to the Pinnacles, I had no idea there was a bird such as the Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli). I think it's nice looking with all those contrasting and bright colors.

It has quite a small range compared to most birds. It is endemic to California and located pretty much just in the central to northern part of the state in Oak Savannah which occurs in our foothills and some valleys. If you're having a hard time picturing an Oak Savannah, think Little House on the Prairie with the grassy hills and beautiful Oaks scattered about. That was Oak Savannah, obviously not Prairie, but that's ok.

It's a member of the crow/jay family (Corvidae) and it acts like it too. It hangs around people picnicking waiting to get their scraps... at least in the park areas. I was able to get within 10-15 feet of it. Still glad I had on my 100-400mm lens though!

It is unfortunately on the Audubon's Watch List due to poisons and now it looks like West Nile Virus too.

It seems a quite proud bird to me. Bolder than the Stellar's Jays too. Beautiful in flight. Sorry for this quality, but it was the only one I got. It was quite striking.


I also think that it must be the yellow bill that makes it look like a Kansas Jayhawk, lol!

Pinnacle Birdies

Well, now that I've got the landscapes posted... I'll hopefully please my bird loving friends :)

When we first got to the Pinnacles, we waited a bit for folks, so I wandered about. I heard some quail and spotted them across the roadway, so i went over there and got a couple of shots before they ducked into the thick scrub brush.

I had an opportunity to see a Yellow-Billed Magpie. I had no idea they had even existed. They're cool looking.
Anyone else think it looks like a Jayhawk?

Rock Chalk Jayhawk '01 :)

Speaking of jays... here's a Steller's Jay that was also hanging about the visitor's center. Nice looking bird.

Once the group finally arrived, folks broke out their high-powered scopes and spotted some condors. Those three blobs in the middle are the condors.

We went hiking from the Peaks View parking lot to the Ranger Station up at Bear Gulch. There, we saw more Steller's Jays and a bunch of Acorn Woodpeckers. Here's one that was near where we picnicked.

About 100 feet or so away, there was a granary the Acorn Woodpeckers use. It's a bit overexposed since it was so bright and I wasn't careful with the settings. Still, it's a cool sight to see the woodpecker with a clear acorn in its mouth.

I'm not sure what was going on here, but I read that they have family groups and young-ish ones stick around and help raise younger woodpeckers. I guess that this one was showing the lower one how to find the right hole. It was either that or it was working and the other was supervising, lol... that was probably it!

Below is an abandoned granary. I wonder if anything nests in the holes left from the woodpeckers.

Pinnacles: east side

Ok, after that respite, and some cute kitties, lol, I'll finish up the birding weekend.

My busy season at work has picked up as Reformation (observed) is this coming Sunday. Next week, All Saints Day... then an organ/hymn fest... Thanksgiving... then Advent, and before we know it... Christmas & New Years. Ah, Pentecost... I'll miss you and the monotonous season where nothing much happened and I had more free time. I hope to keep up a decent pace of posting - and surely you all noticed I posted a heck of a lot more in the last 2-3 weeks than I ever did before. I'm like the grasshopper, lol... no steady pace for me. It's all or nothing. But I'll try.

Anyway, back to the post.
In case you haven't seen it yet, my mom has a post on this too from last Wednesday.

On the way to the Pinnacles from Watsonville, we stopped at Hollister for a few minutes at a water reclamation site. Apparently there were some local waterfowl that people could possibly see. There just seemed to be plain old mallards, and we needed some lunch for the day, so we took off. Here's one of the shots of that area near Hollister. The sun was just rising and it was foggy, so this somehow was the result. It was pretty, but I don't remember it being just like this. I guess my eyes filtered better than the lens did.
We got to the Pinnacles way in advance of everyone else since they had also stopped in Pinoche Valley to pick someone else up. We spent quite some time around the visitor's center waiting on everyone. Saw plenty of birds there, but I'll save them for my next post.

The group finally showed up and decided to tool around a bit near the visitor's center.

I spotted a great little dragon fly. I don't think I can identify this one beyond some kinds of skimmer... although I'm not sure of that either. It blended in very well with it's surroundings. Although it perched still for a while, it was still quite difficult as through the lens, it was hard to find it.
Not far from the dragonfly, a bobcat just strolled by. I think there was a bird in an oak tree that it spotted, and it was hanging out below it at the base. Unfortunately a commotion began when it was spotted and the cat decided it wasn't going to get its prey then so it sauntered off. That was cool. I hadn't seen one in the wild before.
Once we finally got the group together again and on a decided plan of action, we hiked from the Peaks View parking lot to the ranger station up at Bear Gulch. This was some of the typical vegetation. Those ferns were great and in such an arid area I was surprised, not only to see them, but how large they were. It's almost as if the dinosaurs could have still been around and munching on them.
Here's another couple of trail pics. This was getting towards the end of the day as we were headed back to the car from the ranger station. These deer hopped up on the trail from the left side and spotted us and what appeared to be the mama was curious enough to look at us and take a few steps towards us. I was in THE perfect position for a great shot. I was probably 20 or so feet behind where my mom was and even though I didn't have my big lens on, I think my 60mm macro was the perfect one.This one I cropped a bit so the deer's faces were clearer. So common, yet still a thrill :) Oh, they're black-tailed deer too like the one at Rancho del Oso. Essentially mule deer as you can see by their big ears.

Waddell Beach & Rancho del Oso

I forgot a few creatures at Rancho del Oso, so I'll post them here as well.

At Waddell Beach, I already posted the surfers, so here are a few of their companions.
Harbor Seals
Some kind of Cormorant fishing
A gorgeous Brown Pelican in its full winter colors
and finally, a bird I'm not sure of at all. It could be a Shearwater, a Jaeger, or even a Gull. :( Unfortunately, not one of the pictures is crisp and clear, although that probably wouldn't help me either.
At Rancho del Oso, I forgot about the Anna's Hummingbird, the Bumble Bee, and the Band-tailed Pigeons.

Rancho del Oso Creatures

First up, a wrentit. I hadn't seen one before, and had to improve this photo in photoshop to get an identifiable birdy, but here it is... at least I think it is a Wrentit. Someone said it was and pointed the direction I was looking, so it should be.
Here's a black phoebe... turned out as a pretty good photograph, although Mr. or Ms. Phoebe's head looks kinda awkward.
Best I can figure, this is a juvenile Hairy Woodpecker. There were 3 of them hopping around and I think I took a picture of two of them, but they both look about the same, and they don't look like any other woodpecker I have in the guidebook.
Finally, one I can say with certainty. A Scrub Jay, lol... and not one from our backyard :)
Somewhere about where I was taking the picture of the wrentit and looking for a spotted towhee someone else say, this deer just came right out of the bushes about 10 feet from me. My camera was set up for a slightly different setting, so it came out too dark. But through the magic of photoshop, it became recognizable. Around these here parts, we call it a black-tailed deer. It's part of the mule deer family. I wonder what happened to it's right antler.
There had to be a whole lot more birds out there, but there was a raptor in the area that kept them hidden while we were there. Oh well... just for the views I plan to return, so maybe it'll be more birdy the next time.

Rancho del Oso

Saturday the 27th, still as part of the birding festival, we went to what I'm currently thinking of as the most beautiful place on earth. I can't believe the 27th was so long ago! Can you believe it's already the 16th of the next month??? I could swear this was just last weekend. OYE!

Anyway, that rant aside, we started out at Waddell Beach which allegedly is a famous surfing spot. Alrighty... if they say so. My cousin is a surfer and he lives not too far from there, so I assume he's hit that spot. Judging on the surfers that were out there though, the conditions must not have been killer because they all looked like over-the-hill (literally and figuratively) surfers. Literally, because they probably were all from "over the hill" as Santa Cruz refers to the Silicon Valley and vice-versa... and figuratively because they all looked 45+ and not in great shape, one guy was using a paddle to catch his wave. Well maybe they were in great shape from a shark's perspective ;) They kinda looked like seals out there...

(click for a larger view)

Across Hwy One from Waddell Beach is Rancho del Oso. The beach is a fine place to park. As my mom noted, we saw the sun peeking over the hill and through the fog. It was pretty cool :)
It was shortly after this I saw a view that just took my breath away... it was more beautiful than any camera could capture!

In fact, whatever angle you turned a new and amazing view was beheld.

We walked along the marsh trail to the trailhead for the Skyline to Sea trail, a 33 mile (one-way) trail up to the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains at Castle Rock State Park. Along the marsh trail we saw moss growing on the trees like this:
My mom, talks a little about it in that same post. It was a cool area and I'll definitely go back again! I sure hope it still looks as good as I remember though :) Who knows, maybe it was just that day.

Pinnacles: west side

*breaking news: Here's my mom's post...

Well, our "final" destination for that day was to be Pinnacles National Monument on the west side. Or at least, so we thought. I'll get to that.

We had difficulty following our leader in our various cars. We had a lady from Louisiana join our car for the day since we had three of us in our car, leaving one spot if anyone wanted. She said that on other birding festivals she was on, they gave carpoolers a hot-pink paper to past on their rear window so they could follow each other easier. That would have been a brilliant idea ahead of time. My dad was driving and he's not so good at playing follow the leader, but it really wasn't his fault, the leader was no good at leading carpools. He drove too fast and never stopped at a yellow light or noticed if some of the cars behind him had to stop for said lights. We lost the leader early on and it turns out so did almost everyone else. He mentioned he would stop at a winery on the way where they had a nice pond or something like that. He said it was called Gonzales Winery. There is however, a major winery in Gonzales called Blackstone Winery. I used my iPhone to google Gonzales Winery and that was all that came up. It turns out, Blackstone IS the winery he was talking about and you wouldn't know it by the signage, but it has changed its name to Gonzales Winery. About 2 of the cars stopped there on the guess that was it. They found him. Another car ran across him on the highway to Pinnacles, they had stopped at a few other wineries and were delayed enough with that to meet up with him somehow.

We, however, just decided, fine, we'll go on to Pinnacles. We know how to get there and aren't going to search in every winery between "here" and there looking. When we got up there, there was another carload who also decided on the same thing. They had got there about 5 minutes before we did.

I didn't take any bird photos there. It was in the heat of the day and the birds weren't flying or hopping around. Here's the view from the parking lot on the west side of Pinnacles though :)


We stood around waiting for about 30 or more minutes and finally came as a concensus that the leader did mention we weren't going IN the park, but would be outside of it and we decided to look for them on the road outside. There weren't a lot of places they could be because the road was very windy and just barely big enough to be a two lane road.

There was a winery or two near the Pinnacles and the other group wanted to look there. We followed, but were nearly out of gas, so when we went off of the highway enough for our tastes, we stopped and let them look. Where we stopped was a really cool view of the pinnacles over grapevine covered hills. It was gorgeous and I would love to live someplace like that!


We then decided to head back down to the highway out of the area and decided to go birding on our own. We stopped at what looked like a good place - a ravine with a pullout. It was a pretty good place. I heard a lot of birds and managed to see a few, but it was too tree-covered to actually get a picture.

After we were about done with that, the other carload stopped behind us and asked what we saw, etc. Then we informed them we were about out of gas and that's why we stopped following them. We all decided to head back down further. After this, we finally ended up in a location the other cars were. It was an interesting area, and there were a few birds flitting about. Here's the images I managed to capture. I don't remember if there were any other birds there that I didn't get a picture of.
Above: Oak Titmouse on the right, and an unhappy Lesser Goldfinch on the left.
Below: Lesser Goldfinch taking a shower. Click on the image to enlarge in case you can't see it. It's about 1/3 from the bottom.
Spotted Towhee off in the scrubbrush behind that water tank. Bad picture, but pretty bird.
This apparently wasn't "the" spot, but yet another stopping point on the way. I don't think I was the only one getting cranky about that by then, so we stopped for a few minutes, and then went back to Watsonville to drop the Louisiana Lady back off and head home.

Unidentified at Moonglow Dairy Farms

Despite the wide variety of birds here, essentially, all have been identified, BUT here's one I'm not positive on. I think it is a young Heerman's Gull. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Below is an image of more pelicans in flight, but for the fun of it, I'll let you search for them, lol!

Here's a bird I can't quite identify... it has a tag number... do you think that will help?
LOL, I thought she was purty :)

Next post... off to the Pinnacles National Monument! (west entrance)