Central California

Boy, it's fun when rarities show up: the birders come out of the woodwork!  Tootled up to Solano County from Morro Bay to try for the Blue Jay and Snowy Owl on the way to Napa, and with the excellent directions the Blue Jay spot was easy to find.  I found the store parking lot but the place was boarded up and paranoid me didn't want to leave my car there, so again, since I figured the crunch was over, I parked in the residential area and started walking the loop (figured it'd be a good exercise walk if nothing else).  A pair of White-tailed Kites playing King of the Mountain with a cedar was fun, and picked up the usual suburban birds for the county.  Shortly (and thankfully) ran into another birder named Murray who told me that the Blue Jay was back at the parking lot: someone had been putting out feed and now the bird was almost exclusively hanging out there!  So I made a "Uie" and drove back over, and as I was enjoying the juncos and Golden-crowned Sparrows going nuts in the woodpile, suddenly there was the jay!  He wouldn't allow real close approach, but he wasn't shy, either!  And the funny thing was that the area looked strikingly like the farm area around Port Huron, my home town in Michigan where, of course, we have tons of these things, so as Murray also suggested, he probably feels right at home!  Murray himself suddenly appeared in the parking lot again and told me about an albino Clark's Grebe at Lake Hennesey, so I promised him I'd keep an eye out for him!

 

Headed out to the Snowy Owl area, and shortly came upon another car that was pulled over; this was a guy from Davis named Clark (I believe) who had spotted two raptors but didn't have a scope.  So I pulled mine out to reveal a Prairie Falcon and a Harrier, and within the space of five minutes we had attracted at least three other cars!  As one of the guys came towards me he looked vaguely familiar, and I suddenly said, “Didn’t I meet you in Ecuador?!”  The light came on and we had a big hug (it was Ivan without his other half Stephanie), and we all had a good laugh over what a small world it is when a rare bird shows up!  They had been combing the area since 9:30 with no luck, so we all exchanged cell phone numbers just in case, and went our separate ways. 

I basically did the drive-a-mile bit to get out and scan occasionally, and with almost every stop I attracted another birder!  One stop had a big Golden Eagle on one of the power towers, and had a very nice Lincoln's Sparrow pop up in one ditch, along with a Marsh Wren.  There were lots of false alarms with all the egrets around (I was told it was quite white, even for an immature), and at one point I ended up on a levee looking into Yolo County (I assume from the DeLorme atlas I had), adding a handful of birds in the flooded fields including White-faced Ibis, Coot, Greater Yellowlegs, and Ring-billed Gull.  Back along the Solano County roads also added Canada Goose and a large flock of Horned Larks and Killdeer to the day list.  I ran into another birder from Sacramento who was concerned that the owl might have run into one of the many wires holding up what looked like a field full of radio towers along the road we were on.

       

If you can't enjoy a lost Snowy Owl, you can at least enjoy the fancy farm roosters!