All the teams have talked in the latest videos about how much this leg has been like a three-day in-port race, with constant maneuvers and hardly any sleep for anyone. It must be quite an emotional ride on board right now. And big conditions: The live helicopter shots of them surfing at 25 knots down the Danish coast in the past few hours were amazing.
Win or lose, they are going to be exhausted when they finish tomorrow.
Ooh, split developing with the upcoming exclusion zones. Dongfeng appears to be taking the inshore route, Brunel is going outside, and it looks like MAPFRE has decided to go outside with Brunel.
In the on-board interview they did an hour ago with Libby on Scallywag it sounded like she was saying the inshore route was strongly favored. With Brunel, given that they were behind, taking the less-favored option makes sense; might as well risk it at this point. But for MAPFRE, going outside seems like more of a high-stakes gamble. They were leading Dongfeng (though just barely). But going outside with Brunel means conceding the race if the in-shore route really is better. So Joan and Xabi must believe the outside route really is the way to go.
Charles and Pascal either just won this edition of the race, or just put themselves in third. And with nearly 100 miles of separation zone and no way to get back across it, we might find out well before the finish which it is.
@a-solitary-sea-rover: You can tell your mom her team is absolutely in this. Can’t wait to see who pulls it out in the next leg!
Oh, she knows!
Way to keep Mom in the loop. 🙂
Honestly, this is one of those things that happens every so often in sports that if you put it in a movie would be criticized as unbelievable. Ten legs over nine months around the ENTIRE WORLD, and now because of some incredibly badass sailing and a pass in the last few miles the top three teams are going into the final leg tied on points. They’re far enough ahead of the rest of the fleet that none of the others can threaten them, so the final result will be determined by whatever order those three boats finish in.
Any of them can win. MAPFRE, who started incredibly strong and are still right there. Dongfeng, who have sailed so consistently well that even though they haven’t won a leg they would still have a big overall lead if it weren’t for the wind gods destroying them coming into Newport. And Brunel, who started off doing relatively poorly but have come alive at the right time.
Leg 11 starts a week from today, and I have no idea who’s going to win. 😀
Today an out-of-the-area birder reported a juvenile Mississippi Kite along Alisal Road south of Solvang (fun fact: pretty much the same place Sean and Sinéad went for their Sundance retreat a few months ago). Mississippi Kites have only been documented three previous times in Santa Barbara County, and the mood among local obsessives was cautious/pessimistic.
Mark and Joan took off right away. They bird all the time (in fact were out birding already). Mark is #1 in eBird for Santa Barbara County for the year; the closest I’ve been able to get is 9 birds behind him. Joan doesn’t do eBird, I don’t think, but if she did I suspect she’d be ahead of me too.
I didn’t go after it. It was a work day, and though my hours are pretty flexible, taking an hour to drive to Alisal Road and an hour and a half to drive home (b/c of Santa Barbara’s mini rush hour) plus whatever time was spent in between looking for the bird would mean a lot of work time to make up. The fact that the bird had been reported once didn’t mean it would be easy to refind; rarities often keep moving.
Except Joan refound the bird. So I grabbed my binoculars and went.
I ended up spending about two hours walking the road looking across the golf course toward where the bird had been seen last. At that point, hot and getting hungry, I gave up, said goodbye to the birders who’d been there searching with me, and headed home.
Shortly after arriving, as I was about to eat dinner, the group chat came to life again: Conor and Julie (who were on the Big Pine Mountain Survey with me last weekend) had arrived shortly after I left, and Julie had refound the bird.
Sigh. I didn’t drive back. But I’ve set my alarm for 4 a.m.
Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor) – photo by Stephen Kolbe
With any luck, by this time tomorrow I’ll be headed to the Cuyama Valley to see if any of this bird’s smaller cousins (Lesser Nighthawks) are willing to go on my county year list. Wish me luck!
Happy #Flyday everyone!! Saturday is Global Big Day!! I hope we have as much luck as we did last weekend with this GORGEOUS Hooded Warbler! Let’s GOOOO! #hoodedwarbler #warbler #lucky #lifer #globalbigday #letsgo #birdwatching #nycaudubon #nycnature #nycparks #nycbirds #bird #birding #brooklynbirding #brooklyn #greenwoodcemetery #floweringtree #spring #migration #urbanbirding #urbanwildlife #nycwildlife #audubon #wildnyc #myfavoriteseason (at Green-Wood Cemetery)
#220. I got tired of trying and failing to see Horned Larks in the Santa Ynez Valley, so I said screw it; I’m going to Cuyama, the wide-expanses cattle-grazing valley in the northeast corner of Santa Barbara County. Set the alarm for 4 a.m., got to Cottonwood Canyon Road just as it was getting light, and boom! First birds I saw were a pair of Horned Larks that flitted up to check me out (as some curious cows were already).
Saw my first of the season after work today at the Bates Road bridge, right on the Santa Barbara / Ventura county line. The bird was helpfully foraging in a willow tree on the Santa Barbara side of the bridge.
I also heard a FOS Pacific-slope Flycatcher a couple of times, but the only time I could unambiguously locate where the call was coming from it was on the Ventura side, so I didn’t count that one in my SBA list. But it would have been #216.
And _then_ late in the afternoon I briefly thought I heard a FOS Hooded Oriole in the palm trees a few doors down from our house. The oriole chatter didn’t continue, and I wasn’t able to find the bird after I grabbed my binoculars, so I didn’t list it. But in conclusion it’s a very exciting time to be obsessing about one’s county year list in SoCal.
I guess it’s only fairly recently, and only around fairly hard-core birdwatchers, that I’ve heard the phrase “dipped” used this way. It means to try to see a particular reported rarity, but come up empty.
I dipped on the Orchard Oriole again today. But someone else saw him, so he’s still around.
When I was little I’d page through the field guides. We had two on the shelf, legacies of my dad’s upbringing in New Jersey with a mother who was a birdwatcher. There was an original-edition Peterson and an older all-in-one birds+mammals+fish+reptiles+amphibians guide, but both were east-of-the-Mississippi in terms of coverage, so there were a lot of species I never actually saw.
The male Orchard Oriole always caught my attention, though, because look at him: such a different color for an oriole, remarkable and gorgeous but so WEIRD. And then I spent most of my life as a non-traveler, living (and birding) almost exclusively in California. But on October 17 I was walking Rory along the channelized creek near our house and suddenly there he was, plain as day atop a patch of Cape honeysuckle: the bird that had occupied my imagination for 50 years.
It seemed too early for an overwintering bird; probably a fall vagrant on his way south. I didn’t even think about him sticking around for the Christmas count, then scheduled for December 16. But week after week he stayed, and it started getting close enough to hope. And then the fire happened, and half our circle was on fire or smoldering on count day with the rest under a thick pall of smoke, so we postponed to the last possible day: January 5. And again, the chances that he might still be there seemed slim.
There are a lot of misadventures that can befall a bird, especially one so brightly colored, out of its normal range and small for an oriole. More than once while waiting for him to appear I’ve seen an adult Cooper’s Hawk, a female, I think, from her large size, fly in and perch in the eucalyptus that overlooks that Cape honeysuckle patch, listening and scanning for movement just like me, and though I’ve appreciated her presence I’ve also been quietly anxious on the oriole’s behalf, and have felt relieved when she’s given up or been discovered by crows and chased off. Yes. Thank you. Go find some sparrows further up the path.
I haven’t seen him since we got back from evacuating, but someone else did 5 days ago. So he’s still there, or was. Maybe later today after the family event I’ll go look for him, my non-traditional avian family member. Merry Christmas. Please stay. Please be shy and cautious, and watch out for hawks and cats.
