Mokka mit Schlag

After leaving Santa Cruz, I headed north up U.S. 1 toward Ano Nuevo. I considered stopping at Natural Bridges State Beach for Heermann’s Gull, but I didn’t want to take a chance on missing my 2:30 P.M. Elephant Seal walk appointment. I did scan various coastal pull-offs along the way, and stopped at Waddell Beach where I added Whimbrel to my day list. However I never did spot a Hermann’s Gull. Maybe next trip.

I arrived at Año Nuevo about 2:00 P.M. with plenty of time to spare. It was still drizzling, so I hung out inside the visitor’s center and watched a video about the elephant seal’s and the site while I waited for the walk to start. They were a little short on docents, though, so they combined the 2:15 and 2:30 walks, and we still had to cover the first half of the trail out to the seals without a guide. This was a little troublesome because the path that you couldn’t miss actually forked at the shipwreck and none of us knew whether we were supposed to go left or right. The correct answer was left, so of course we went right, and barely met up with our docent Barbara on time. However this proved to be fortuitous because on the right fork I spotted an Allen’s Hummingbird, my first life bird for the day. (Given the time of year and the chaparral habitat I really don’t think it was a Rufous.)

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I headed over to Sunnyvale Baylands Park first thing this morning to see if we could get in early enough for Thursday morning’s Birding BoF. The gates are open, and you could probably get in at 3:00 A.M. in the morning if you wanted to. There isn’t enough light to see by until 6:45 A.M. or so, though. However, it seems to have been a very dry year. The marshes have turned into baked mud flats, and few birds were seen.

Fortunately, I had a backup plan in hand. The Donald M. Somers Water Pollution Control Plant just down the road was in a lot better shape, and a quick 30-minute spin around the big hill (probably a landfill?) turned up 18 species including this Common Moorhen:

I think we’ll come here on Thursday instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday I drove down to Santa Cruz with plans to do a little birding at various sites before my 2:30 P.M. appointment at Año Nuevo SR. The first stop was Neary Lagoon, a small 15 acre wetland in the middle of a residential area in Santa Cruz. I arrived at 10:15 and stayed for about an hour. It’s a very pretty site in a place where you wouldn’t normally expect to find one. I’m glad they preserved this much, though apparently about 60 acres of the original lagoon have now been filled in and built up.

Neary Lagoon is known for good waterfowl in winter, but winter leaves early in California, and the waterfowl were limited to Mallards, American Coots, and one presumably domestic-descended Muscovy Duck. I did, however, find some nice land birds including two California Quail:

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Ed Levin County Park, Santa Clara, CA, 2007-03-19

I lost a full two days of birding in California when JetBlue canceled my Friday flight due to bad weather. I couldn’t get out till Sunday. :-( Monday morning I taught XML, but as soon as that once done I headed for the hills, literally. I decided to spend the afternoon at Ed Levin County Park and Alum Rock Park in the eastern hills. Local birders had been reporting some good stuff here, and I’d never really gotten up into the hills so I thought it would be worth checking out.
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Testing for some plain text problems in WordPress title formatting. Hmm, looks like this one is OK. WordPress turns the double quote into a curly quote which does not terminate the attribute value. The greater than sign is escaped inside the attribute value. so the problems only arise if there’s real markup.

The curly quote may be an accidental fix. I’m not sure what would happen if I figured out how to publish a real straight double quote in a title. I wonder if there’s a preference for that somewhere?