Mokka mit Schlag

Besides the two lifers, one of the most interesting birds I saw at the Santa Cruz Municipal Pier this past Tuesday (March 20) was a banded Western Gull, #2406.

What’s especially interesting is that this is a very old style leg band. Four digit bands like this one haven’t been used for over 25 years. That makes this a very old bird. I’ll have to get the original banding data back, but it seems to be at the outer limits of what’s been recorded for this species’ longevity in the wild.
Read the rest of this entry »

Alum Rock Park, 2007-03-19

I had a tip that Burrowing Owls were relatively common at San Jose Mineta International Airport, so last night at sunset before dropping off my rental car and catching the red eye home, I stopped in the long term parking lot to scan the runways. I parked roughly in the middle of the lot (section 101) and walked south toward the tower as far as I could. I saw a Red-tailed Hawk, one Northern Mockingbird, and one owl burrow but no owls.

I turned back around and walked north. I saw one American Crow and had a breif flurry of excitement that turned out to just be a Mourning Dove. About three quarters of the way toward the north end of the lot, I saw something fly from the fence into the grass. It was getting dark, but not so dark that my binoculars couldn’t clearly pick it out as a Burrowing Owl! It perched in the grass, flew to a new perch in the grass, then flew back to the fence. If it hadn’t been flying and perching on the fence, I would never have spotted it in the grass. Possibly there were multiple owls in the grass that I walked right by.

It was a little bigger than I was expecting. Somehow I was thinking it was the size of a Sawwhet, but in fact it was a little bigger than a Screech Owl.
Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday morning was the second SD Birding BoF. If I do it once more, it becomes a tradition. Due to the daylight savings time change, we only had about an hour and fifteen minutes of actual birding, but we tried to make the most of it. Nine hardy souls joined me at 6:30 A.M. to ride over to the Donald M. Somers Water Pollution Control Plant. (It’s more interesting than it sounds.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday afternoon I decided to play hooky from the conference. I skipped out on “Why Software Still Sucks” keynote and the annual Jolt awards to walk along San Tomas Aquino Creek to Harvey Pond and Sunnyvale Baylands. If the DST change is going to take away my morning preconference birding, I can at least get a little of that back in the afternoon.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m busy at Software Development 2007 this week. Consequently I have limited time to update the various web sites or answer e-mail. I’ll feed in content as I can. All four sites (Cafe au Lait, Cafe con Leche, The Cafes, and Mokka mit Schlag) should return to a more normal publishing schedule next week.

P.S. Birding BoF is Thursday morning at 6:30 A.M, not Wednesday at 6:00 as erroneously printed in the catalog. My apologies to everyone who showed in the lobby this morning at 6:00.