Woods Lake and Carson Pass: A High Elevation Megapost

You know, I've done so little blogging this year that I could really blog about anything at this point, there's a lot to work with...I've been seeing some nice rarities this fall, clobbering county birds (my Santa Clara list will soon surpass my San Francisco list, which I know you don't care about in the slightest but is crazy to me), maintaining yard vigilance (Foxtrot Oscar Foxtrot Fox Sparrow for the yard this morning) and planting native goodness, and I finally watched Pelican Blood, probably the most interesting movie involving birding that I've seen...although despite ample drug use it did not surpass the amount of cocaine consumed in Rare Bird.

I could make fun of birders, which is always necessary and something readers love.

Those topics will have to wait though. I'm going to go with covering a trip I took to the Sierra Nevada this summer. It wasn't a full on birding trip but the avian haul was high grade. The original plan was to go back to Mono County with the fam, see some east side spots and hang out with The Grub, but the massive Ferguson fire was in full effect and the area was effectively smoked out. Considering we were bringing a toddler with us, that didn't sound so great (we will try again next year Grub) so I scrambled to find another area that would make for a good camping trip that both didn't need reservations and wasn't being besieged by smoke from wildfires. With the help of eBird (specifically looking at Pine Grosbeak observations), some web browsing and hitting up people on Foxtrot Bravo I settled on the Carson Pass area, camping at Woods Lake in Alpine County, an area I was totally unfamiliar with.

It worked out really well - some smoke moved in and out of the area each day but the air was leaps and bounds cleaner than the garbage air we drove through to get there, and there were even campsites available. Billy was pleased with the choice, and Annie was confused but eventually became pleased as well. Yet again #7 proved himself a master birding tactician, and great at family planning as well (get it???).

Let's jump into the birding. As expected at the beginning of August, some areas in the high country held numerous neotropical migrants staging for the long haul south, or already on their way. Wilson's Warblers (top and above) were one of the more common species. This one here has almost no black in the crown whatsoever, which I don't see often with this species.

There were Yellow-rumped Warblers galore, common breeders in the area. It's always a jolt to go from months of no Yellow-rumps to being back in the thick of them again, in a completely different habitat than where you see them the rest of the year. Many of the adult birds we encountered, Yellow-rumped and otherwise, were really haggard looking.

Lots of adult Yellow-rumps were toting around loud, begging juveniles like this one.

Fox Sparrows were not as numerous as I thought they would be but this one teed up nicely in response to my mediocre pishing. This is the thick-billed subspecies.

The nesting oriantha White-crowned Sparrows up there have black lores and reddish bills, and hold it down in mountain meadows. Stylish and bucolic.

A major target bird for me was Williamson's Sapsucker, because they are fantastic and I don't get to see them very often. As you can see, great success! I like sapsuckers and this is the best sapsucker. I'm glad I don't have to relive the time in my life when I had yet to see one, what with the constant gnashing of teeth and painful spasms that afflicted me, as well as most people who have yet to see this poignant species.

On the trail to Winnemucca Lake (from Carson Pass) I found this Empidonax, which I thought was a bright/fresh Gray at the time but looking at photos afterward I think is more likely a bright/fresh Dusky. The bill length, eyering, and head shape (in the first photo) all look better for Dusky to me, but opinions are welcome.

This trail was all very legit and scenic and flowery, but the trail got super crowded later in the morning. Do check it out but hit the trail early or later in the day if you go during summer.

One afternoon we drove down to Kirkwood Lake to check it out. Just off the highway, Billy spotted a pair of Sooty Grouse! Sooty Grouse is a bird that I have not encountered in a long time...a long time. It had been over a decade since I've seen one, which is far too long to go without seeing this splendid grouse. This is the first time I've seen them in the Sierras.

Even though they were just lurking on the shoulder of the road, I am absolutely sure I would not have noticed them Billy not called them out. So much for #7...anyhow, I was stoked to reconnect with these finely patterned friends. While they can't really be considered rare in most of their range in California, they are exceptionally unreliable in most areas. Even booming grouse are notoriously hard to spot. You don't find Sooty Grouse, Sooty Grouse finds you, and usually while you are in a car and unprepared.

As I mentioned, I wanted to find Pine Grosbeaks. Not just because I had a craving for Pine Grosbeak, but because it was my last "easy" bird I needed for the precious California list. After many years of waiting the bird gods had mercy on me, and I saw them over and over again on this trip. I saw them down by Woods Lake, in the Woods Lake campground, on the Woods Lake entrance road, and near the trailhead by Carson Pass. It was brilliant. The first one we saw flopped down to the ground a few feet away from us while we were standing next to a bathroom at the campground.

After that I made sure to take my crusher whenever I went to the bathroom, which ended up working perfectly when I found this confiding male cruising around on the ground. I've read that they are approachable and now I know it to be true. Few state birds have been so welcoming and affable, and their hospitality made me forget, however briefly, that life is pain.

The final Pine Grosbeak encounter featured a family group - here is one of the fresh juveniles.

Here is mom Pine Grosbeak stuffing it full of something while it flaps crazily.

Mom Pine Grosbeak is a lot more worn looking than her grosbeak child, with a more richly colored head.

Wow! Talk about getting the complete Pine Grosbeak experience. Things may never be the same...

Now that we covered the birds well, lets check out some small stuff. For example, this fly is small. And super hairy.

Looking at a plant book, I'm guessing the super hairy fly is on mountain-pennyroyal, but rest assured I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to plant ID.

Ranger's buttons were an abundant and becoming wildlflower. The pollinators also found them very becoming.

Ooooh waspy thing just shoving its face shamelessly into an inflorescence.

I know next to nothing about butterflies, but I do like them. Here is a pleasant small thing.

Another pleasant small thing.

Little elephant's head was a lifer flower. These were growing on the south side of Woods Lake.

These monkeyflowers looked happy about something. A little too happy if you ask me.

While there are a seemingly endless supply of smug looking yellow monkeyflowers out here in the west, I'm pretty sure this huge flashy lavender one was new for me. They probably aren't uncommon or anything (though we only saw a few, at one stream crossing) but they left an impression on me. I reckon this is Lewis's monkeyflower, or at least something very similar.

I don't reckon what this is whatsoever. No reckoning to be found here, just total ignorance. Found a tiny patch of whatever the hell this is on the south side of Woods Lake as well.

I think this is an alpine lily? Small blossoms, short petals, hella high elevation. A high quality wildflower.

Before I forget, yes Woods Lake was great; this epic rockslide is visible from the south side of the lake. Thanks everyone who recommended it. Good birding, easy Pine Grosbeaks, lots of trails, lots to explore nearby, heckof scenic, many wildflowers on the west and south sides of the lake. Mosquitoes were no problem either, though I can see that situation being different earlier in the summer....oh and there were a lot of different bats too, at least a couple kinds, including some big ones that were larger than hoary but smaller than Townsend's big-eared...pallid bats perhaps? Anyways really good batting and stargazing, which would have been even better had I not forgotten to bring bourbon....STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID.

Speaking of stupid, we had some total wankers camping next to us the entire time (hella loud, and I got to hear about how one of the kids thought the earth was flat because Kyrie Irving said so...at least the other loud kids thought he was crazy). That said on the last night I figured out they weren't that bad compared to the total nightmare camping apocalypse situation going on at a campsite further away, which I think would have driven me to do terrible things if I were unlucky enough to camp next to their "party", if it could be called that.

On the way to Meiss Meadows, a known wildflower mecca, we found these pinedrops, which apparently get their nutrients from fungi associated with the roost systems of plants. We were a little late for the peak wildflower scene this year (we were there the first week of August) but there was still a lot blooming. We probably could have found more in the way of wildflowers at Meiss but Annie was feeling the elevation so we didn't loiter for as long as we could have - the birding by that little pond was good though, featuring my first Wood Duck above treeline.

Good times and good views from up at Meiss, though the encroaching smoke didn't help.

My happy campers. Annie looks very impressed by it all.

Phew. I'm not sure if I've ever put this many photos in one post before, might be a BB&B first. Thanks for sticking with me, see you soon nerds.

Manuela The Mandarin, Stowed Sparrows, Winter Gulling

Damn...no more Mexico posts...I guess I could finish off posting about the Costa Rica trip, but that would be too, um, prudent. I think I'll get caught up on winter birding instead.

After Mexico, Don Francisco and I birded for a few days around the bay, racking up year birds left and right. Don Francisco found this Greater White-fronted Goose at Golden Gate Park, which is always a nice bird to see in San Francisco. If Don Francisco ever finds a bird rare enough, I'm just going to start calling him San Francisco, which will thoroughly confuse everyone.

Golden-crowned Sparrows are supremely crushable at Stow Lake, and this bird got smashed pretty badly. I think I might have hurt it.

Fox Sparrows are usually not as confiding as crowned sparrows and are more interesting to look at, so I could not help but steal the (apparently grainy) soul of this bird.

This is a Sooty Fox Sparrow, the common form in northern California. Will the large and confusing pile of subspecies that comprise Fox Sparrow ever get split? I'm going to go on record here with a "no".

I will even take junco pictures still. I am a man of all birds.

See...I will even photograph a non-countable exotic! How embarrassing! How low can you go? I'm really scraping the bottom of the birding barrel here. Anyways, this is the same Mandarin Duck that has been at Stow Lake for over a year now. She still occasionally gets identified as a Wood Duck...but hey, there are worse mistakes one can make. She is not as popular as "Manny The Mandarin" and does not have her own Facebook page, which upsets her, but the world of birding is better for it.

If a Great Egret wants to sit a few feet away for a quick crush sesh, then I will oblige it. They're still pretty impressive birds to be up close to.

After dropping off Don Francisco, I went back out to the Richmond herring run to see if I could hang out with the Slaty-backed Gull some more. As expected, there were many Mew (left) and Thayer's (right) Gulls gorging themselves on herring roe.

This first-cycle Thayer's was a good-looking bird, already acquiring a lot of pink in the bill.

I refound the young Glaucous X Glaucous-winged Gull that we had seen earlier in the week. Not a bad looking bird for a hybrid gull.

The best find of the day was this adult Glaucous-winged X Glaucous Gull...just look at all the white on the primary tips....frosty! I had never seen an adult of this hybrid before, so I had some mild stoke going with this bird. Come to think of it, I've still never seen an adult Glaucous Gull...its a sad state of affairs.

Compare the hybrid's primary pattern with the Glaucous-winged Gull's primaries conveniently poking out from the left side of the frame.

Glaucous-winged X Glaucous Gull with a typical Glaucous-winged Gull below. I assume adult GWGU X GLGU primarily winter north of California, which is definitely how GLGU arrange themselves.

It's not unusual to find banded Western Gulls in the bay area, as they have been banded on the Farallon Islands for many years.

This Western Gull, silver-winged, leucistic Western Gull was a cool bird to see, and possibly the best Western Gull I've ever laid eyes on.

It's not unusual to see thousands of Mew Gulls at herring runs. Patches of the bay can be open, uninhabited water one minute and a seething froth of Mew Gulls the next.

I did not get to do as much gulling last winter as planned, and my multiple-year streak of not seeing any Glaucous Gulls continues. I'll miss these vulgar displays of Larus, but not being confronted with numerous birds (often at once) that are better left unidentified. No point in stringing, is there?

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.