Monday Birding Post:

So, there've been two bald eagles (it appears) sighted in Orange County in recent days. Since Libby and I love to look at cool/rare birds, and this is a very cool/rare bird, we took a track to where one's been seen the most: Yorba Park in Anaheim. Yorba Park is right along the Santa Ana River, where it runs along the 91. It's near where Imperial hits the 91.

Anyway, we dropped by Saturday morning, but we didn't see it. That's unfortunate, as it had been seen Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Monday mornings. Gee whiz, you would think it was wild!

We did see some cool birds, though. And then we went to the Newport Back Bay and saw more cool birds.

Highlights?

Yorba Park:

1. The river and lakes in the park are full of fun birds. Coots, Cinnamon Teal, Blue-winged Teals, Canada Geese, Wood Ducks (second most colorful duck in the world), American Wigeons, etc...

2. Among the ducks we saw Redheads, which were lifers. Redheads are ducks with red heads. They're diving ducks, and seemed to like sleeping or diving best. "Hey, is that a redhead?"
"I can't tell, it's got its head shoved under its wing!"
"Oh, is that a redhead?"
"Where?"
"I don't know, it was there a second ago."

3. A mountain chickadee was chilling with a flock of bushtits. That's a rarity!

4. Juncos and blue-birds also resided in the park, which is fun.

Newport:

Newport's a bit of a drive, but it was serene and beautiful as always. I really like the back bay. This trip brought us to the preserve at low tide, which is both good and bad. The mud flats smelled pretty bad, and it was impossible to identify the peeps that were feeding out on the fringes of the mud without a spotting scope.

Highlights of that trip:

1. Green-winged teals, which were new to us. For some reason we had never seen them before, although they were very common this trip. They're very pretty ducks, with the cinnamon and green contrasting interestingly. I suppose their face is almost Christmasy. The colors are much richer than this picture can show, when you see them in the wild.

2. There was a flock of black skimmers sitting on a mud flat, along with a couple of Caspian Terns. The terns black masks are shrinking, which is an interesting point of variety from normal.

3. Last, but certainly not least, we were peering into some wigeons near the parking lot on Back Bay Drive, when we noticed that among them was a bird with a red head. Was it a Redhead? No. Was it a Green-winged Teal? No. It was a wigeon. Which makes it either a Eurasian Wigeon or a Eurasian Wigeon/American Wigeon hybrid. And that was the bird of the day!


Here's a Eurasian Wigeon (front) with an American Wigeon (back). American wigeons are very common. Eurasian Wigeons not so much. We kept clear of him, since, as an Asian stray, he probably has bird flu.

This was our first trip birding since the honeymoon, and it was fun to see the diversity of God's creation so brilliantly displayed. Especially, since all of the new birds we saw were ducks. And ducks are really exciting!

After birding we saw The Chronicles of Narnia. It was a good movie.