BIRDQUEST2004

Right from the flight to California, luck was against me.  My flight was delayed limiting my time a Colusa NWR to one morning.

I drove straight to my hotel after my plane landed and planned on going to Colusa with Dan Brown.  Someone whom I’d communicated with via birdphotographers.net but had never met.  He and I proved to have quite a bit in common, both of us started out as birders and took up the camera later on in our lives. It was fun birding with him, even though it was such a short time.

We left our hotel at 5:00 am and drove the 90 miles to Colusa arriving just before dawn at the bridge where the Falcated Duck had been seen only days before.  We spent 2 hours glassing the area, checking out the more than 2000 ducks in the wetlands without luck.  Unknown to me Dan Brown took the photo below.

We moved over to the viewing platform which is on the other side of the refuge.  This viewing platform is on my list of places I will visit again.  it is strategically placed so the incoming birds are in full sun.  Most birds are acclimatized to humans being on the platform,  its a  great place to view and photograph birds up close.

Below are examples:

Greater White-fronted Geese

Lesser Snow Goose Dark Morph

Lesser Snow Geese

Roosting Night Heron’s, click on the image to see large view of just how many are in these trees.

Northern Shoveler

Ross’s Goose

Ross’s Goose Dark-morphed

The Falcated Duck never did show itself but it has shown itself on 3 occasions since.

We had allotted 3 hours and it was time to move on.

Ciao for now

Partly because it was a good bird and partly to get away from the winter, I decided to make a 12 day, 9 airport run for all the rarities across the US.  I left on January 14th, arriving in Portland, Oregon that night.

Enterprise had my car ready and I drove to Lincoln City, checked into my hotel and I was out like a light.

I was up early, my GPS got me to the Nestucca NWR in 20 minutes.  As soon as I turned in NWR road,  I saw the Tundra Bean Goose almost instantly.  It was with a group of Dusky Canada Geese, only about 30 feet from my car.

Talk about a plan working out, 25 minutes from the hotel and a life bird in hand.  I usually allow myself 2 days on any life bird, then if I can’t find it time to move on.  Now what was I going to do, only 30 hours to kill until I was to board my next flight.

I was lucky enough to photograph a lovely Steller’s Jay at the information sign.  This si a very small NWR but lots of birds.

As I was driving out, I passed a large flock of  Geese, made up of 3 of the 4, Cackling subspecies;  Taverner, Richardson’s and Cackling.  I spent quite a bit of time looking through the flock looking for the Aleutian subspecies (which I finally caught up to later on my trip).

Moving on up to the Barview Jetty,  looking for Surfbirds but one look at the jetty told me their was no way I was going to go out there.

Not much happened on the was out to the jetty but on my walk back to the car in this gale, I was targeted by a group of gulls flying by the jetty.  It was raining guano, one gull was particularly accurate,  hitting me directly in the chest, all of my binoculars and a bit on my camera.   Let me tell you gull crap is not easy to remove from your binoculars and camera,  I’ll be more careful in the future and make sure I stand upwind.

I passed a small pond with a really nice Bufflehead drake and Ring-necked Duck hen

I found a small inlet that had a few Surf Scoter’s, greatly improving my images of this species.

The rest of the day and most of the next day was a total washout.  There was very heavy rain the rest of that day and most of the morning.  I was glad to get on that airplane, I’ll take snow over rain any day.

Bring on San Francisco…….

Ciao for now