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At the end of July (and very early August) I was working at a summer camp in the Petaluma area. I brought my binoculars hiking almost every morning. Most of the birds I saw were turkey vultures, but I also saw jays (California scrub; Steller's), sparrows (lark; chipping; dark-eyed junco; California towhee; spotted towhee), swallows (barn; cliff), finches (house; gold), flycatchers (western wood-pewees; black phoebes), woodpeckers (hairy; northern flicker), doves (mourning; Eurasian collared) western bluebirds, chestnut-backed chickadees, California quails, Bewick's wrens, American kestrels, red-tailed hawks, wild turkeys, crows, and ravens! Almost all the photos are of turkey vultures, which are one of my favorites, and I'm really excited about some of these shots!  Female or immature lesser goldfinch, I think. Possibly an American goldfinch?  A flock of turkeys that wandered the campus  Not a bird, but there's a dilapidated, lichen-covered, crumbling observatory on one of the hills and on an extremely foggy hike I saw 3 or 4 ravens sitting on the dramatic-looking dead tree and it all seemed like some very heavy-handed symbolism but it was just birds being birds.  Speaking of heavy-handed symbolism, these two turkey vultures perched on this gate that I was about to go through, and especially with the moon in the background it felt very intentional, and I had the urge to ask their permission before passing through.  Action shot of the vultures on the gate! There were actually three vultures, but I never got a picture of all three.  Possibly my favorite bird photo I've ever taken - through-the-binoculars close-up of one of the vultures from the gate above.  Another close-up of one of the gate guardian vultures! I love the colors visible in their feathers.  A turkey vulture sunning itself on top of a tree. If you look closely, you might be able to see a cliff swallow flying across the background on the left side, but it just looks like a black dot.
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Lee Metcalf Wildlife Refuge  Male green-winged teal (kinda funny-looking one)  California quails in the parking lot  California quails in the road  Juvenile great horned owl from behind  Juvenile great horned owl from the side  Adult great horned owl  Baby northern flicker in a nest waiting for its mom to bring back food  The same baby northern flicker (we also saw its sibling, but I didn't get any photos)  More quails! A female (left/front) and male (right/back)  A male California quail Maclay Flat  Cooper's hawk (probably)  Another hawk very close to the other one - possibly also a Cooper's hawk, but because of the light I really couldn't see any details  A cool spiderweb hanging over the river  The spiderweb again  Some gorgeous rocks from the river At the beginning of June my family went on a trip through Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Here are some of the birds and other highlights from the trip! Yellowstone National Park  American dipper  American dipper again, very blurry but you can see that it's about to dip into the water
 Adult killdeer
 A gorgeous raven who was a little too comfortable around humans  Not a bird, but some bison we saw!  A pair of marmots!  Shooting star flowers  Violet-green swallow Other birds we saw in Yellowstone include Canada jays, white-crowned sparrows, killdeer, and American white pelicans! Grand Teton National Park I didn't take any bird photos in Grand Teton, but we saw bald eagles, northern shovelers, spotted sandpipers, bank swallows, and more! Here's a moose we saw from the car:  And here are the Grand Tetons themselves with their reflection:  May started out pretty low on birds because I had finals and didn't have time to go birding as much as I wanted. Pretty much as soon as my finals were done, though, I headed outside to look for birds! Friday, May 10th - Maclay Flat On the Friday after my finals I took the day off from work so I could drive to Bozeman (more on that later), but before I left I went to Maclay Flat, which is one of my favorite spots to bird in Missoula. It's a short, flat loop next to the river that has some marshy areas, forest, and more open grassy areas, so there's a lot of variety! Going at a normal pace, it probably only takes about 30 minutes to do the whole loop, but I've managed to do it in a whopping 2.5 hours because I make frequent stops. On this particular occasion, I saw 20 different species, all birds I've seen before and all birds I was excited to see again. Some highlights include yellow-rumped warblers, brown-headed cowbirds, two bald eagles, a red-tailed hawk, a mourning dove, and a killdeer. The most exciting, though, was a pair of Cooper's hawks! One of them flew right over me, about 15 feet away, with prey in its talons! I watched the Cooper's hawks for a little bit, but as soon as I got out my phone to take a picture, they took off. May 10-12th - Bozeman I got to spend the weekend in Bozeman with some family to celebrate my cousin's college graduation. It was a lovely weekend and I took 0 bird pictures, but the highlights were turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, yellow-rumped warblers, ospreys, a Cassin's finch (a new lifer for me), and ruby-crowned kinglets (another new lifer)! Not birds, but there were a few marmots running around near the place we stayed. Then on the drive home we saw some turtles and tiny little ground squirrels or prairie dogs or something. I also saw a herd of elk out the window!  Mountains in Bozeman  Turtle!  Osprey Sunday, May 19th - Maclay Flat Again I went back to Maclay Flat and saw several exciting birds! Highlights pictured below!  Western Bluebird  Eastern Kingbirds - not new lifers, but delightful and I think these are the first ones I've seen this season.  Black-chinned Hummingbird - These are new to me! I may have seen them before, but since hummingbirds are very little and fast-moving I'm not usually able to identify a species.  A pair of wood ducks! These are new to me and a bird I'd been hoping to see for a while, so I was really excited about them! The males (right) are really striking and distinct.  Male wood duck Saturday, May 25th - Ninepipe Wildlife Refuge For Memorial Day Weekend, my brother was in town! We drove to Kalispell on Saturday and stopped at Ninepipe Wildlife Refuge on our way. We saw lots of birds, mostly waterfowl.  Western Meadowlark - state bird of Montana  Ruddy Duck - A new lifer for me, and their beaks really are bright blue!  Marsh Wren - New lifer, very tiny bird with a very big voice Sunday, May 26th - Lone Pine State Park, National Bison Range I don't have many pictures from Sunday, but at Lone Pine we saw two mountain bluebirds (new lifer), and then on the drive back to Missoula we stopped at an overlook at the National Bison Range and saw cliff swallows (another new lifer)! Monday, May 27th - Mt. Dean Stone I didn't take any photos from this hike, but we saw a dusky grouse, which was super cool! I highly recommend looking up pictures of the dusky grouse online, because they're very funky. We also saw a western tanager, a pileated woodpecker, house wrens, a calliope hummingbird, and some cool wildflowers and trees!  Fairy slipper orchid
This morning (Saturday, March 30nd) I got to tag along on some ornithology students' field trip to Freezeout Lake, which is a hotspot for migrating snow geese in Montana! Earlier in the week, a friend told me they saw 90,000 geese (yes, 90,000!) while they were there (and got pooped on twice). Many of the geese have moved on since then, but we still saw several thousand!
I got up at 5:45am, met the students and the T.A. (who's a friend of mine and the reason I got to join), and we drove about 2.5 hours to the lake. It was a beautiful scenic drive and I didn't take any photos (sorry!), so you'll just have to imagine the turquoise sky before the sunrise, the snow-covered mountainside pine forests, and green rivers meandering through rust-red rock formations. Other people in the car saw some elk, but I missed them. We also saw some birds on the drive -- most notably, two rough-legged hawks flying right next to the road! We saw our first huge flock of geese standing in an agricultural field, so we pulled over and watched as literally thousands of geese flew over us to the lake. It was stunning! Then we continued to the lake itself and watched the geese for a while. We also saw tundra swans, red-winged blackbirds, western meadowlarks, a northern harrier, two ring-necked pheasants, various gulls, and miscellaneous ducks (mostly wigeons and mallards). We also saw part of a dried-up dead fish, so I got to look at a fish spine. A few of the snow geese we saw were the "blue morph," which is the same species but instead of being mostly white with some dark wing-patches, they're mostly dark with a white head! 
Geese in the air, and that long white strip in the grass is also all geese!
For the most part the geese were not actually making that much noise, but at one point a few thousand decided to start flying almost simultaneously, and they got much louder. I took a short video:
We kept driving partway around the lake and stopped to look at some western meadowlarks and horned larks! I had never seen horned larks before, so that was pretty exciting! The meadowlarks on this trip were also my first meadowlarks of the season (they migrated south for the winter), so I was pleased about them as well.
Two male horned larks
After the larks was one of the biggest highlights of the day -- a gorgeous short-eared owl hunting in the fields next to the road! We watched it hunt for quite a while. I didn't get any still photos, but I did get a short video! It's a little shaky at the start, but in the second half you can see the owl fairly well.
.We kept driving and saw a dead vole on the road. Two of the people on the trip have been working with the university's museum (I cannot give more details about this because I don't know the details) and one of them is also studying rodents for their PhD thesis, so they decided to collect the vole as a specimen. We needed a container, so I offered to make room in my tupperware with my sandwich for a piece of shortbread (not the vole), so that the ziploc bag formerly occupied by the shortbread could be used to carry the vole.
We stopped again to eat some snacks (sandwiches and donuts, not the vole) and saw more geese, miscellaneous ducks, and two American white pelicans! The pelicans are in their breeding season right now, so they had what's called a nuptial tubercle on their bills (looks like a funny flat nubbin; the internet says it's a "fibrous plate"). No pictures from this spot, unfortunately. After eating our snacks, we got back in the car to head home. We saw more birds on the drive, including common mergansers, various hawks, and a bald eagle. Most exciting from the drive home was a pair of sandhill cranes! We drove past them at first, but turned around to watch them, and it was so worth it. I'd seen sandhill cranes before, but they are always a delight, and this was the best view I've had of them in a while.
This pictures is quite a bit blurrier than the others, but I enjoy the position of its legs.
Also on the drive, we saw an American coot (kind of chicken-shaped, acts like a duck, isn't really either) and a turkey vulture! I love turkey vultures and, like with the meadowlarks, hadn't seen any yet this year because they also migrated south and are just starting to come back!
All-in-all, a fantastic day! At some point I can update this post with the full list of birds we saw, but one of the other people in the group was keeping track of sightings for the group as a whole and I don't have the list yet. I hope you enjoy the pictures and videos! |
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