Birding Big Day in Morro Bay

Cindy and I decided to spend last Saturday morning in the area of Morro Rock,  so we could also turn in checklists for global big day. I ended up going back the following two days, in order to get decent pictures. And of course, there were lots of stuff I HAD to look at. And take pictures of.


I have been trying to take this picture of Morro Rock since I first saw it from the south. I finally got the early morning light to take it from the town of Morro Bay's marina.

Morro Rock

Singing canyon wren male (Click here for audio)

Dark-eyed juncos are very common  

White crowned sparrow are the most common

California lesser goldfinches have green backs but still sound like the Texas ones

California towees are super common

I got this bushtit at Morro Bay State Park...

...but we watched a pair working on the nest - actually mostly just saw movement and
zooming birds at Morro Rock - it looks like a dirty sock

Non-nesting brown pelicans were feeding at the breakwater at Morro Rock 

All these pelicans are under three years old and still in juvenile plumage

The California quail have paired up and we always see the male and female together. Haven't seen any with babies yet. This pair was in the camping area of Moro Bay State Park.  The male was on a little house doing sentry duty while the female grazed. Then she jumped on the picnic to wipe her bill.

California quail male

And his female

Just inside Morro Bay State Park is a Heron/Cormorant rookery.  It is supposed to have breeding Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, Black-crowned night herons, and cormorants.  I didn't find any night herons there but there were plenty of the other three species. 

Turkey vultures use the rookery as a roost

Female cormorants were sitting on eggs while the males came back and forth

Condo's are in short supply

I think copulation was in progress at this nest

I think this one of those California red tailed hawks

A great egret and three snowy egrets were feeding on the incoming tide  - I missed the other two but love seeing the differences between them. 

Then I got distracted by the surfers - but one had to wait WAY longer on them than on the birds

I am STILL trying to take good pictures of the sea otters.

Still trying to photograph sea lions

I've been hearing harbor seals barking. I finally found them - all in one place. 

This was about half of the seals - guess they haven't gotten the social distancing message

I'm always on the hunt for native bees. This is the ONLY bumblebee I've seen in California.  And it isn't all that common.  I seldom see more than one at a time.

Yellow-faced Bumble Bee (Bombus vosnesenskii)

We found forty species over two sites and two days. Not much by Texas standards, but the most birds I've seen far. 

Hope you too are getting to get out into nature, but staying out away from people. 

Sunday Morning Was Just Beachy

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Poor Cindy has to work five days a week and can only go play on the weekends. She has been really missing the beach, after seeing and hearing about all my fun. So we decided to head down and play along Morro Bay.  She also wanted to show me a breeding area for the endangered pipping plovers.

We went down to my favorite beach and immediately were blown away by the rising fog. As the sun came up, we saw a fogbow. Cindy had to combine two pictures to capture the view. And Morro Rock finally appeared out of the fog. And then there was the light, making everything more beautiful.

Fogbow by Cindy - she had to combine two pictures to show the actual view

Cindy posing in front of Morro Rock

The view from the beach of the sand dunes and the mountains behind them in the early morning fog

Cindy's picture of me on the beach

I saw lots of art in the beautiful light and changed my camera to the watercolor setting for some of them.

Arrangement by the tide

Just a shell in watercolor mode - loved the purple

Even the purple flowering invasive mustard added beauty when backlighted by the rising sun

 After a few beautiful hours wandering around on the beach and taking lots of pictures, we moved back north to Estero Bluffs State Park. We parked in a big pullout and walked down the partially paved trail after watching kayakers hauling their kayaks down that trail towards the beach. We had to spend the first several minutes trying to capture the beautiful, partially foggy light.

One of at least a few score of pictures I attempted to capture the amazing light -
and this is the landmark for the parking lot that 

We followed a couple of kayakers down to this beach - and saw another fogbow

Male American goldfinch feeding

Song sparrow singing

Tiny beauty dressed in fog droplets -  found this is invasive rose clover and out competes native clovers and grasses

A watercolor modification of a shoreline view as we walked north

The only banded snowy plover of about seven we found - I turned in the band pattern 

Whimbrel taking his crab to shore 

Sanderlings hunting for food along the edge of the incoming tide

The only least sandpiper I saw

Cliff swallows were racing to collect mud and build their nests

View down San Geronimo  Creek towards the beach 

We had intended to only spend a couple of early morning hours on the beach. But we had arrived before sunrise and spent over five hours before we noticed we were starving. But this was the BEST medicine for the isolation blues. And I had three miles on my step meter. Cindy walked over two miles- the longest she has been able to walk in over a year.  

Exploring West of the Refuge

Fellow volunteers who are avid birders told me of a wonderful trip they took on Hwy 20 west past some lakes and all the way to the coast.  I decided to do the trip but only got in part of it.  I think they must not have stopped every five minutes for pictures. One of the sights that really impressed them was a flock of common mergansers so big that they thought they were seeing a shoal - shallow water running over rocks.

The first thing I saw was the foothills to the coastal mountains as I started driving through them. Of course I was entranced and took lots of views of them.

I saw some animals moving around way back from the road.  With my binoculars, I could see they were a herd of tule elk.  When I got home and showed my pictures to a staff biologist, he said this elk (and others I saw) have hair loss syndrome which may cause them to get hypothermic and die this winter.

I stopped at the Cache Creek Natural area and took pictures of this spotted towhee and lots of gold-crowned sparrows. I also saw a California towhee but couldn't get its picture.

I finally got to lower Clear Lake and decided to go around the west side of it to get better pictures. But I was on the lower east side at first and came to a dead end.  I decided to go up the steep hill and come back to the main road by a different route.  Just as I got to the top of the hill and was going into a hairpin turn on a one lane highway, I saw quail, a deer and lesser goldfinches. Thankfully, there was no traffic as I struggled to get pictures off all the animals.

These are California quail.  I was amazed at the size of the pine cone.  I may be the cone of a Coulter pine. I didn't dare get out of my car to get this one but collected another one a few hundred yards down the road.

My next stop was at Clear Lake State Park.  I couldn't stay and visit since there is a $7.00 per day fee and I needed to start home.  I did get some quick looks at common mergansers and found the biggest congregation of pie-billed grebes I've ever seen.  I was confused by a flock of strange ducks until I realized they were grebes. Here is all I could get in my camera field of one group of perhaps 40.

After I left that park, I found a county park way on the northwest end of the lake on Soda Bay Road. It had many trees with the huge  infestations of mistletoe.

A little cove held a large flock of western Canada geese.

A comical acorn woodpecker was closely inspecting a dead branch where I had seen mallard ducks hanging out as I came in.  

I saw this view just as I was leaving the lake after driving back south and east on Hwy. 20  I think it was a slough.

Just as the sun went behind the mountains, I got another glimpse of the tule elk.

I had a great day exploring and still have lots more places along Hwy. 20. The place where my friends saw so many mergansers is on the next lake west.