Adventures In Geri Birding

I was once what they call a "young birder"...but no longer. I may still be younger than the average birder - much younger - but I can't identify with being a young birder anymore, or even just young. As my youth and vitality slowly drain from my body and mind, leaving aches and pains and codgery notions and inclinations in their wake, I am reminded more and more each year that middle age has crested the distant horizon and is quickly coming for me.

The past few years have bore all the signs of being left by the wayside of youth. I have worked the same job for over five years. There has been less travel...less socializing...finding a new band to embrace has become a huge challenge...and whether I care or not, I am really losing track of what is, or is supposed to be, remotely cool. Of course, there are more responsibilities too, even a child!

Are you there, Perpetual Weekend? It's me, Steve.

But there are benefits to being 37 and not 27. Like I am hungover way less, I'm not broke, I drink better bourbon, 5MR birding exists now, I'm a little wiser, and with Annie here with us I am never, ever bored. But one benefit that I am now reaping every day at this age is GERI BIRDING.

Yes, geri birding. Although some people scoff at geri birding, I have always reveled in it. Really, the main downside (which can also be an upside, depending on your sense of humor or appreciation of irony) of geri birding is that you are often forced to do it in a confined space with other birders, and you have to overhear their conversations or unwillingly get sucked into them. Something that has always stuck in my mind (I think it was from some standup comedy bit) for years now is that almost every random snippet of conversation you overhear from strangers ends up sounding completely idiotic. I have found that anecdote to be unnervingly accurate - most conversations I overhear sound somewhere between incredibly boring, trite, recycled, or utterly moronic, and that percentile is no different when you gather a bunch of birders together at some feeders...in fact, it is probably worse, and all but impossible to tune out. Satre said "Hell is other people!" and that is hard to argue with if you spend enough time geri birding where other birders congregate. You are going to hear some excruciatingly vapid exchanges, people who live to hear themselves talk, incorrect scientific and bird facts, abhorrent misidentifications...often, all at the same time!

But geri birding is not just something you only do in southeast Arizona or at some rainforest lodge, there are geri birding opportunities almost anywhere...if you build it, they will come. In the sanctuary of your own yard, you don't have to deal with all of those, well, geris. Although I definitely miss going to cool places for field jobs, I have found in my increasingly middling age that having a yard to bird from is pretty great. Yes, Rancho de Bastardos happens to be situated in a uniquely awesome location for yard birding purposes (the ponds behind my fence really ups my yardbirding game), but the feeders and garden bring a lot of species in too, often just as many species or more than the ponds. Geri birding is what you make it, and I'd like to focus on that aspect for most of this post. So in that spirit, here are some anecdotes and lessons I have learned over the last couple years, since I got serious about geri birding in my own yard.

Many geri birders welcome back a host of migratory species to their feeders in spring and summer - that is unfortunately not the case at my house, but one obvious migrant species we get for about 5 months a year are Hooded Orioles, which nest in various neighborhood palms. I always put out this leaky, hard to clean hummingbird feeder for them because they can actually nectar from it - the ports in our other feeders are too small. I did try putting up orange wedges at one point, but the rats got to them...maybe I'll spring for an actual oriole feeder before next year. The adult males are super skittish for some reason so I'm still waiting for the crush of a lifetime, but the females and HY birds are a bit more confiding.

I'm still trying to figure out the deal with hummingbirds at my house. So far, it does not seem like hanging up a grip of hummingbird feeders is actually going to attract more hummingbirds than a couple feeders, though I'm tempted to try it - I think they would still be dominated by one or two super territorial Anna's. My current hypothesis is that the Rancho is not located on a major hummingbird flyway and/or lacks an adjacent area that draws in large numbers of them (i.e. a park with a lot of blooming plants/eucalyptus, for example). Perhaps one day, at a future Rancho de Bastardos, I will bring in swarms of them.

Before I embarked on this voyage that we call geri birding, I would have raised an eyebrow if you told me that Bewick's Wren was a frequent denizen of feeders. I also didn't think of them as being terribly confiding for a wren. But my yard wrens have shown me that it was I who was mistaken...about a great many things. Bewick's Wrens are fearless and cannot say no to either suet or seed....huh! Geri birding...easy, fulfilling, and educational!

This year I finally put up a suet feeder. I waited a long time to do this. For some reason, I just assumed that it wouldn't really get put to use by the local yardbirds...I was wrong again. The suet feeder is MAGIC. I haven't lured in anything rare with it, but it just gets absolutely hammered by the yard birds. The wrens love it. The chickadees love it. The titmice love it. The nuthatches love it.

The nuthatches. White-breasted Nuthatch was a yard rarity the first year we were here. Now? The yard is straight nuthatch-mania. As Frank might say if he were here, "nuthatches galore!"

It has been interesting to see what locally common species have "found" the yard as time has gone on. The first year here, White-breasted Nuthatch and Spotted Towhee only came in to the yard once or twice. Now nuthatches are one of the most reliable visitors, and I counted three different Spotted Towhees this morning. Of course, birds do different things year to year...this year, though they could care less about what is happening in my yard, Vaux's Swifts have been much more uncommon overhead than 2017 and 2018.

Yup, as easy as geri birding can be, it's not quite as easy to do everything you can to maximize the geri birding potential of you own yard. Reaching maximum geri birding potential is not as easy as you might think, especially if you are working with a modest budget. Having the correct feeders up (and the correct feed to offer) can make all the difference, as mentioned above with the oriole-accommodating hummingbird feeder and the suet feeder. In fact, just last week I went from a very small tray-style feeder to something much larger, figuring birds will find something roomier more inviting. The result? Within a week of trading feeders, my high count of Black-headed Grosbeak in the yard went from 1 to 3...and all three were seen on the feeder together! Not bad for a yard in suburban tract housing with no native trees.

Everybody knows that birds love bird baths. I was dead set (unnecessarily) on getting something that I could put on the ground, which turned out to be a little more challenging than I thought it would be. I settled on this rocky looking basin thing, which could be purchased without the accompanying standard bird bath pedestal. I wish it was a bit bigger but it performs well, along with a bubbling rock thingy (fake rock with a small pump inside) to add some movement to the water. It gets hella use, though mostly from birds that are towhee-sized or smaller. Lincoln's Sparrow likes it.

One day, when I am a homeowner, I will build the water feature to end all water features. Birds will be falling out of the sky to use it. Well, maybe not, but it will be a couple of steps up from the current situation, and it will be situated to maximize crushing opportunities, which is currently not really possible with our small yard combined with less-than-ideal lighting conditions. Having a south-facing house is a positive thing in many circles but from a birding or photography perspective, it sucks. Why would you want to maximize the amount of time spent looking into the sun? Ugly, ugly light.

Right. The water feature of my geri birding fantasies may one day become the bane of my existence, but I look forward to the challenge and subsequent avian rewards (cough VAGRANTS cough cough).

Hey, is this the first Rock Pigeon I've ever posted? Only took almost a thousand posts! But this isn't just any old pigeon...its someone's homing/racing pigeon! What are the chances we would be visited by a pigeon of such honor? Such calibre? It stayed around the house a few days before resuming its voyage home. In that vein of weirdness, we've also had two different Budgerigars at Rancho de Bastardos, and just recently there was a mysterious, tiny blue dove with a short tail in the yard very briefly...the brain paralysis that thing induced was swift and total. I still don't know what the hell that was but am confident it was an escapee.

Crushing opportunities must be maximized, even when having to deal with harsh lighting much of the time. When it comes to geri birding, any zealous bird photographer will tell you it is all about fake perches. Fake, as in natural looking perches set up in artificial situations...talk about keeping it real. I don't really obsess over this sort of thing (as I've said a hundred times, I'm not a photographer, I just take pictures) but I will readily admit that a picture of a bird on a stick usually looks better than a bird on a feeder. So, to facilitate crushing, I've got several sticks ziptied to things around the yard, and I think the birds appreciate the additional spots to wait their turn if a feeder is filled with a pile of doves or Band-tailed Pigeons. The Chestnut-backed Chickadees here readily use these perches and now only have a modicum of fear of me (I often reach to refill a feeder and am surprised to find a chickadee still sitting on it, only a couple feet away) so make ideal photo targets, although they don't exactly sit still much. They are also the best looking chickadee of them all, so might as well go to town.

I currently have this perch up. It's an interesting one, I'm not sure what to think of it. It's kinda too girthy to be real popular for songbirds to perch on it very much, but I had Accipiters in mind when I put it up. This Cooper's Hawk made my vision complete. It's nice to have raptors in our little yard pretty often, though the Mourning Doves don't agree. The perch manipulation is also a fun experiment just from a behavior perspective...it's interesting to see how a perch is almost completely ignored in one spot, but moved a couple feet over gets used 3 or 4 times as much by birds wanting a good waiting spot before landing on a feeder.

Although I always knew in my heart of hearts that I would be a geri birder someday, I didn't quite realize how much gardening that would entail, or that I would kind of like gardening. The gardening aspect really makes gerifying your yard feel even more geriatric than just hanging up a bunch of feeders. Since we are renting and will never buy the home we are in, we haven't planted any trees, but it is tempting! Instead, we've most planted shrubs; a lot of sages, native and otherwise. The hummingbirds love many of them but I'm still waiting to see them get a ton of use by other birds, though I suspect once they mature more they will at least provide good cover. This is another geriatric activity I can see myself getting really into someday...gardening with native plants and landscaping. How embarrasing, can't believe I just admitted that.

Just dump me in a grave already.

I have to say though, it is a few of the *nonnative* trees in/just outside the yard that seem to bring in a lot of birds. Birds love our random backyard juniper and the Peruvian pepper trees (Schinus molle) just outside our yard. Pepper trees are notorious in California for being sapsucker magnets , and I owe my yard list's Red-breasted Sapsuckers entirely to a neighbor's pepper tree. But a lot of other species are drawn to them as well, including a number of neotropical migrants, and even Western Screech-Owl, which spent one very vocal night in said pepper tree.

Of course, if you are going to put food and water out, you are going to attract some unwanted visitors. These can range from Brown-headed Cowbirds (above) to cats to rodents (native and otherwise) to bears, depending on where you live. Here at Rancho de Bastardos, we have to contend with native and nonnative squirrels, the occasional cat, Norway rats, House Sparrows and cowbirds.

I hate the rats. I hate the cowbirds.

The cats are infrequent enough that chasing them off by yelling with a hose in hand like a senile old man seems to deter them most of the time. Rats and squirrels have to contend with a squirrel proof feeder and a squirrel baffle for another feeder - incredibly, both of those deterrents work perfectly. The presence of House Sparrows and cowbirds have motivated me to experiment with seed mixes: black oil sunflower and safflower go in the feeders, smaller seeds get sprinkled on the ground. For whatever reason, this has worked pretty well and the feeders don't get overrun by the House Sparrows, though the cowbirds have grown fond of the feeders lately...a source of much brow-furrowing and hand-wringing.

But enough about shitbirds...I will leave you with my greatest geri birding accomplishment to date. The hands-down highlight of geri birding here in the last couple of years came in June, and I can safely say it had nothing to do with all of the plants we've planted, or the feeders, or really anything else going on in the yard. I had been out grocery shopping and was bringing bags of groceries in...without binoculars, of course...when I glanced up at the power lines behind the house. There sat a passerine facing me with a black head, white throat and white breast. For an instant I thought it was odd that a Tree Swallow was sitting there, that isn't normal, but then I saw the Mourning Dove next to it and realized the bird was much bigger than a Tree Swallow, and there was only one thing it could possibly be...a VAGUE RUNT EASTERN KINGBIRD!!! Almost as soon as this dawned on me, the kingbird took flight, flew overhead and disappeared far to the west...I assumed it would never be seen again.

I was astounded. Not only is Eastern Kingbird a very good rarity in the state, it was particularly good for Santa Clara County, where no one had seen one in many years. And this bird was sitting above my yard!

Miraculously, Billy refound the bird later in the day while looking out Annabelle's window, foraging from the neighbor's pepper tree. I got some acceptable photos and a few local birders were able to see it from a nearby public path. Pretty sick that one of my best self found county vagues came in my own yard...a geri birder's dream come true! For one day, I got to live my best geri birding life.

So there you have it, the comprehensive geri birding update from Rancho de Bastardos. The yard list currently stands at 138 species after being here for less than two and a half years, with the most recent additions being an "overdue" Bullock's Oriole and a true gift from the geri birding gods in the form of a flock of Western Sandpipers. May the lords of geri birding continue to smile upon me, and you.

A Summer Dispatch from Rancho de Bastardos and the Five Mile Radius

I lied. The newest BB&B post will not be about Texas...how about we change it up? What about the local birding? What is the good word? How are things going at Rancho de Bastardos? What of the Five Mile Radius (5MR)? As everyone knows, you can't be a birding darling without birding locally!

Well we renewed our lease of Rancho de Bastardos, so will be holding it down at least until next spring. The current Rancho list stands at 122, with 6 new species so far this year: Lesser Scaup (expected), Phainopepla (very unexpected), Purple Finch (expected), Red-breasted Merganser (quite unexpected), Rufous Hummingbird (not necessarily expected), and Orange-crowned Warbler (long expected). A hoped-for-but-unsurprising Snow Goose showed up right at the end of 2017, found by my dad who was visiting from out of town (above).

Getting new yard birds this year has been a major pain, and I suspect I won't be getting another until August or September...the potential for new birds before then is really low, especially if the ponds behind the house remain too full to be attractive to shorebirds...but if shorebird habitat was actually allowed to develop, there are a whole bunch of new birds that could potentially drop in. Same old story...the impossibilities are truly endless. A crippling drake Wood Duck hung out right behind our back fence for a morning earlier in the month, which was a life-affirming (if not life-changing) summer surprise and a new one for the 2018 Rancho list. Speaking of which, the 2018 Rancho list is at a solid 104, and with a little luck I think 120 can be reached by the end of the year.

This seemed like a good spring for migrant hummingbirds in the county (namely Rufous and Calliope), and multiple Selasphorus made visits to the feeders at Rancho de Bastardos in the spring. All the males seen well enough to ID were Rufous (above), though several females and an immature male or two could not be identified to species. I'll be on the lookout for Allen's Hummingbird next spring, a prime candidate for the yard list.

The putative White-throated x White-crowned Sparrow hybrid ended up hanging out for several weeks in April. Here is a head-on shot that shows the crown pattern pretty well, which is a closer match to White-throated but doesn't perfectly match either species.

Compare it to this White-crowned (presumably pugetensis). All of the Rancho's Zonotrichia migrated north while I was in Texas in late April, not a single bird remained by the time I got home. I guess they had an exit plan.

In other bastard news, Annabelle can now identify Mallards ("duck"), Canada geese ("gee"), Mourning Doves ("duhv") and California ground-squirrels ("wheeo"). She even made a rudimentary song about the squirrels...it goes "Whee-oh, Whee-oh, Whee-oh, Whee-oh." Fully legit. She also peed on my binocular strap and on my camera case the other day, which is not a problem I've dealt with previously.

My 5MR list has matured nicely this year as well, and has climbed to a modest 156, surpassing my previous 5MR based in Albany. Many (most?) of you have higher 5MR lists, but I am pleased with how mine is progressing, nay burgeoning...I've already added 19 species to it in 2018. Let's hear it for local birding! This is about 65% of my entire Santa Clara County list, which I think is a nice ratio and reflective of what the 5MR has to offer relative of the general area.

If only eBird could whip up a quick target list for my 5MR...

They are an abundant bird in the bay area and they are in my yard every day, but since I grew up in a chickadee-depauperate part of the state they still hold some novelty for me. This Chestnut-backed Chickadee was photographed on the Los Alamitos Creek trail in San Jose, in the 5MR of course.

On the same trail on another day, I came across a Turkey Vulture feeding on a deer carcass (note the ribcage in the upper right). This generally isn't blogworthy, especially considering the rubbish quality of the photo, but this section of trail wasn't next to a road (it's actually separated from area roads by a tall fence) and the trail was saturated with warnings of mountain lion sightings. I think this deer wasn't taken down by a Jaguar, but by a mountain lion, know what I'm saying? Eh? Eh?

The southern half of my 5MR is absolutely brimming with Acorn Woodpeckers. It is the cradle of Acorn Woodpecker civilization as far as I know. This is the sort of bird that you want around in great abundance, especially when they aren't wary of people. Photographed at Guadalupe Oaks County Park.

While we are on the hot topic of 5MRs and the perpetually hot eBird, I have a proposal to make. Those of you who have an ear open for you at eBird Central Command (or are a part of Central Command) should tell them to embrace the 5MR. I know almost half of you who read this are eBird reviewers, so we have a nice, potentially powerful little lobby here. The 5MR encourages local birding, it encourages birding lightly-covered (or uncovered) areas (a major goal for eBird), and it encourages eBird use (an even greater goal for eBird). If a 5MR tool is added to patch lists, 5MRs will become the shining jewel of that feature. So eBird, go ahead and do a quick interview with everyone's favorite famous post-Oregon birder Flycatcher Jen, add a 5MR feature, and let it rip! Many birders will chill back on their excessive checking of Top 100 state and county lists, and be all about comparing the Top 100 5MRs in their states and counties instead. This will really level the playing field for those who are interested in comparing patch lists, considering that many users (including reviewers...wtf) have bullshit patches that are hundreds of square miles.  Anyhow, do us all a favor and let eBird know...if they actually had some interest in this idea, things may never be the same.

I'll close this post out with series of Great Egret vs. gopher shots from the Los Alamitos Creek Trail, part of my 5MR I've been birding on the reg. It's a nice zone and has some Vague (not vague) potential, unfortunately it starts getting real crowded by mid-morning...but when you live in a city with over a million people, what do you expect? Gross...

Surprisingly, the gopher ate the egret in the end.

Jk the egret won, gopher-egret matches are always fixed. I'm glad I don't have to worry about being impaled by giant birds, just stuff like cholesterol. More from Texas in the next post, for reals.

Word is bond.

The Coast Is Alive With The Sound of Vague Runts

September went by very, very quickly...I have much catching up to do. September is generally considered the best month of the year to be birding in California...seabirds, shorebirds, and passerines are barging through the state in huge numbers (by West Coast standards) and the potential for finding a rarity is as high as it can get. Not that October is any slouch...it can be just as good, if not better...the main problem this month is that you have to battle the Yellow-rumped Warblers. This week rarity fever has been particularly acute...after Sunday passed, day after day has been absolutely perfect for putting down Vague Runts on the coast, and I've been stuck in the office like a chump...the Perpetual Weekend looms large, in memory. Birders at Point Reyes and Bodega Bay have been getting rewarded every day with the overcast skies and south winds...the patches are just clogged with rare right now. No Yellow-green Vireos for me this week (three have been found in the greater bay area in the last few days, two photographed...fuck), but fall is not over yet.

This fall was a good one for Baird's Sandpipers, it seemed like they were getting reported a lot more than in most years. Seeing them in California always feels like a mild victory, though they aren't quite unusual enough to be a true rarity. Frank's Dump, Hayward, CA.

Lesser Yellowlegs bring the mellow compared to their louder, larger relatives. We get good numbers of them at Coyote Hills (where this bird was), but they are pretty local throughout the bay area.

In early September I moved from Oakland to Albany, to move in with Billy so we can raise the shit out of this baby that is on its way. Albany (on the north side of Berkeley) is a tiny city that is little-known outside of having Golden Gate Fields and the Albany Bulb, so tiny that most people who don't live here don't even have an opinion about it...and we in the bay have a lot of opinions. Anyways, my last morning in Oakland I thought I should bird my patch one last time before I had to start a new one. Middle Harbor Shoreline Park has never rewarded me with anything really juicy (an extremely late fall migrant Common Tern was my best bird to date), but I always though the place had a lot of potential for waterbirds. As expected for early fall, a horde of loud Elegant Terns were loafing on the mudflats. A throng of birders, presumably an Audubon group, was also there; when they moved past me without mentioning any birds of interest I presumed that it would be another typical visit. I was wrong.

Within minutes of the group finishing their trip and leaving, I found a no-doubt BAR-TAILED GODWIT not far away on a mudflat. I couldn't believe it...finally a rarity here...and not only a self-found vague runt, the best bird I'd found in a few years!

Unlike the godwit I had seen at Bolinas just a few weeks before, this bird was quite close. I walked out to the end of a breakwater and hoped the sleeping would come in closer as the tide came up, which worked out brilliantly. I was quite chuffed.

I was out there for a while, and eventually the birds accepted I wasn't a threat and went about their business. Great looks at this quality rarity, this quality SIBE. Now, I'm not a big proponent of the One Bird Theory, but with the help of Peter Pyle I was able to compare photos of this bird, the Bolinas bird, and the Don Edwards bird, all of which had been seen within weeks of each other in three different counties. Personally, I feel there is a strong probability that this bird and the Bolinas bird were one in the same, while the Don Edwards bird was another individual.

Luckily, the bird stuck around a few more days and was relished by a great many birders; I'm only aware of one or two other records for Alameda County, and people were stoked. I guess I can't call it quits on this patch after all.

Now that we got this rarity out of the way, we can go back to robin-stroking. We take them for granted here, but there is nothing not to like about Chestnut-backed Chickadees. They are one of a handful of our native passerines that have adapted well to urbanization, and their flocks often lure in various migrants that will join up. Lake Merced, San Francisco, CA.

When I talk about robin-stroking, I'm serious. Young American Robins are rather interesting early in the fall. Don't deny it. East Wash, San Francisco, CA.

Chickadees and robins are well and good (what would we do without them?), but those are not birds you want to devote a lot of energy to in September. Gray Flycatcher, on the other hand, is one of those birds. Westerns and Willows are the only expected Empids on the coast any time of year; anything else from that genus is a very solid bird. Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA.

I love getting county birds in San Francisco, even though I haven't lived there for a few years now. I also love seeing birds out of range, even though Gray Flycatchers breed about 4 hours east of here in Mono County. A life of seeking rarities will do that to you. Hopefully this individual continued south along the coast, and wasn't so turned around that it thought the best migratory route it should take was southwest over the Pacific. That's not how I would have done it.

Wild Turkeys drink bourbon, not sure what it was doing here. Coyote Hills Regional Park, Fremont, CA.

San Francisco Runts and Grunts

Fall is slipping away, my fiends and friends. Where has it gone? Though gulls (goddammit), raptors and fowl of water will still be pouring in for the next few weeks, most my grunts have passed us by, bound for Central and South America. Gone are the days where I can head out to Point Reyes and expect to see a warbler rarer than the dreaded-but-still-appreciated Palm Warbler. Nor can I sort through a flock of peeps, grinding my teeth in anticipation of a stint to pop out. No...those days have passed, and we are hurtling toward winter faster than we would like to admit. Before we know it we will be donning our armor and diving into hectic internet battles, trying to diffuse bombs...meaning convincing people that a certain bird is just a damn Herring Gull, not a backcross Yellow-legged X Iceland or some similar nonsense. Gulls...they are coming...will you be ready this winter?

The sudden passing of fall is particularly sad for me in Y2K15, as I've had the pleasure of nabbing a couple of lifers, a state bird, and a healthy number of rarities as birds are heading south. September was almost a dud until the last week of the month, but the momentum of rarities was strong for quite a while, and October was seemingly raging with Vague Runts. I would have seen more of them if I was still living The Perpetual Weekend (White Wagtail immediately comes to mind)...but alas, I am not.

Here are some assorted runts and grunts from San Francisco earlier in the fall. Some are rare, some are typical, but they are all Good Birds.

I had just seen the Painted Bunting in Golden Gate Park, and was walking around in a euphoric, blissed-out state...but the sky was overcast, and it was the end of September for Christ's sake, and I would be an idiot to not keep birding...so it was off to North Lake, which seemingly always has migrants, and has the added bonus of being popular with Western Tanagers. Why does that matter? Because I've never seen a Scarlet Tanager in the state, and North Lake seems like a perfectly reasonable place to find one. So I lurked around, looking through migrants, when I met this bird. At first, I had only a head-on view, seeing a short bill, gray wings contrasting against a yellow breast...could this be the bird? But quickly the bird turned and showed a decidedly reddish tail, and Scarlet Tanager was quickly shot down.

It was a bizarre bird, a female-type Summer Tanager, but decidedly duller than any one I (or most birders, for that matter) have ever seen. So, not the tanager I was looking for, but a satisfying self-found rarity nonetheless. Though it was too dark for crushing, it sat out in the open for quite some time, dismantling this yellowjacket. I seem to recall the last Summer Tanager I saw in SF was also feasting on meat bees.

As hoped, there were obscene numbers of Western Tanagers at North Lake that morning, so it made sense that something different was lurking in their midst.

I thought this shot came out pretty well. It was good to see so many of you this fall, Western Tanager, I fear we may not meet again until next year.

This is the best American Robin I've ever seen...talk about a rarity. What a cool bird.

Townsend's Warblers have been holding down the bay area for a couple months now, they love it here.

When an adult male Townsend's Warbler dangles itself in front of you, it is impossible to look away.

On the contrary, there are no shortage of birders who would gladly look away when an Orange-crowned Warbler dangles itself similarly. Beginners hate Orange-crowned Warblers because they are drab and resemble half a dozen other warblers. Power birders hate them because not only are they abundant, they are insultingly dull to look at. Even their song is boring. But I am not most birders; I am #7. And goddammit, I will look at Orange-crowned Warblers.

There was a time, a long time ago, when I would post a picture of a bird and write some kind of caption for what the bird might be thinking, if said bird had a full grasp of the English language and also had the exact same values, worldview, and sense of humor as myself. What a coincidence! But I stopped doing that when I suddenly noticed EVERYONE was doing this, both in blogs and on Facebook, and 99% of these captions made me wince, they were so bad. This has nothing to do with this Orange-crowned Warbler, just an observation.

Ok, fine, for old time's sake, I'll give it a shot. I might be a bit rusty, but here goes..."Oh fuck look at this spider web! There's go to be one of those tasty fuckers in here! I am going to find that little shit and fucking kill it, even though it might be the size of my goddamn head. I don't give a fuck. Christ I'm hungry."

How was that? Was that ok?

Have I even posted a Chestnut-backed Chickadee on BB&B? I don't know, I may not have, although that seems weird. In case I have not, here is one. They are cute and super common and mellow and I like them.

In early October, a Mourning Warbler showed up at Ferry Park in San Francisco. You easterners reading this do not care, but locally, this is a hell of a bird. In a bizarre twist of county listing and geography, there have been dozens of records of Mourning Warbler in San Francisco County...but until now, all of these birds have been found on Southeast Farallon Island. Not a single one had ever been seen in mainland San Francisco, so when this bird was found it brought widespread panic among local birders. In typical fashion, a hilarious majority of my attempted photos of it looked something like this. Mourning Warblers do not want to be photographed, it is known.

Here is a highly pixelated, but ultimately acceptable portrait of the bird. I've only seen one of these in California before (almost 20 years ago!), so this was a great rarity to be able to catch up with here on the west coast.

My, what a heavy bill you have, Mourning Warbler. The bird spent a lot of its time scurrying around some short, knee-high plantings, but eventually was foraging 20 feet high in a poplar with a mixed flock. Bizarre. Great bird, stoked I got to see it.

Blogger is still giving me formatting trouble, so I'll go back to my old school photo layout for the time being, we'll see how it goes. Hope you all had a good weekend, and enjoy fall while you still can.