Mother’s Day hike (and Global Big Day birdwatching)
Today Wife and I took an easy hike with my parents. After a bit of a mishap with meeting up (it turned out the park had two completely different entrances!), we had a lovely walk. Among the interesting sightings:
- A dramatic hummingbird courtship display! (@lies, Is the Anna’s hummingbird the only one that does the flying up really high and then diving, swooping up out of the dive with a “peep!” and then hovering a little higher from the bottoming-out point of the dive, before repeating?)
- A tiny bunny!
- A lizard on a branch! (usually they are sunning themselves on rocks)
- A wrentit (well, this wasn’t a sighting but a hearing; my dad recognised it)
- A possible rufous-crowned sparrow? It definitely had a rufous crown, a plain grey front, and black mustache markings down the sides of the throat, and I definitely instinctively thought “sparrow” when I saw it, and it didn’t look like the photos of the other sparrows in the app, but Merlin says it is rare…
- various wildflowers
- A spotted towhee
This wasn’t a birdwatching walk, so I wasn’t keeping track on eBird, but I might report them later if I get confident enough about the sparrow.
For yesterday’s Global Big Day, I met up with a couple of friends by the mud flats and we had a nice bird walk for about an hour and a half, spotting 17 different species, though we couldn’t tell if the ducks were greater or lesser scaups. Our favorite sightings were:
- American avocets
- semipalmated plovers
- marbled godwits
- snowy egrets
- a black phoebe
- a pair of red-winged blackbirds
This is all fabulous birdwatching content; thanks for tagging me in!
Yes, that’s a classic Anna’s Hummingbird display flight: zooming up super high, then zipping down and making a sharp J-turn at the bottom, with an audible “chirp!” when he makes the turn. The chirp is produced by the wind whistling through his spread tail feathers.
I would agree with the Rufous-crowned Sparrow ID based on your excellent description. As a confirming point I’d ask about habitat: at least in my limited experience with them, Rufous-crowned Sparrows are fairly habitat-specific. According to Sibley:
“Uncommon on arid rocky hillsides with patches of shrubs and grass. Usually solitary or in pairs. Somewhat secretive, does not flock.”
So if what you saw seems consistent with that, I’d be pretty confident.
Your Global Big Day outing sounds awesome! And yeah, Greater vs. Lesser Scaup is a tricky ID for me, too. I need to spend more time out there with experts (and both species of scaups) to work on my ability to distinguish between them.
Shape of the head (Lesser somewhat taller and narrower with more of a distinct “corner” at the rear of the crown; Greater wider and more rounded), extent of the dark “nail” at the tip of the beak (Greater is larger), and extent of the whitest part of the white stripe across the trailing edge of the spread wing (Greater is more extensive) are the main points I’ve heard people talk about, but all of these can be subtle and subjective.
In the meantime, “Greater/Lesser Scaup” is a perfectly respectable ID.🙂
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/650800041016033280.
