Birds ore one part – okay, the biggest part – of birding.   But understanding birds also means understanding the places they live.  I wanted to learn more about the habitats in the Yosemite high country (one of my very favorite places) and took a Yosemite Association class on the ecology of the high Sierra.   We looked at all elements of the ecosystem – plants, animals, geology, climate.

Female American Kestrel at Mono Lake (nest tree)

Did you see this piece about Barack Obama?  Look at the kind of right-wing talking spew they're splashing across their pages:

"When I started organizing, I understood the idea of social change in a very abstract way," Obama told me last year. "It was to some extent informed by my years in Indonesia, seeing extreme poverty and disparities of wealth and understanding sort of in a dim way that life wasn’t fair and government had something to do with it. I understood the role that issues like race played and took inspiration from the civil-rights movement and what the student sit-ins had accomplished and the freedom rides.

"But I didn’t come out of a political family, didn’t have a history of activism in my family. So I understood these things in the abstract. When I went to Chicago, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to test out my ideas. And for the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful. The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."

I love my backyard.  I share photos taken there regularly, including last week's goldfinch diary where all the photos were taken from my living room window, looking at my favorite feeder.

That feeder comes down today and will stay down until I can find an answer to my problem.  You see, one of my neighbors has a cat and it's outside most of the time.  Not in their yard, though - in mine.  I love the birds and don't want to lure them to their deaths, so I'm going to give up my happiness for their safety.

If that neighbor stood at their window with a BB gun and picked off birds at my feeder and shat under my bushes and regularly had loud sex on my bench,  no one would blame me for calling the cops and having them hauled away.  But since it's the neighbor's cat who's doing the killing, shitting and screaming, I've been tolerant.  It's not the cat's fault that the neighbor doesn't take care of it.

It’s mid-summer – goldfinch time!  Right now, they’re at their peak wearing their most brilliant feathers, singing constantly and engaging is wild, fluttering territorial battles (as wild as you can get when you weigh half an ounce).

Adult male American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)

(Pictures will be emerging slowly this week, as we’re at the cabin and I’m on dial-up.)

How can a person live in California for 16 years before they ever make a trip to Yosemite?  I dunno, but it happened to me.  Stoopid!!  Fortunately, I've worked hard at making up for lost time ever since.  A few weeks ago, I got away for a much needed long weekend to take the "Yosemite Hawks and Owls" class offered by the Yosemite Association.

Great Grey Owl (Strix nebulosa), Westfall Meadow, Yosemite

Steller’s and juncos and Golden-crowned Sparrows,
Brown streaky shorebirds with beaks long and narrow,
Peregrine falcons with black tapered wings,
These are a few of my favorite things....

Steller's Jay, my long-time friends at our cabin

Indulge me, please.  It’s my birthday.  I have a nice, thoughtful diary all written about the birds of Yosemite (ps – thanks to dcoronata for covering with a great diary last Saturday!), but it’s getting bumped until next week.  Instead, this about the things that bring me pure joy.

If the world of birds and birding was like the human world, I'd be like a society section reporter, scrutinizing everyone's attire (to see how well they're doing) and checking on who's aging well and who's not.  Fortunately, in the world of birds, there's actually some justification for doing so.  I can just say I'm a molt geek, and let it go at that.

Nice outfit on this Cooper's Hawk, but she has a few loose ends there, doesn't she?  Teenagers... sheesh.

(I'm at our cabin, with some computer problems and some dialup issues, so pictures will be trickling in over the next little bit of time.  Lots more pix from the workshop that inspired this in last week's Dawn Chorus.)

Since many of us will be enjoying the long weekend, this is a sort of vacation edition of Dawn Chorus.  I just got back from a week of studying molt patterns in passerines and other smaller birds.  Most of the other participants were biologists; a few were volunteer passerine banders.  I felt a bit like a bio-groupie, wanting to learn a bit more about some birds who I haven't spent much time with.

                             
                               Warbling Vireo (Vireo gilvus)

You don't need to be a bird geek to appreciate parrots.  They're bright, colorful, curious and intelligent, they can be quite friendly... and they can talk.  On the other hand, I think you need to be a fairly committed bird geek to understand parrots (or at least try to).  For 20 years now, we've shared our home with birds; for 18-1/2 years, we've had parrots and we're looking forward to many, many more years.  To make the most of a very long-term relationship with our macaw, I made a few visits to her ancestral home to see macaws in the wild.  It gave me some insights into her behavior, and also taught me a lot about the challenges faced by wild macaws and other parrots.

Blue and Yellow Macaws (Ara ararauna) in flight over Tambopata, Peru

I wasn't a birder when I lived in Michigan, so I never really had the experience of the proper winter-into-spring birder's re-awakening.  In California, it's more like a shift change from wintering birds to breeding birds; in a lot of spots the numbers decrease as winter wanes.  We do still have an obvious change of season, and I just celebrated one of my rites of spring.

Mines Road.

My friend and I made our annual pilgrimage Mines Road (south of Livermore, CA).  Since she first introduced me to the spot 15 years ago or so, I visit every year - often twice, if I can make it.  It's a nice loop of a day trip, and there are three or four species to see here that are hard to find in the rest of the bay area.  It's also a really nice wildflower location, which just makes it that much more of a treat.  Join me over the jump for a daytrip, and maybe share some of your own favorites.

Even by birders' standards, I'm a really early riser.  When this goes up around 6am (SF time), I've usually been awake for an hour or two.  The hours before sunrise are a wonderful time of day; the world is silent, calm and cool.  At 4 am, you pretty much have the place to yourself.  But in mid-late spring, you start noticing that you have company around 4:30. By sunrise, you're surrounded by others, all with plenty to say.

And not a human in the bunch.  This is the hour of the Dawn Chorus.

I just had a conversation with the mailman at my office.  He's keen on politics, and we've had a lot of interesting conversations over the years.  We both wanted Gore to run, and held out hope that he would until after the Nobel Prize came and went without an announcement.

After that, we both drifted toward Edwards, and liked Dodd after his FISA stand (would just love to have him for Senate Majority Leader).  Even though we'd pretty much settled on Edwards, we were listening to all the candidates.  When Edwards dropped out a week before our primary in California, we voted for our second choice.

(Apologies for the short diary, but there didn't seem to be any point to adding padding.)

Golden Gate Audubon is looking for volunteers over the next few days to help enter data re:  the Cosco Busan accident last November.  Since I know that my fellow Bay Area Kossacks are a) concerned about the enviroment, b) wanting to bring the guilty parties to justice in the aftermath of this event, and c) computer literate and fast on the keyboards, it just seemed natural to post this here.

Wouldn't it be a good way to celebrate Earth Day?  Make a difference!

More info below the jump

The Salton Sea, seen from Obsidian Butte (click here for full-size version; note: 1 mb file)

Last week, I wrote about going to Anza Borrego for the Swainson's Hawk spring migration (as well as the plenty of other cool birds and wildflowers, too).  We took one day of our trip to visit the Salton Sea, which is about 30 miles east of Anza Borrego (and over 200 feet below sea level).  This "accidental" body of water is extremely important to birds for breeding, migration and wintering.  Unfortunately, the Sea is drying up, and the increased salinity is killing the food sources for the birds.  Various plans for saving the sea have been proposed but (as far as I know) no work has been done yet.

Do not recommend this diary.
Recommend the Live Blog Mothership: Petraeus & Crocker to keep us on the recommend list.

Afternoon Hearing - Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

Part 1:  Live Blog Mothership - Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Part 2:  lineatus - You Are Here!
Part 3:  webranding
Part 4:  losty
Part 5:  Jayw
Part 6:  GlowNZ

Desert wildflowers, Swainson's hawks and soaring mountains... can't beat it.    I was desperately in need of recharging, and a long-planned trip to Anza-Borrego and Salton Sea (in southern California, inland from San Diego) was just the right way to do it.

Wildflowers, mountains, and (if you squint) probably some birds.  click here for larger

(Big thanks to tgypsy for guest-hosting last week so that I could make my getaway!)

It's kind of hard to think of a predator as, well, cute.  But really, how else to describe this guy?

American Kestrel (Falco spaverius), juvenile male

Few creatures have fascinated humans like owls.  We envy birds for their ability to fly; owls have the added mystique of mastering the night.  Their adaptations include a remarkable sense of hearing, feathers that allow them to fly silently, and keen eyesight.

In the US, owls range in size from the tiny elf owl of the southwest deserts (roughly the size of a fox sparrow) to the great grey owl, who is almost three feet from beak to tail.  Though other owls may be larger, none are quite so fearsome as the great horned owl.

Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) at twilight

Fear not, fans of other owls - there will be more owl diaries in the future.