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Placerita Canyon, Frank G Bonelli Regional County Park, Franklin Canyon Reservoir, and Sepulveda BasinCalifornia, USA

02 April 2006
 

Placerita Canyon

 
I spent yesterday (02 April) birding in the Placerita Canyon State Park (the site of the first gold strike in California apparently), the Frank G Bonelli Regional County Park (named incidentally for an LA County Supervisor and not [...]

Apart from the first frenzied hours of my arrival in Oakland, birding was restricted primarily to those species eking out a living in my hotel’s foliage. Not that I tired of my spare minutes with the same old scrub-jays, ruby-crowns, yellow-rumps, crows, gulls, Anna’s Hummingbirds, Black Phoebes, and Brewer’s Blackbirds …it’s just that I wasn’t [...]

Yesterday, I described the excitement of landing in Oakland and birding Arrowhead Marsh. By the time I finished there, checked into my hotel, and found my way to the hills above Oakland, the sun was growing low in the sky. The dramatic heights of Oakland Hills and the other elevated areas east of Oakland proper [...]

Anna’s Hummingbird
Business has brought me to California this week and I’ve got to say, flying into Oakland is pretty sweet. Not only is the airport nice and clean, it sits less than a mile from premier birding habitat! Arrowhead Marsh, part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Park, is a birding bonanza, a [...]

The “Burger King” Round Trip, Panoche Valley, central California. 03 January 2006
 
The “Burger King” Round Trip (so-called because the trip proper begins when my good friend Jack Cole meets up with fellow-birder and other good friend Ed Frost in the car-park of the Gilroy BK) follows a circuit roughly from the town of Hollister along [...]

2nd year (apparent) Kumlien’s Gull Larus glaucoides kumlieni
Hidden Lake Park, Milpitas, California: 07 March 2005
 
This second year gull was found by Al Jaramillo on Feb 22 2005. Photos and a discussion are on Al’s site at http://www.birdsofchile.com/iceland.

For more photos (taken on 24th Feb) and further discussion on this bird have a look also at Les [...]

Hidden Lake Park, Milpitas, California: 07 March 2005
 

1st winter Thayer’s Gull, 07 March 2005

1st winter Thayer’s Gull (with 1st w Glaucous-winged Gull behind), 07 March 2005

1st winter Thayer’s Gull, 07 March 2005

1st winter Thayer’s Gull (with 1st w Glaucous-winged Gull behind), 07 March 2005

1st summer Thayer’s Gull, 07 March 2005

2nd summer (?) Thayer’s Gull, 07 [...]

San Francisco, California (with Jack Cole and Ed Frost) 07 March 2005
 
Ed (left) and Jack (right)
 
The “Burger King” Round Trip: 07 March 2005
A great day in San Joaquin Valley with two very good friends of mine - Jack Cole (who, with wife Jeannie, I met back in 1991) and Ed Frost (who I met a [...]

Our one scheduled excursion for our California mini-vacation was a trip to Joshua Tree National Park. Both of us have visited this phenomenal park, but we’d never been there together. So, we packed lots of water and drove 140 miles inland to the desert.

Joshua Tree in its glory
One great feature of the California ecology is [...]

The Core Team was in the air at 7:15 AM Eastern and in Los Angeles by 10:15 AM Pacific Standard Time.  We were in for a long day.  Since I was the best man in our good friend Jason’s wedding, we had no choice but to hit the ground running.  During our whirlwind tour of [...]