Mississippi Kite

There's been a Mississippi Kite at the South Coast Botanic Garden in Palos Verdes for the last week or so. He's way off-course, and who knows how long he'll stick around, so Jonathan and I drove down yesterday to see him while we still had a chance. We tried taking several pictures and none of them turned out very well, but you can get a pretty good idea of what he looks like:
After perching for several minutes to allow us ample time to get a good look, he put on quite a show. He would fly around catching insects and eating them on the wing. That is, he would grab them with his talons and then bring his talons to his beak and eat while he was soaring. Insects-to-go! He also showed us his diving and swooping skills, which were quite impressive.

We met up with several other birders there, one of whom we actually had seen at Big Morongo a few weeks ago. He records bird songs and had his equipment with him this time as well. We all chased a familiar call that we couldn't identify, until the bird finally showed himself to be a Robin!

Here's a cute little house we saw near a meadow where a wedding reception was taking place.

We left around 5:00 for our next destination: The Point Vicente Lighthouse. On our way, we saw a White-tailed Kite. And when we got there, we saw another wedding reception. So, two kites and two weddings. Not bad for an afternoon.

We saw several cool things besides the lighthouse. There was a colony of Brandt's Cormorants on the side of the cliff, an unidentifiable pelagic bird, a couple of people who claim to have out-of-body experiences and want us to do the same, and a sea otter. The last was clearly the most exciting. We set up our spotting scope and got some good looks at that cute little guy, but eventually he dove and we never saw where he came back up.

That's right. We're not just into birds. We like marine mammals, too!