Sierra Summer Birding Part I

Back in early June, Billy and I ditched the bay area and headed east into the Sierras. We were destined for Mono County, but to get there we had to endure the grotesque and horrible Yosemite National Park. Most people go to Yosemite Park, but I have a habit of just driving through it on the Lee Vining-Oakland commute. There are worse places to have to endure...in fact, most places are worse. We did stop and walk around a few random spots...no complaints about Mountain Quail, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Townsend's Solitaire, Nashville and MacGillivray's Warblers, Green-tailed Towhees...not to mention delicious, fresh mountain air. A few Mountain Bluebirds were taking in the air at Tuolumne Meadows (above).

This yellow-bellied marmot was holding it down at the meadows as well. Good luck getting this as a lowland vagrant.

Nothing was blooming in the meadows yet...a good portion was still under water. The marmot was probably still groggy from being asleep for months, unlike their Pika relatives who stay awake through the winter.

That afternoon and the following day was spent bouncing around Mono Basin...Vesper, Brewer's and Sagebrush Sparrows were quality year birds, and what I think was a Black-throated Sparrow (only sang once from a great distance away) was almost a nice year bird as well. Some Brant at Mono County Park (later seen at Rush Creek Delta on the south side of the lake) were pleasantly rare, and a bewildering number of Virginia Rails made a cacophony of unfamiliar sounds...they do more than just grunt, take that to heart. A couple random Geris (not birders) pointed out a Golden Eagle nest up Lundy Canyon, and thus I got my lifer Golden Eagle chick. The Grub showed us what he had been doing with the DeChambeau/County Ponds...I think he is determined to pull in some kind of meguh vague runt there some day, but he is currently content to nurture the sizable Yellow-headed Blackbird colony; a lone ibis and Blue-winged Teal were deec county birds for me. White-breasted Nuthatches of the Great Basin flavor were fairly common and scattered about, patiently waiting to be split into their own species. Looking for Black-backed Woodpeckers at a burn along Owens River Road was fruitless, but we did get White-headed Woodpecker, Bank Swallow and a weird sunbow (above).

That night I got hammered at the Mono Inn, which was entirely predictable.

The next morning we headed up to Virginia Lakes, which is heck of high, hella scenic and features one of the few decent Geribirding spots in the entire state. Mountain Chickadees were there (not shocking), and I hung out with this particularly confiding bird for a bit as it foraged close by.

Mountain Chickadee is my favorite chickadee...maybe from birding Lockwood Valley (Ventura County) as a kid, but I'm not entirely sure why. They sound superior to all other chickadees, in my opinion, and they've got that white eyebrow that sets them apart from everything else. Boreal Chickadees are cool, but all the others haven't built a cavity nest in my heart like Mountain Chickadees have. I guess I can't comment on Gray-headed Chickadee, but when the fuck am I going to see one of those?

Where there is Geribirding, there will be finches of some kind. Because Virginia Lakes is so damn high, Cassin's Finch was the only finch on the menu while we were there.

Living in Oakland the past few years, I don't get into high country often enough, so Cassin's Finches are still fun to look at...familiarity breeds contempt and all that. Note the classic streaking on the undertail coverts.

Take a gander at the length of those primaries...that is a bird built for wandering. You wouldn't want to get into a dispersing contest with a Cassin's Finch.

Clark's Nutcrackers were raging...I'm not sure if I'd seen so many at once before. It looked like whole family groups were coming in to eat peanuts.

Nutcrackers, as some of you know, are vital to the health of whitebark pine forests. It's not often you see a bird that essentially manages the forest you are standing in.

Judging by the short bill, this is a hatch year bird. It looks like there are a bunch of very fresh tertials growing in as well.

While Virginia Lakes is always dependable for nutcrackers, birders come here for another reason...Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch. There is no better place in the state to see them in the summer without burning a few thousand calories in the process, which is very unappealing to most birders.

The Rosy-finches finally came in to the resort's feeder after almost two hours of waiting, and promptly got down to the business of gorging. It's not the most "natural" setting, but rosy-finches are crippling birds and they are damn hard to get to (at least in this state) so I'm not going to complain if they want to frolic in a pile of seed right in front of me.

Why there are so few pink-feathered birds is unbeknownst to me. It's a very fetching color on birds, especially passerines. Rosies are just killing it with the pink-black-gray-chocolate brown combo.

Speaking of combos, here is a Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch-Least Chipmunk combo. Of all the avian and mammalian visitors to this Geribirding oasis, rosy-finches are probably the least wary of humans. It warmed my small, shriveled nerd-heart to see these creatures close up once again...so much so that I am going to Colorado this month just to look at Brown-capped Rosy-Finches to keep that rosy flame burning. Well that is not the only reason, but it would be a damn fine year bird, no doubt about that. If I had a dollar for every day I've seen Brown-capped Rosy-Finch, I would have...one dollar.

I would prefer to have two.

Sierra Bravo In The Sierras

The state list is often an important list, when you have been birding for a long time.  After it becomes difficult to get lifers on a regular basis without travelling absurd distances, the birder begins to realize the beauty of pursuing lists other than the all-important List of Life. It is another shot in the arm, a reminder to seek birds besides those that one has never seen. And so, the state list often becomes the second-tier list, a worthy list...even a source of pride for many people (how embarrassing). In many ways, I am no different than the average birder, although I am much better at finding and identifying birds (#7, hello).  I keep a state list.  My state list is very important to me. It's so important that I have seen most birds that regularly occur in the state, which is hella. It's hard to get state birds now, which is why I now squeeze joy out of life by seeing county birds.  I know...how embarrassing...

But county birding is not why we are here...sorry to disappoint you nerds. When I was approached by one Amy Patten to make a quick, two day run to the Eastiern Sierra, I jumped at the chance. The Eastern Sierra is a special place, and I have a long and twisted history with the place known as Lee Vining. I am forced to keep going back, though it typically results in hangovers, and usually much yelling.  And although I'm sure you would like to hear more about the Yelling Club, that is not what I thought of when this opportunity came to be.

I thought of rosy-finches.

Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch has been the low-hanging, visually delicious fruit that I have been eyeing for years now. And by low-hanging, I mean they hang over 9,000 feet for a good piece of the year. In California, rosy-finches do not live where people live, so one must travel far (and wide) to seek them out. It turns out there are exactly two (2) places in the state where you can find a rosy-finch, with great ease, without having to embark on a high-elevation death march...or in my case, more like a wheezing walk that is a grim reminder of how out of shape I am and an all too real glimpse of my own mortality.

So after a night of drinking next to Lee Vining Creek, talking baseball with the Grub, and getting shitty morning coffee in Lee Vinging, it was up to Virginia Lakes for rosy-finching. The rosy-finches were mellow, despite their outward brilliance (look at those hot pink wings!).  Lounging on the deck of the store of the Virginia Lakes Resort, it was just a brief wait before this crippling beast came in for seed gobbling. The proprietors of the resort feed birds with reckless abandon, and a few rosy-finches come down from rocky slopes to gorge themselves on the regular.  The lady behind this operation told us that one in particular waits for her outside the door early every morning "and hovers around like a [goddamn] harrier" before she can even get the seed out, which appeared to be somewhat true...when someone came out on the porch where the seed was, instead of flying away sometimes this bird would just hover a few feet away and wait for the person to go back inside. So if you need an easy rosy-finch and enjoy some good geri birding, head up to Virginia Lakes.

For the first time since the Common Scoter, my state list has grown even more swollen and bloated. Sierra bravo! New Lower 48 bird! Lifer subspecies! Great success!

Rosy-finches weren't the only things taking advantage of the seed bonanza. Cassin's Finches were one of the most common birds there, which I was pretty stoked on. I've never seen so many so close before, and I have now rectified my chronic problem of not crushing Cassin's Finches. The cycle has been broken, and the Cassin's Finch has been crushed.  This is a juvenile, you can still see a few wisps of down on its crown.

Here is a male.  The lighting was kinda gnarly, but I'm pretty happy how geri photo sesh went considering I was baptizing a new lens.

It was really nice to be surrounded by Finches of Cassin, instead of Finches of House for a change. It was also cool to get blasted by a variety of Cassin's Finch vocalizations, since these days I get to hear them even more rarely I get to see them it seems. Getting rust on one's birding by ear skills is not something that I encourage, and I recommend avoiding it at all costs.

Hello White-crowned Sparrow.  But you are not just any White-crowned Sparrow, no...you are not nuttalli, our coastal resident, nor are you of our other relatively common California subspecies, gambelii or pugentensis.  You breed in the Sierras, your bill is pink, and lord have mercy, your lores are black. Black as midnight on a moonless night, if you want to get scientific about it. This is oriantha, a bird of deserts and mountains, a White-crowned Sparrow that thinks making babies at 9,770 feet (the elevation of Virginia Lakes Resort) is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Here is a juvenile oriantha, a life plumage for me. Just look at those broad, dark lores...weird.

Damn, take a gander on the bill length of this White-breasted Nuthatch. It's obscene, and I am still struggling to come to grips with it.  This is a member of the Rocky Mountain subspecies (subspecies group?), which sounds absolutely nothing like WBNU in most of California. They have a very narrow range in the state; on the weekend we had them here at Virginia Lakes and further south in Lee Vining Canyon.

For your edification: beneath all the birdlife was a writhing swarm of jiggling Belding's Ground Squirrels.

A walk around part of Saddlebag Lake was not particularly birdy, but had a major highlight in this Pika. A Pika! I've never seen one in California before, and actually pished this one up. That branch to the right is destined to become part of its larder, but with all the greenery the Pika had scattered around on the rocks it didn't look like it was in a hurry to get organized.

Some birds don't like feeders.  Some birds are hard to geri bird. Green-tailed Towhee is one such bird, and is another species I was happy to add to the old year list over the weekend.  Their mellow songs and mild disdain for people brings back many memories of birding Mount Pinos when I was a kid...when lifers were easy to come by, I misidentified birds more often, and I couldn't fucking drive.

And here is a somehat-unsure-of-itself juvenile/fledgling that was following the above adult around. Like the young White-crowned Sparrow above, this bird won't wear this plumage for very long. This also reminds me of being a teenage birder, but for complicated and mostly embarrassing reasons.

Unlike month-old towhees, lilies are very sure of themselves. This is a Sierra Tiger Lily, growing next to a stream at Virginia Lakes.  It is a small lily, modest in size, but big on facemelt. Thanks botany girls for the ID.

Here's a Mariposa lily, I forget what kind, it real pretty though.  A state rich in Calorchortus is a rich state indeed...not sure if I've seen this one before, it was up at Saddlebag Lake.

I'm not a butterfly nerd, but since some of you are here is some kind of copper to gawk at.

The mighty Clark's Nutcracker can be heard bellowing the pines on distant slopes. It is one of the quintessential sounds of the mountains. These birds are one of the most interesting species (bizarrely accurate recall abilities, ties to whitebark pine, etc)  that reside in high elevations, and thankfully they usually aren't very difficult to find. Oh, my friend Jill saw one swallow a Junco fledgling the other day, so they do that too.

The rarest thing we saw over the weekend was a marriage proposal. That is when I learned that proposing in public with all your friends (there were a bunch more dudes lurking out of the frame) awkwardly watching from extremely close range is a thing now. We were actually geri birding when we saw this...geri birding is so good.

Return To Mount Pinos

Recently my dad and I ditched the lowlands and lurked up into the mountains for a change of pace. I needed a dose of high-elevation species, so we headed up to Mount Pinos, which straddles the Ventura/Kern County line in southern California. I used to bird there quite a bit back in the day, when I couldn't ear bird worth shit and I was much lower than Number 7 in the country. I got a lot of life birds up there.

While Mount Pinos isn't exactly a crowded birding destination, it does top out at close to 9,000 feet. Many high elevation specialties are found, including species (that I've never seen there) like Calliope Hummingbird and Northern Goshawk; not easy birds in Southern California. The Mount Pinos area used to even have Sooty Grouse (now extirpated); this was the southern limit of their historic range. The last wild California Condors were captured here; they have since fared better than the doomed grouse, and a very lucky birder again has the chance to glass one from the mountaintop.

I was really hoping to get my Ventura County Red Crossbills, and agonizingly had a flock fly over just a few hundred feet from the county line. Life is pain. It was a good day though; birds were pretty much everywhere we went and the year birds were easy to find.

My proximity to this Olive-sided Flycatcher was too much to bear. It was not in good light, and it was sitting on a dumb Forest Service sign, but my camera was smoking by the time I finished rendering the poor bird two-dimensional. This is the one and only kind of its species that I've seen over the years that seemed accustomed to people.

I love the primary extension. This otherwise chunky bird is built to fly far...and decimate large insects.

Ah, the Thick-billed Fox Sparrow. For years, it has been rumored that Fox Sparrows would be split into multiple species, but I think the lines between them appear to be too muddled to do so in any simple way. The form of Fox Sparrow that breeds on Mount Pinos and the rest of southern California is P.i. stephensi.

Fox Sparrows are gifted singers, one of the best birds to hear in the high clearings and edges of mountain meadows. They trigger a flood of nostalgia juices whenever I hear their rich songs; it's a sound that stays with you through the years.

Thick-billed Fox Sparrow is actually comprised of multiple subspecies. They are the most range-restricted group of Fox Sparrows, essentially being confined to Oregon, California and northern Baja California. Thick-billeds are the only breeding type in most of California, although Slate-coloreds do breed in a small part of Inyo County.

There is no bird quite like a Clark's Nutcracker. Their grating shrieks are a welcome sound in the hallowed high-elevation coniferous forest. Even the pine trees themselves love the nutcrackers.

Clark's Nutcrackers are reliable at Mount Pinos in small numbers. In spring and summer they typically stay near the top of the mountain, above Iris Meadow. In fall and winter they can be lower, but I think birders are generally too damn lazy to go up the mountain when its cold.

Aside from being charismatic and noisy, nutcrackers are prodigious seed cachers, specializing in Whitebark Pine. An individual nutcracker will cache tens of thousands of Whitebark Pine seeds every year, and have demonstrated the ability to remember exactly where seeds have been stored for up to 9 months. Not only is this an amazing feat in and of itself, but the big picture is that Whitebark Pine seeds only germinate when removed from the cone by Clark's Nutcrackers and cached in the soil. The two species have evolved together and are almost completely dependent on one other for survival. Pretty cool I reckon.

Look at this anonymously-garbed bastard. You know what it is...right? Right? I like how the pine needles in the background give the bird a kind of luminescent, deityish look.

The last thing I expected to find above treeline was a vast shrubscape littered with unkempt, recently-fledged Sage Sparrows. I have never seen so many Sage Sparrows. They were everywhere, outnumbering the Green-tailed Towhees, the Chipping Sparrows, the Dark-eyed Juncos, the Cassin's Finches, the Clark's Nutcrackers. Nary an adult was to be seen...what a bizarre phenomenon.

Sage Sparrow is the only sparrow that sprints across openings with it's tail held high in the air. Why they evolved this highly-entertaining habit is anybody's guess.