Going to the Coast

As I set off before dawn last Wednesday, a song kept going through my head, over the mountains and through the woods, to the coast I go.  I had decided to follow Hwy. 20 further than I had made it the last time I set out that way, and to just see what I could see. I had two cameras and my binoculars and even my scope.  I planned to just stop whenever something interested me but had no particular destination.

As I began to climb through the foothills, dawn broke behind me while the moon seemed to be bouncing up and down and to the right and the left as I wound up and down the mountains.

I managed to not stop until I was near the north of Clear Lake. I stopped to look for birds but only found one beautiful image of frost  This was when I noticed I had left my jacket home.  However I had a spare jacket in my backpack and a heavy shirt on so I was OK.

I stopped to check out the historical district of a tiny town called Upper Lake. It was very colorful and even had decorative hitching posts outside some of the buildings.

I admired this decoration on top of an antiques store.


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This basket looked very colorful.  But the color is coming from the geranium leaves. This area was all frosted over when I was driving through so they don't have very many flowers in bloom.

Another interesting place that caught my eye was the Jackson Demonstration Forest.  I was a long way from the coast  on roads that kept me averaging about 45 mph, so I only stopped a few minutes to see what it was all about.  This boiler looking thing mounted on big long redwood logs caught my eye.  I found it was called a steam donkey, but nothing else. I looked it up and found it was a steam driven winch.  A long cable was attached to a fallen tree and then the steam donkey pulled it out to a logging site or to a pick-up point.  The steam donkey could even drag itself to a new location. It was anchored to a big tree or other anchor and then pulled itself toward the anchor.

When I  got to Clear Lake, I stopped a few times to look for ducks. These common mergansers were in a lake west of Clear Lake and very far down the bank from the road.

I had to stop a lot to take pictures of the beautiful views. As I went further west,  the hills were covered with more and more trees.

I saw a sign for Lake Mendocino Recreational Area and went in to find a tiny stream and a closed park. But, this stream  runs into the large, dammed Lake Mendocino.

There were several wineries along the way.  The grape vines added yet another texture to the landscape.

And this old barn was another beautiful texture. The frost was still on the ground and even on moss growing on the old posts and fence slats.

As I traveled west, the land looked like it gets much more rain and has more and more trees until mostly all there is are trees and understory.. The last stretch of the road wound tightly through dark forests. The north side must only get full sunlight in summer. In many places, there wasn't much room for error - there is a mostly a sheer drop on the right side. And the views were to tree-covered mountains.  The driving rule is that the slower driver has to pull off where there is a place to do so. But I also stopped in a lot of the pullouts to check out the views.

Finally, about four hours after I started, I got to Fort Brag.  I had set my GPS to show me parks in the area.  I saw one called Ten Mile Coastal Trail that looked really interesting, so I set my GPS to go there.  But when I got to Fort Brag, I took one more look at the GPS and found that Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden was only a few miles south. So I decided to detour there before heading north to Ten Mile Coastal Trail.

This is one of the pictures I took while still in the parking lot. I was immediately hooked, and went in and paid my $10 dollars. It was now almost  noon but I had lots of daylight left.  I ate a orange before starting out for a quick peek.  That peek lasted through two camera batteries and the rest of the day.

To be continued. 

And on a postscript to the falcated duck story,  I got to spend the whole morning there for the last two days.  The bird is fantastic and comes ever closer and feeds and displays to the oohs and ahs of his adoring audience. But even better, to me, is that six weeks of having a constant human presence from dawn to dusk on the viewing platform, has convinced the birds that people there are no threat and we can now get closer pictures of pintails, gadwalls, cinnamon teals, shovelers, American and Eurasian widgeon and even greater white-fronted geese and snow and Ross's geese than we can from the photo blinds. Today we had a coot coming towards me and another visitor from about twelve feet away.  So hurry up to see the falcated duck and all his friends at and Colusa NWR. .

Those Frustrating Blue and White Geese

When the refuge does its bimonthly survey of geese and ducks, it has to list the geese as white, white-fronted, Tule, Canadas and Cackling - in several subspecies.

But actually the white geese are made up of two species, Snow and Ross's and two morphs - a blue and a white - in both. They hang out together or separately but when you are measuring white areas and translating that into geese, the species can't be differentiated.

The last survey in December, 2011 showed that there were 57,000 white geese on the refuge. Even though I know snow geese well, I have never gotten comfortable in identifying a Ross's goose because, in the central flyway, Ross's are extremely uncommon and I'm a very slow learner.

But in Sacramento Valley they are estimated to make up thirty percent of the white geese, and they can be found on any given day in in most groups of white geese, sometimes in large, pure groups. So I've started learning the differences between snows and Ross's geese.

I still can't see the faster wing beat of the Ross's geese and the smaller body when they are flying, but I can spot them on the ground pretty easily now.  The Ross's have a cuter, baby-faced  look to them because their heads are rounder and their bills are shorter, as compared to each other and as the bill length is compared to the thickness of the bird's neck just at the junction with the head.

This picture has three Ross's geese in it. See how the bill is really short and the head round?  And see how small they are- hardly bigger than a pintail duck. 

These geese all look like snows.  See the longer bill and more elongated head? See how the bill is longer than the diameter of the neck?

I can't see these next birds well enough to tell what they are for sure, but think they are all snows.  All the birds with grey backs are this year's young. Some visitors see them as a different species.  I think they are now leaving their family groups and hanging out with their friends.  Usually I see two adults with two or three young but yesterday I saw about twelve young birds with brownish heads and varying amounts of grey in their backs hanging out together.

 

Blue morphs occur in both species. I'm used to seeing about twenty-five to thirty percent of blue morphs in the central flyway, but here they are very rare.  I took all the pictures of  blue morphs in one day and haven't seen any since then. But a visitor showed me a picture he had taken of a blue Ross's goose. Blue and white are color genes and blue is an in incomplete dominant gene.  (This really surprised me because the ratios made me think blue was the recessive gene.)  However blue geese prefer to mate with each other and white geese also prefer each other.  But geese often lay eggs in other geese's  nests so sometimes a blue is raised by a white pair or a white goose is raised by a blue pair.  These geese imprint on their parents and mate geese the color of their parents. If a goose is a hybrid of the two colors, it will have a white belly.  That means one parent was white and the other was a blue.

The dark goose in this picture had one white parent and one blue parent. The blue and the snow in the foreground are showing another snow feature, the snow grin patch and strongly curved lower mandible. Both of these are absent in snows. The grin patch looks like a black marking on the bill.

 

Another blue snow goose, this time with a mix of snows and Ross's. At least four of these geese are Ross's. And the snows show the bill markings clearly.

This is yet another blue.  I know because I photographed them all in the same half hour and just moved from one resting group to another. I think a couple of the geese way in the back are Ross's but I need a more sideways look to be sure.

 

A month after I got the blue snow geese, I was able to get a barely adequate picture of a blue Ross goose. I found it while checking out the auto tour - this mostly means looking at birds but we also note any drivers out of their cars and ask them to get back in. I found this bird about 30 minutes before I had to be back to turn in my vehicle.  And he would NOT wake up and pose for me. Finally,  I rushed to headquarters, turned in the car and hurried to my car.  Then I had to go around at least thirty cars before I could get back to the far end of the auto tour.  By this time the bird had woken up and moved further back in the crowd. But this picture is very exciting to me anyway, as this is my first blue Ross. And since there are only about one blue Ross's to every 10,000 white Ross's, if I get another picture this year, it will probably be of this bird.

And to make matters even more confusing, these two breeds can hybridize.  In fact, some experts believe that blue Ross's geese are actually hybrids between blue snows and Ross's.  If that is the case the blue gene doesn't work the same way AND their bills don'tlook like those of hybrid snows/Ross's.  I'm sure I'll never notice any hybrids, though. For a thorough discussion of how to identify these two species and the hybrids of them, along with drawings, see David Sibley's blog on Identification of White Geese. Thankfully, I pretty much don't have to think about the greater snow geese that occur in the Atlantic flyway.

Making Old Birds New Again

There's nothing better than a new bird except getting to show old birds to new birders. I got to guide a van full of new birders (although one grandfather was a duck hunter and rice grower) thru Colusa NWR yesterday, and had probably the best time of everyone.

I had already seen that there were way too many people on the refuge to expect to see the falcated duck so, after I gave everyone binoculars and a guide to waterfowl, and gave them a little discussion of what ducks we would see, we drove the auto tour.  We started out by checking out the over-sized feet of the coots in the road and discussed how they differed from ducks. Then we saw a big bird that wasn't a duck sitting on a little island.  In the binoculars, it turned out to be a peregrine falcon which then tried to fly off with its coot.  But it dropped it and then circled around several times for our extra enjoyment.  I thought it was circling back again but realized we had a harrier coming through.  We got to see another harrier later in the trip and some of the group could already call it. What brilliant students they were. 

We learned gadwalls, shovelers, mallards, and ring-necked ducks before we even got to the bridge.  Then we enjoyed two great egrets and a great blue heron sunbathing.  Soon everyone could decide what duck they were seeing. We found lots and lots of greater white-fronted geese, and got one good, albeit distant view of a male bufflehead.   We stopped to look at some golden-crowned sparrows and watched a couple of pie-billed grebes. Then we got to see a two cock pheasants and a deer in short order, and almost immediately after the deer crossed the road in front of us, we found an American Bittern sitting out in the open.   We rounded the last corner and enjoyed a close-up view of a red-tailed hawk, got a glimpse of a red-shouldered hawk, and got several looks at a kestral. And then I had to stop because I saw a single long-billed curlew on a levee. We also got distant looks at snow geese, none close enough to be able to find Ross's geese. Finally we enjoyed all the night herons in their roost just before the bridge.

The sunning great blue heron - (thanks for snapping the picture Charles)

Immature female red-tail hawk

Same bird front view

We got back to the viewing platform about  3:00 P.M. and were told by the other twenty or so people there that the falcated duck was actively feeding.  So I set up the scope and everyone got to see it and also enjoy closer views of the ducks and geese we had already learned.

Me and the birding group minus the photographer

The viewing platform after I removed the nine of us

It was hard to break away but I had strict orders to get back to Sacramento NWR by 4:00 P.M.Otherwise all of us were ready to continue birding until dark.

Exploring Feather River and Lake Oroville.

I spent New Year's Day at a Christmas Bird Count in Oroville.  I realized that there are lots of places for camping, boating, hiking, biking, fishing, and birding in that area and decided to come back.  Then I read about Feather Falls, which is supposed to be the sixth tallest falls in the U.S. and decided to hike in to see it.

Last Wednesday was a beautiful day for a hike so I set off just at dawn to find that falls. 

Soon I found my GPS knew nothing about Feather Falls.   I stopped at the Visitor Center  in Oroville, after stopping for coffee and directions to it, and got literature which gave me the directions. Soon I was climbing towards the sun as I went north of Oroville often in third or fourth gear.  I changed from  medium sized roads to ever smaller, steeper, and twistier roads until I came to the road marked as the road to the Feather Falls Trailhead. There I found a map showing two trails to the falls.

I had to stop several times along the way to admire Lake Oroville, made by damning up Feather River.

This is part of the map showing the area. Signs said that the upper trail was 4.5 miles long while the lower was only 3.5 miles long.  But the lower trail was closed for a bridge replacement. I was pretty sure I'd make a 7 mile hike but wasn't too sure if I'd survive a nine mile hike.  But I was there and the scenery was pretty.  

 

 

The trail was wide and easy and was going downhill.  Most of the large oaks had beautiful moss (or ferns) on them.

I  set my camera's timer and took a picture of myself.  I was glad I had my hiking poles with me.  I have a knee that hurts when  hiking downhill and that's mostly what this hike was. And I could use arms and legs to get up the hilly spots.

There were several tiny streams but one bigger Frey Creek that had a falls just before I crossed it on a bridge. I enjoyed sounds of moving water at least half of the time I was hiking.

Most of the time, I was hiking in deep shade because the sun's angle was too low to reach over the tops of the mountain, and there were lots of tall evergreen trees. But this was a wonderful spot full of light and with tall trees making a canopy.

At almost three miles into the trip, I found Bald Rock Dome. There was a sign there that told about how it was made by a volcano. 

Shortly after this I found the three mile marker and my rational self convinced my wild child that I should not attempt to complete this hike. Sane self also pointed out that, so far, the trail had been about eighty percent downhill and I would have that ratio of uphill on the way back.  I still have a sore heel and am stiffer than usual so that was probably a good move. But I resolved to get more fit, lose some weight, and go back and start earlier.  I'll probably try it again in a couple of weeks.

The way back looked very different with more sunlight getting to the ground.

The day was warm enough that I was hiking in a fleece shirt and a light jacket.  But it was way to cold for this salamander that was weakly moving on the trail.  After I took his picture, I tucked him into some leaf litter.

 
This bench is less than a mile from the trail head and seemed unnecessary, particularly as there were very few places to rest the rest of the way. But on the way back, I did take a water and rest break here.

I was out by 1:45 P.M. so decided to visit the Lake Oroville Visitor Center. It has a wonderful museum in it and the tower lets you see the lake from this location.

One of the exhibits was on the local Native Americans.  These were some of their baskets.

 I managed to struggle up two flights of stairs to view the lake.

When I picked up the literature about the area, I read about the Feather River Scenic Highway and all the wonderful things I could see.  One of them was this pair of bridges, the historic Pulga and Tobin bridges. Pulga is for automobiles and crosses Tobin. I got there and managed to stop in a private driveway and hike down the narrow road with no edges just in time to get this picture before the last of the light was gone.

 I was now about sixty-five miles from home so turned around. I saw glimpses of a beautiful sunset but couldn't find a place to actually see all of it.  Then I got to the Vista Turnout I had noticed on the way north and quickly pulled in there and practically fell out of the car.  I was almost immediately joined by four other cars, all intent on enjoying the sunset.

It was a beautiful day from start to finish.  And I will see that waterfalls before I leave. 

Looking Back at My First Year of Full-Time Volunteering

I started working at Anahuac NWR the first of November 2011.  Then I took October off to play before starting a new volunteer job at Sacramento NWR. Since this is a time of review, I thought I'd look back over my pictures from last year and remember some of the high points of my year.

I started the year on a very sad note when I saw the destruction Ike had rendered to our trees. This is the famous Willows, an internationally famous migrant trap, two years after Ike put an eighteen foot wall of water over the trees, drowned some of them, knocked others apart, and finally poisoned the remaining ones with salt. I was crying when I took this picture.  I determined that at least part of my volunteer job would be to work to replace habitat. 

I took off for several days at Thanksgiving and camped and birded in the Valley. This screech owl was one of my favorite finds.

And I loved using my macro lens to take butterfly pictures at Falcon Dam State Park.

In December, I got to spend several days with my grandson, Cian.  He got this bunk bed for Christmas that year.

  

I spent November and December helping the Friends of Anahuac raise money to buy trees. I started an adopt-a- tree program and made cards to represent each tree.  People paid the cost of a tree and gave it as a present. I also filled email orders. By the first of January, we were ready to order the trees.  The trees were delivered two days before a snowstorm and a big freeze.  It was a wild time as staff and volunteers packed up the trees and stored them in the maintenance building. Many of the volunteers couldn't make it to our planting day because of lingering ice on the roads.

But planting went on in January and February - the February work day got rained out except for a bus load of kids who planted willows in ponds. 

By late February, winter was over and the alligators were coming out of hibernation. 

 
I got my all-time favorite job - taking a videographer around the refuge. He was trying to get pictures of snow geese lifting off and other wintering birds. He came back in April for the migration and I was again able to guide him and feed him birds.  A friend and I even got a clapper rail to walk across the road in front of him after trapping it in a small patch of vegetation until he was set up.

And I got to go on the annual kayaking/birding trip to Choke Canyon State Park.  I've been leading this trip for many years.  It is one of my favorite places because it is at the junction of the Texas Valley and has eastern and western birds as well as Mexican birds. Green jays show up as soon as we put out sunflower seeds. This year I got to go as a participant only, which is WAY less work.

March saw the appearance of lots of wildflowers, in spite of the worsening drought.

In April I got to go back and paddle on the Bayou Teche in Louisiana.  This side trip into a swamp was one of my favorites since I love swamps. And I got to visit with paddling friends from across Louisiana and Texas and met new friends, some from as far away as Wisconsin.

In April,  we still had a few lingering shorebirds. But the water was rapidly drying up.  Many mottled ducks had to fly off to find water,  leaving  their hatchlings that were too young to fly, to die.

May was an exciting month because we had the grand opening of our new visitor center and office. I got to lead bird watching tours along the amazing trail/boardwalk that goes through an East Texas mixed forest, then doglegs into a cypress swamp before ending at the edge of Lake Anahuac.

In June I was STILL planting trees and shrubs. This was because we had around 200 trees left to plant after two work days and mostly just me to plant them. Sometimes, it would take me several days to dig the hole because the clay was like cement and I had to add water, dig a little, then add water and wait several hours or until the next day.

In August, I made a deal with Trinity NWR to make cuttings of their button bushes for our refuge and dig up cypress sprouts that were growing in the bottom of what is usually an 800 acre lake but which had dried to about 80 acres in the drought. I got them all potted up in the shade shelter we got this past spring. I also started lots of willows and got a few acorns to sprout.

In September, I spent lots of time taking pictures of dragonflies. This is one of my favorites.

And I continued my watering job which I had done all spring and summer. I hauled water by Kawasaki mule from our rainwater tanks until I used up all that water.  Then I had to haul water in a 120 gallon tank for ten miles from the volunteer site.  The water at the refuge is too salty to put on plants.

We had a volunteer dinner in September and I just managed to get in 3000 hours, 2000 of them in the eleven months I worked there as a resident volunteer.

 I took off the full month of October and said goodbye to friends and favorite places in Louisiana and Texas. The last thing I did was attend a Kayak Festival in Corpus Christi.  There I led a trip to Bird Island and had good visits with lots of my friends from across the state of Texas.

 Early in November I arrived at Sacramento NWR. Here the geese are the big story and I'm almost always in sight and/or sound of them. I hear them coming back to the refuge starting around 5:30A, see them flying up when a raptor flies over them, spend lots of time showing them people and discussing them and the ducks and also spend personal time enjoying them.

And we are really getting on the map due to our Asian visitor, the falcated duck - on right. In the first three weeks he was here, over 1000 cars came to Colusa NWR, mostly to look for him. I spent a lot of time in December at Colusa, helping people find the duck, directing traffic, and reminding people not to get out of their cars or walk behind closed areas around the pond. The duck has been coming closer and closer to the viewing platform to the delight of his visitors.

It was a very good year. And I'm expecting to have another great year.