Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

By the time we left the California Overland Tour, the sun was setting; but we decided to drive through town on the way back to the hotel. (Not a lot else to do in Borrego Springs after dark.) Beth spotted a church off in the distance, and wanted to check it out. In fact, she spotted several. About four are lined up in a row along Church Lane. However we parked at the Episcopal Church and walked around a bit. House Finches and Lesser Goldfinches were both present in some small abundance.

As Beth was checking out the labyrinth, I was walking around the other side of thee church and spotted another small bird in the back of a small but bushy tree. I thought it was just another finch, but after putting my binoculars on it, I decided it was something else. A kinglet maybe, or perhaps a Gnatcatcher. A Gnatcatcher out here could well be a Black-tailed Gnatcatcher, which would be a life bird for me. So I’m looking closely at the tail, trying to figure out if it’s more white or dark underneath, all the while the bird is moving around in the back of a tree I can barely see in the fading light.

Then all of a sudden the bird turns into my field of view, and I’m looking at its head instead of its tail. Damned if the head isn’t yellow. Gnatcatchers don’t have yellow heads, but Verdins do. The bird flies off, and the light was far too gone to hope for a photo, even if it had stayed. However, the yellow head is pretty distinctive, #463, Verdin.

The next morning we did find several more Verdins at the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Visitors center, this time in light good enough for a photo. Here’s one:

However the lifer was at St. Barnabas Church.

Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias
San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, 2009-03-08

San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, 2009-02-26

My photography is definitely improving. Just compare to this shot from a little over a year ago. Of course that was a cloudy winter day in Brooklyn, and this was a bright sunny day in southern California, but still the difference is remarkable. I still have a long way to go before Arthur Morris has anything to worry about.

One thing I still have to figure out is proper gamma adjustment. This picture looks great on my Mac but is much too dark on my Ubuntu/Gnome desktop. Haven’t checked Windows yet. Is it possible to make a photo like this actually work across all platforms? I know the Mac gamma is about 1.8 and the PC gamma is about 2.2. Not sure about Linux.

Anna’s Hummingbird, Calypte anna
Irvine, CA, 2009-02-20

American Pipit, San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, 2009-01-29
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2008 was a year I moved to a new state on the other side of the country, and a part of that state I’d only been to once before. It also featured trips to China and Louisiana. The net result was one of the biggest years I’ve had in a long time. According to eBird, my year total was somewhere over 300 species. I don’t know exactly because I don’t enter the China data there. Even more impressively, 2008 saw 61 life birds, 12 from China, 3 from Louisiana, and 46 from California. That’s not even counting some new exotics like this Red-whiskered Bulbul from Huntington Library and Gardens:

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