Then I moved from the primroses over to the lavender, where things were a bit more grim. I found a crab/flower spider (genus Misumena or Misemunops, I forget which, probably the latter) feasting on its breakfast, a Western Honeybee, and there were a few flies enjoying the meal as well. Still trying to get an ID on the flies.

Later on, I found another sweet little bee gathering pollen from our Cleveland Sage:

Lots of stuff out there to see; get out there and see it!

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And they were fine. I enjoy little bees. The shiny greens, the yellow hairs, the brilliant eyes. They have a charisma to them that makes them almost adorable, and when I manage to get a good image of one, it’s a real thrill. But each and every time I was out there, I also encountered two much larger bees, bumblebees: a shiny-smooth one in the genus Xylocopa, which I still don’t have good photos of, and several hairy yellow-faced yellow-butted bumbles in Bombus, most likely Bombus vosnesenskii.

I still don’t have positive ID on almost any of them–native bees are difficult to ID, and photos can only take you so far, even with the help of the experts over at bugguide.net–but I do have enough images for a little photo gallery.

So, here is a little photo gallery of bumblebees from my Central California yard in mid- to late June 2026. Enjoy!

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One of the best subjects for macro photography is bees. And since we’ve been planting more native flowering plants over the past year or two, we’re well stocked with them! The provencal and Spanish lavenders (non-native plants here in California) still attract mostly Western Honeybee (apparently renamed from European fairly recently), but I see some native bees on them frequently. (They’re just outnumbered by the dozens of honeybees.) Some of our weedy non-natives like Mexican Primrose and Wild Mustard also attract the bees.

The natives we’ve been planting, appear to attract the widest variety of native bees, though: just this morning on one plant, I had bees in Lasioglossum, Agapostemon, Melissodes, Bombus, and even some kleptoparasitic bees in Sphecodes! (Not even counting all the bees that were too fast for me to get a picture.)

By far the most pollinator-attractive native flower we’ve got is Cleveland Sage, which is an exuberant plant in the genus Salvia. It has lavender/purple/blue flowers in giant whorls. It’s truly an astonishing plant, growing well over three feet tall and wide, and we’ve only had it in the ground for one winter. I don’t remember which variety we have, but it’s likely Pozo Blue. It could easily be one of several other forms, though.

I do find that the most common butterfly in our yard prefers our abundant crop of mustard weed, though. I find that these butterflies, while flighty, tend to cooperate much more nicely than the bees. Here’s a picture of a Cabbage White (now called Small White) from today:

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Their ancestral range is right here in the west: they build their mud nests anywhere a steep cliff face meets an overhanging horizontal ledge. Historically, that meant they were at home in the foothills and steep canyons of the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Rocky Mountains. Over the past couple of centuries, though, as artificial cliffs with overhangs (think bridges, buildings with eaves, etc.) have proliferated from coast to coast, the swallows have expanded eastward across the Great Plains to nest across almost all of the United States.

The taxonomic name is interesting: the genus name already includes the entire common name! Petrichelidon, from petri, cliff, and khelidon, swallow, so, literally “cliff swallow.” Then the species designator, pyrrhonota means flame-backed (pyrrhos, flame-colored, red, and notos, -backed), which is a reasonable field mark for this swallow.

In winter, these flame-backed cliff-dwellers live in southern South America (Brazil, Paraguay, south-central Argentina, even as far south as Tierra del Fuego), meaning they migrate several thousand miles between breeding and wintering grounds. I’m not sure where they spend their time down there, but when they’re up on the breeding grounds, they spend a lot of it fairly conspicuously, in large flocks, doing what they do: feeding and breeding.

Theater-goers

For at least the past several years, there’s been a colony of Cliff Swallows nesting on the side of the Atascadero Colony Cinema building in downtown Atascadero. The theater management cleans the nests off the sides of the building after the nesting season (it’s illegal to clean them off during nest building or nesting), but the colony’s swallows return every year and build them anew. (This is the bird made famous for its return to the mission in San Juan Capistrano, reputedly on March 19 every year, demonstrating the high degree of site fidelity displayed by this species.)

In general, Cliff Swallows at “small” colonies like the one at the Colony Cinema prefer to reuse nests year after year rather than start from scratch, but they apparently have strong enough site fidelity that even when faced with the necessity of building anew every year, they’ll do that rather than scout out a new colony site.

Unfortunately for the birds (but perhaps a relief for the theater management), despite a very high number of nest-building attempts at this site, only a few get built all the way. I think there’s just too much foot traffic for the birds, and thankfully, there are nest sites aplenty under nearby bridges. Here’s a shot of just one of the twelve columns of a bridge nearby.

Extrapolating from the number of nests with openings we can see here (about 20, but some probably no longer usable, on the visible 25 percent of the column), there are at least seven hundred nests (60 x 12) at this one site. And I see similar aggregations at many of the bridges here in the AtascaRobles area.

Mud nests

Cliff Swallows build their nests out of mud that they carry to their chosen substrate (bridge, building, cliff) one pellet at a time. It takes about 900 to 1,200 individual mud pellets to complete a nest. Both sexes build the nest, apparently, although how ornithologists figured this out is a mystery to me. (The birds are not sexually dimorphic, which means you can’t tell them apart visually unless a brooding female’s brood patch is visible.)

According to Birds of the World, the mud is applied thusly: “A bird brings a mud pellet back to the colony and molds it into the nest with a shaking motion of the bill. The shaking causes a partial liquefaction of the mud, disperses moisture, and allows fresh mud to overrun small air spaces, resulting in a stronger structure when dry.” Once the nest is about three-quarters complete, they start adding dry grass stems as lining inside.

The birds build collectively, because apparently having dozens of birds gathering mud at the same time makes life more efficient–the theory here is that all those birds together provides “vigilance advantages.” However, efficiency has its drawbacks: “A pair can bring as many as 44 mud pellets in a 30-min period, adding more than 1.5 cm to the nest rim during that time. If birds build too quickly, hunks of wet mud fall off before drying, which happens often.”

As I was observing the birds gathering mud at the permanently fenced-off dirt area across from the theater, I wondered why they held their wings up in the air and fluttered them. The answer lies in the mud itself: it’s a very sticky substance, as my clothes can attest whenever I encounter it. It turns out that the birds are most likely doing it to keep themselves clean. Here’s how the Birds of the World account describes it: “Wing-fluttering during mud-gathering may be to prevent extra-pair copulation attempts, but also probably keeps wet mud from soiling the wing and tail feathers.”

Flocking behavior

Even at a small colony like this, the number of birds in the air at any given moment can be astonishing. Trying to isolate individual birds for a good flight shot served as an object lesson in how flocking behavior deters predation. My camera’s autofocus is almost s-tier, but it kept being distracted by the number of birds in close proximity to my targeted one. I’m sure falcons and other aerial predators find it similarly challenging.

Many mornings at nearby Atascadero Lake, I’ll see the flock feeding out in the middle. Unlike the other swallows that nest nearby (Violet-greens and Tree), I rarely find them along the edges.

Here’s a little photo gallery of an early morning in early April at the Colony. Enjoy!

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All of that time, all of that effort, gets distilled down into a few million pixels and offered up to the eyes of the unsuspecting shutterbug who then thinks, “Hey, I can do that!”

And it’s true. You can! You just have to work really, really hard.

My choice of animal is birds, and my choice of location is constrained by the fact that I have kids in school and a day job: after the morning school dropoff and before I install myself at my desk, I stop by the local lake. On weekends, I head over to the coast, or up into the mountains or, if I’m really lucky, out to the water treatment plant.

At most of those locations, at least during the spring and summer, there will be swallows around: small, fast birds with long wings, more or less of a long tail (some species have longer tails than others), and generally tube-shaped bodies. (The tail, along with various other cues, distinguishes the swallows from the other small aerial insectivorous bird, the swift. Swifts have practically no tail.) Usually these birds will be seen zipping around overhead in pursuit of their flying insect prey, wings outstretched in a slow turn or swept back next to the body in a burst of speed. Sometimes high overhead, sometimes low.

I feel the need to mention once again, in case the title of this essay didn’t convey it strongly enough the first time: swallows are small. And they are fast. That makes for an incredibly difficult exercise in bird-in-flight photography. You need a long, heavy lens to bring them close enough to you; you have to whip that lens around quickly but smoothly, so you can track the tiny little images in your viewfinder; and then you just have to keep shooting.

With birds this small and fast, sometimes all you can do is spray and pray. You might get lucky, like I did with this Violet-green Swallow back in April of 2023 in my front yard:

Or you might get really lucky and happen upon them when they’re resting, like I’ve been able to do in a few places (Sweet Springs in Los Osos, the side of Turri Road, Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara County, or down at Oso Flaco Lake, the birdiest hotspot in San Luis Obispo County):

But flight shots are the pinnacle of my ambition. I’ve been shooting swallows zooming over my local areas (the lake, my front yard, etc.) for years now. Almost every day from February through October, I have a shot at these birds. (Groan.) And now finally–finally–I’ve taken a shot of a Violet-green Swallow that I’m almost satisfied with. I was at my usual spot, Atascadero Lake, and for once the insect swarms that the birds feed on were down relatively low over the lake, so the birds were also down low, making them a bit easier to see (but MUCH harder to track as they zoom by so close to the camera).

I’m only almost satisfied with this shot, because while the bird is in the frame and in focus, the background isn’t very pretty, and the action is reduced down to almost portrait style. There’s no behavior other than the spread wings indicating flight. But there’s always next time…

And in fact, a couple of months after I got that shot of a lone VGSW zipping over the lake, I was able to capture a flight sequence that had both a VGSW and a Tree Swallow feeding low over the lake, and apparently the Tree Swallow had encroached on the Violet-green’s preferred flight path (or so I imagine), resulting in some interesting behavior being captured as well:

I love how vivid the colors of the birds are in this image: the, well, the violet-green back of the one, and the brilliant blue of the Tree Swallow. I also like that one of the better field marks for distinguishing them in flight shows up well: the white on the rump of the VGSW goes all the way across the back, while that of the TRSW is limited to the sides of the back; its rump is the same color as its back.

These two species are often compared out here in the west where they are both readily found. The species account for Violet-green Swallow in Birds of the World opens with a quote from William Leon Dawson, written for the 1923 edition of Birds of California, in which he takes up the comparison, at least obliquely:

If we lavished any superlatives on the Tree Swallow—and our memory misgives us that we did—we regret it now. Not but that the Tree Swallow is strictly deserving—oh, a very deserving bird—but we needed all our superlatives for present use, and one hates to repeat. What shall we do for the Violet-green Swallows? Simply this: we will call them children of heaven.

It’s hard to top that! The species name, Tachycineta thalassina, is interesting.

• Tachy, of course, means “fast” (think tachycardia, elevated heart beat). Cineta means “to sing,” while kinetic, of course, means movement. I’ve heard their twittering overhead, and, sure, it is fast. Not sure it’s faster than that of other swallows, though. (Think of Keats: “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”)
• Thalassina has to do with the sea. Some sources claim it means “sea-green,” which, hey, why not? It is the Violet-green swallow, after all. If Homer can call the sea “wine dark,” we can call it green.

So it’s either a fast-singing sea-green bird or a fast-moving one. I’ll let you decide which one is more accurate. I know which one I (and my camera) think it is…

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The closest NWRs in the sense I’m used to, where you can drive in and then either drive or walk around, are way over in the San Joaquin Valley, a couple of hours’ drive away: Kern and Pixley relatively near to San Luis Obispo County, and Merced and San Luis NWRs, about three hours away up in Merced County.

And that’s where I went one weekend in February: the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. I was attracted by the promise of thousands of snow geese and sandhill crane, along with reasonably close views of many species of waterfowl. And the refuge does not disappoint!

I drove up around noon on Saturday so I could have the afternoon and sunset at the refuge, and then I’d be able to arrive early Sunday morning for the main event: an all-day excursion searching for birds. During the afternoon of my arrival, I drove around the auto-tour route to try to familiarize myself with the locations:

• Big impoundments with Black-necked Stilt, Wilson’s Snipe, and nearly a dozen species of ducks. Check!
• Parking area for the photography blind, one car allowed at a time, no other pedestrians when occupied. Check!
• Parking area for the Bittern Marsh Trail, where you can get out and walk around some tree-lined ponds and explore another observation pier. Check!

By chance, as I was on the very last leg of the route, getting ready to return to the entrance/exit, an enormous flyout occurred: hundreds of thousands of snow geese, greater white-fronted geese, and Ross’s geese flew over my head to find a different resting spot for the night. It was one of the most amazing wildlife spectacles I’ve ever seen. The hasty iPhone video I shot really doesn’t do it justice, but I do provide an embed below. (PS: I have no control over the list of suggested/related videos that appears in the embedded video; I don’t know what the algorithm will serve you, but it doesn’t serve me anything I’m even remotely interested in. Random talk show comedy, some ASMR videos, etc.)

After the geese flew out, I did as well, to the hotel I’d reserved in the nearby city of Merced to rest and refuel after the long drive.

The next morning I arrived at the refuge before dawn, with only one other car ahead of me at the locked gate. Within a very few minutes, and still well before sunrise, the gate rolled open (presumably it’s on a timer), and I drove to the parking area at the entrance to wander up onto the observation deck and look out over the predawn marsh:

The peace and serenity of the entrance area was broken only by the sounds of nature: the grunting and croaking of the coots, the chipping of the snipe, the squawking of the geese, and the rattling call of the cranes. It was foggy/cloudy, but the moon was visible from time to time, and I expected the fog to clear shortly after sunrise. (Sadly, I was a bit optimistic; it took several hours before the sun broke through.)

As far as birds go, the refuge is hard to top. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more snipe in one place in my life as I did on this trip. Little gatherings of 5, 6, 10 birds in one place. And as long as I stayed in my car (you’re not allowed to get out during the auto route except at designated areas), they allowed astonishingly close approach. Despite this ease of access to the birds, it’s still a bit of a challenge to capture good images of snipe: if you’re at one of the places where you can walk around, you can’t approach closely–I flushed probably fifteen of them from invisible parts of the shoreline at my feet while walking back from the photography blind. And when you’re in your car, even though the birds are barely fifteen feet away, you can’t get out of the car to get that great low-to-the-ground angle that makes for a truly engaging picture. Here are the best two car shots I managed:

The refuge does offer photographers the opportunity to get close to the birds while not in a vehicle: there’s a photography blind about halfway around the loop, with a little parking area for one vehicle and just a short hike out along the embankment to the hide. The sign at the parking area is pretty clear: access is limited to the one parking spot, and pedestrian access is not allowed if the parking area is occupied. After all, if someone’s in the blind waiting for the birds to not be spooked, having people walking on the embankment would just flush the birds. That’s a recipe for an unhappy photographer. (Ask me how I know.)

In case you were thinking it, I can confirm: yes, after I arrived at the blind before sunrise, I waited a couple of hours in the fog for the birds to approach. And about an hour and a half after I was all settled in and the birds were getting close, a pair of yahoos wandered along the embankment, flushing all the snow geese and other waterfowl, completely tanking all the time I’d invested in the blind . Truly stunning display of courtesy. Sigh.

About three-quarters of the way around the rectangular route, there’s a major stop where you ARE allowed to get out and walk: the Bittern Marsh Trail. There’s an observation deck to look out over the impoundment on one side, and on the other there’s a trail around a marsh (as the name of the stop implies). I saw all kinds of cool birds there: Tree Swallows roosting and flying, a Great Horned Owl roosting, and (way too far away for anything but figuring out what they were) a huge flock of dowitchers flushed up into the air by a marauding Peregrine.

Perched birds are beautiful, and birds in flight are a nice technical challenge (can you get the bird in focus, in frame, with an interesting background, etc.?). But the most exciting kind of photo is one that captures behavior. And on the final leg of the tour, I was able to capture a little bit of that: a couple of Cinnamon Teal squabbling over something:

And, because there were so many of them, and they are so fun to look at, here’s a picture of a Black-necked Stilt:

After I left Merced, I made a brief stop at the nearby San Luis NWR and did that auto tour. It was getting late into the day, though, and most of the wildlife was hidden, and the light was pretty harsh, so I don’t have anything to show from that part of the trip.

All told, it was successful visit, and one that left me eager to return. (I’m still chasing that nice photo of any of the geese and cranes.) The refuge website offers a nice list of what’s going on with what kind of wildlife throughout the year. In August, there are supposed to be kettles of Swainson’s Hawks, which I’m eager to see.

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The species account in Birds of the World describes the behavior like this:

Male holds head and tail and 2 rows of feathers on crown (“horns”) erect, inflates neck; begins beating bill slowly at first against neck, forcing air out of feathers, causing bubbles to appear in water; beating intensifies toward end of display with concomitant movement of tail over back and head moved slightly forward over water; low belching sound uttered at end.

Seems accurate to me, although I didn’t hear the belching sound since I was a bit far away and it is a lake in the middle of town, after all.

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We’re on California’s central coast, and instead of the mating wail of the common loon, we have the “harsh, rolling cree creet” (as the authors of the species account in Birds of the World put it) of the Western Grebe (or the single-note cree of the closely related Clark’s Grebe). Like the wails and cries of the loon, though, these are the advertising calls of a water bird hoping to attract a mate. They sound out frequently in the winter months here on Santa Margarita Lake, and earlier in February I headed out there to try to hear and see it in action.

The lake was made back in 1941, when the army built a dam across the Salinas River a few miles southeast of the town of Santa Margarita:

The dam was built in order to create a reservoir to supply water for the army at Camp San Luis Obispo, way over on the other side of the mountains. (The water was meant to travel via the Cuesta Tunnel, which was also custom built by the army for that purpose.) But, in classic army style, it turned out that the camp’s own wells provided enough water, so the reservoir was never needed or even used for its original purpose. It’s now part of the water supply both for local agriculture and for the city of San Luis Obispo.

Whatever its origins, Santa Margarita Lake now attracts humans and animals alike to the great fishing along its seven-mile length (with twenty-two miles of shoreline, quite a chore to circumnavigate!).

Particularly noteworthy year-round, but especially in winter on the lake are the scores of pairs of grebes (the Westerns outnumber the Clarks perhaps 4 or 5 to 1, by my guesstimate). And if you know anything about this closely related species pair, it’s not those harsh advertising calls but their astonishing courtship ritual runs and dances, that account for the appeal of these birds in the minds of many. These mating activities start off (at least here) as early as January and continue through February. (I’m not sure how many birds here are wintering birds vs residents, but the lake is large, and in the summer there are an awful lot of grebelets.)

Here’s how the article in Birds of the World describes these courtship rituals:

Western Grebe and Clark’s Grebe are perhaps best known for their elaborate and energetic courtship rituals. These courtship ceremonies—in which courting pairs perform a series of displays in ritualized, apparently mechanical, sequences—are among the most complex known in birds. [They have] two courtship ceremonies: “Rushing Ceremony” includes Advertising, Ratchet-pointing, Dip-shaking, Rushing, and diving; “Weed Ceremony” includes Neck-stretching, Bob-shaking, Weed-diving, Weed-dancing, Bob-preening, and Arch-clucking.

Despite the many sub-elements involved in each broad behavior, the two types of breeding ritual boil down to rushing, where they rise up vertically out of the water and run across the surface at top speed, presumably a test of fitness and compatibility, and the weed ceremony, where they again rise up vertically but this time in a stately, slow-motion dance of approach and retreat while carrying weeds from the lake bottom in their bills. Rushing reminds me of speed skating in all its frenzy, while the weed-dancing reminds me of figure skating or ballroom dancing with the added excitement of the birds offering up samples of home furnishings for inspection.

Before a grebe can start rushing or weed-dancing, though, it has to attract a potential mate–which is what that “harsh cree creet” call mentioned earlier is for. It rings out over surprisingly long distances at the lake; I’ve heard it echoing from any number of other little coves and inlets while there’s nary a grebe in close view.

A successful advertising call will bring more than one potential mate to the vicinity, and it seems that when this happens, a bit of sorting out takes place. Even though it’s a bit harder for human observers, the male and female grebes presumably can tell at a glance who’s who, and (usually) the Clark’s and the Westerns figure out which is which as well. (For nearly a century Western Grebes were treated as the same species as Clark’s Grebe, with the Clark’s being considered a “white morph” of the Western. The species do hybridize, though some authorities say it happens rarely, while others say it happens far more frequently than is documented.)

Beginning birders, or even advanced birders with limited experience of the species might take a bit longer to sort them out than the birds themselves take: Clark’s has a more colorful orange bill than the yellow-green bill of the Western; during the breeding season especially (but often visible year round) it has a little more white in the eye; and it has a bit paler body overall. (I use that last character with caution; it seemed that every “pale” grebe I noticed on these trips turned out to be Western rather than Clark’s.)

You can often see both species of grebe, along with the pied-bill grebe, a fair variety of ducks, and the omnipresent American Coot at a little bay near Mackey Point on the western half of the lake, just around the corner from the marina. Mackey Point is convenient for birds and observers alike: there’s a parking lot and a lakeside trail, both of which are lined by vegetation (shrubs on the dry land and a fairly tall bed of rushes and cattails in the littoral zone) that helps screen the humans and birds from each other’s sight.

This natural blind allows for some fairly extended observing sessions without putting too much pressure on the birds. And when the birds are able to relax, it’s possible to get a decent look at their normal behaviors.

Rushing

The most exciting behavior both Western and Clark’s grebes perform, and by far their biggest claim to fame, is rushing. They synchronize their movements in a little ramp-up before the rush proper, facing each other with bodies low in the water, alternating little vertical bobs of the head with bouts of synchronized preening. Once they’ve determined that yes, they’re ready to go for it, they lunge simultaneously in one direction and lift their whole bodies vertically out of the water before they run across the surface anywhere from 10 to 70 feet. They’ll do this in pairs if they’ve gotten their signals right, or solo if they haven’t, which I imagine is somewhat embarrassing.

The runs go anywhere from five to twenty meters on top of the water. It’s astonishing to watch these birds, which almost can’t walk, rarely fly, and usually swim at the surface or under the water, break character like this and scamper across the surface of the lake. Apparently it’s quite physically taxing, too, since these rushes last at most a few seconds before one bird or the other dives back down onto the water.

Here’s a pair of Western Grebes rushing. It’s part dance, part speed skating, and very intense.

Usually rushing happens in pairs, but not always. I’m pretty sure this next sequence is an example of what happens when signals get crossed: a Clark’s Grebe goes for a solo rush while a Western Grebe looks on, perhaps bemusedly:

Rushing, or at least speed running on the surface, isn’t just for courtship, either. I watched a Western Grebe rush into a bodysurf to escape from a Clark’s Grebe that was displaying a bit of a temper (biologists call this “agonistic behavior”):

Weed Ceremony

A second aspect of their courtship ritual, which takes place after rushing has formed the initial pair bond, is the weed ceremony. Compared to the rushing, which takes only a few seconds once the birds get going, the weed ceremony is majestically slow. I couldn’t believe my eyes, seeing how still and serene these birds are, practically motionless while they levitate vertically on the water’s surface for minutes at a time. (My photos of one such sequence show that a full minute passes with them “standing up” on the water’s surface the whole time.)

On my second trip to the lake, the grebe collective at Mackey Point had disappeared, presumably with pairs absconding to the other side of the lake. This greatly reduced the number of birds I was able to observe. Around the corner from the point, though, I found a pair that had meandered relatively close to shore. As soon as I spotted them, I hustled out of the truck and threw myself and my camera down into the mud on the lakeshore, hoping to reduce the threat of a standing human profile to the birds. (Sorry about the mud, future laundry me!)

This posture is a good way to get some pictures when you don’t have a blind but you do have birds in front of you, but it is a bit awkward to maintain (and to clean up afterward). I lost track of the birds from time to time as they dove and resurfaced, gliding in and out of view behind some of the rushes on the shoreline. Eventually, though, I noticed the pair “standing up” on the water with weeds in their bills, and I started grabbing pictures. They were in fact performing the slow-motion vertical dance of the weed ceremony, which I’d never witnessed before. (It turns out that their diving in and out of view must have been when they went down to grab the weeds needed for the ceremony. I didn’t figure that out until I got home, though.)

In this dance, as in rushing, the birds appear to levitate on the water’s surface, but unlike the frenzied energy of the rush, the weed dance is a stately slow-motion evolution. The pair start off a little ways apart before they slowly drift closer together, present their offerings to one another, advance and retreat and return, then eventually drop their weeds and return to their normal posture on the water.

I only managed to get a few aesthetically pleasing shots of this amazing interaction since I was a bit constrained by my posture and the intervening vegetation, but the few that I selected here capture the flavor of the exchange nicely.

I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get back out to the lake before the grebes are done performing these dances for the year, but I’ll certainly try, and if not, I absolutely know that I’m headed back there next year.

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It’s not at all uncommon to catch a glimpse of peregrines in the vicinity of Morro Rock. They’ve been nesting there for decades–the first known nest in recent years was reported way back in 1967, just a few years before their designation as an endangered species in 1973. (Their recovery took about 25 years–they were delisted back in 1999 as a result of their strong rebound following the phase-out of DDT, which caused disastrous eggshell thinning in numerous species, as chronicled by Rachel Carson.)

As I said, it’s not uncommon to catch a sighting of one, and I always enjoy it when I do, but… They’re usually extremely far away, and they’re always hard to approach. My typical sighting involves a distant bird sitting in a transmission tower, seen through a spotting scope, or perhaps a spotting-scope view of one perched high up on Morro Rock, or binocular views of one or even several soaring above it. But that morning was the first time I managed to get a bit more intimate look.

Usually when I go to Morro Strand a few hours after dawn, it’s pretty crowded with strollers, dogs, strollers with dogs, and kids who love nothing better than to run through a lounging flock of gulls right when I spot the interesting Herring Gull among dozens of Westerns and Californias. That morning, though, there weren’t any dogs, and there were really only a few other people on the beach. There was a smattering of gulls lounging in the creek mouth, along with a lone Long-billed Curlew. And, shockingly, a pair of peregrines just sitting (well, standing) on the sand. They were relaxed, and I suppose that’s why they permitted a relatively close approach. (At no point was I closer than about 50 yards; as soon as I felt them starting to look at me and change their posture, I stopped and backed up a bit. It was still many times closer than I normally can get to these birds.)

From time to time one or the other would just lazily fly over the heads of the nearby gulls (and that one lone curlew). It didn’t look like they were trying to catch them; they were just enjoying the morning and having a little fun while stretching their wings. (The gulls and curlews weren’t quite as blasé about it as the falcons seemed to be.) One of the falcons even took advantage of the flight time to scratch at an annoying itch on its throat.

All told, I spent about 10 minutes watching them take turns going for short flights over the waves, landing relatively near one another, and basically just enjoying their morning the way I was enjoying mine. Then they either got bored or decided that they no longer wanted to perform for their appreciative papparazzo, so they took off and flew back over to Morro Rock.

When I eventually got the pictures “developed” (downloaded to my laptop and sorted), I was amazed to see an important feature that I hadn’t noticed while in the field: one of these birds was banded! That meant we have some life history for the bird, which is a rare chance too enticing to pass up!

I sent a few pictures of the banded bird to Steve Schubert, who literally wrote the book on the 50-year history of peregrines at Morro Rock (covering the years from 1967 to 2017), and he suspected that it might be the local breeding female, nicknamed Sierra. She’s been breeding on the north side of the rock for at least a decade. He checked in with Bob and Jerry of Pacific Coast Peregrine Watch, who confirmed that the bird was indeed Sierra, banded as a chick in 2012 about 100 miles up the coast at Elkorn Slough (112 straight-line flight, 139 miles up Highway 1, which just recently reopened).

Apparently there are two pairs of nesting falcons at the rock, but Sierra is the only one with a band. She was first documented as the north-side breeding female back in 2015, when she was 3 years old.

Terminological side note: male falcons (and hawks and eagles) are called tiercels; females are called formels.

Related Images:

The post Peregrines at Morro Creek first appeared on Benweb 3.3.

The day started off innocently enough, with a sunrise that I’d hoped would be spectacular (clouds and sunrise often work magic) but turned out to be meh, since there were too many clouds. I caught a peek of it from an eerily empty KCL campground, and then a bit further on I got a nice view from Soda Lake Road:

The clouds and the wind heralding the arrival of tomorrow’s storm front combined to suppress the number of raptors I saw, but I did manage to get a few good looks at Ferruginous Hawk and the ubiquitous Red-tailed Hawk:

I also saw for the first time (not pictured) a San Joaquin Kit Fox. I was stopped checking out a field (trying for Mountain Plover), and it ran top speed to get a ridge line between me and it. Presumably its den or at least a good hiding spot was on the other side of the little ridge. While I didn’t get a picture of the fox, I did get a decent image of a Nelson’s/San Joaquin Antelope Squirrel and my first ever image of a long-tailed weasel:

My normal turnaround spot is a big hill on the west side of Soda Lake Road; it has a water tower on top of it. On the east side is the road out to Van Matre Ranch interpretive site, which is about as close as you can drive to the Dragon’s Back pressure ridge, which is the place I haven’t been to yet and am itching to get to. But today was not the day. The road looked dry enough, but last week’s rain was apparently enough to make it a no-go. I powered through a long stretch of wet clingy mud, thanking my lucky stars for 4WD and high ground clearance, but I decided I’d rather turn around than risk getting stuck.

But here’s the view from the top of the hill:

I called it a day after that, but on the way home I got bonus time with a Golden Eagle on Hwy 58:

Related Images:

The post Carrizo Plain before the (next) rain first appeared on Benweb 3.3.