Some birds for the new year

Winter, such as it is here on the mild, frost-free Central Coast, means birds, birds, birds. Migrants of all sorts are down from their breeding grounds up north, and even the year-round resident species seem more abundant than in the warmer months.

There’s also the upcoming weekend’s Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival. Not the kind where people dress up as birds and flap their arms, the other kind. This one involves four days of birding field trips and lectures. It’s a big deal, supposedly the largest such event in the country, with many of the nation’s top bird authorities in attendance. Marla and I plan to spend a lot of time there, including some volunteer organizing.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a few recent bird shots in recognition of the Festival and of the new year. None of these birds are rare, or even uncommon. Just beautiful.

A Song Sparrow proclaims his supremacy from a silver lupine at Montaña de Oro State Park. These guys are ubiquitous throughout much of the U.S. and Canada, but rather oddly we never see them at our backyard feeders. This in contrast to the White-crowned, Yellow-crowned, and White-throated Sparrows that swarm our feeders almost year round.

We ran into a small gang of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers foraging for insects at MDO. They’re more gray than blue to my geriatric eyes. Apparently they tend to be bluer in the eastern part of their range.

This one has spotted a bug (or maybe a spider) hanging near the base of the side branch.

A moment later, the gnatcatcher flies off with the bug in its beak. (Notice that the bug is now missing from the branch.)

A Bewick’s Wren, again at Montaña de Oro. These delightful, feisty little birds are the most common of four wren species found in this area. We see them in our backyard quite often, either dining at our suet feeders or looking for insects in the garden. To me, the eye bar and long, curved bill lends them a certain fierce look, and they are indeed fierce—from an insect’s perspective.

A Common Loon stretches its wings in Morro Bay, near Morro Rock. These big, robust birds breed far to the north, but some individuals apparently forgo breeding and remain in this area year round. Loons are so highly adapted to a watery life that they can barely walk on land—their legs are set too far back. They cannot take off from the land, requiring a substantial stretch of open water to take flight.