Over Christmas Break (Yay for Holiday pay and the wonderful category of Bonus Day pay here at Biola), we had an opportunity to spend some time with both sides of the family and even got to do some birding with Bill and Becca.
Christmas Eve was spent with at Grandma and Grandpa's house, and that was a lot of fun, and so was Christmas at the Mootharts. Libby put up some pictures in an album on Facebook.
On the 26th, we headed off to Bolsa Chica with Bill and Becca, and we saw 65 species for the day. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but lots of fun looking at all the wintering water fowl. I was pleased we were able to find the resident White-tailed Kite for them, though we missed the resident Reddish Egret. The tide was really high, so we didn't do much shore-birding at all. A real highlight was a very confiding Brown Pelican sitting above a tide gate that let Becca get almost within arm's reach of him before flushing!
On the 27th, we visited the San Diego Wild Animal Park (photo album here). It was a real blast to see all the neat African animals. Of course, we really enjoyed the aviaries. Golden Orioles are beautiful anywhere, and so are Golden-headed Quetzals! There were also a good number of native species hopping in the bushes or flitting about. Bill and Becca got to see Say's Phoebes, Nuttall's Woodpeckers, and Cassin's Kingbirds. Libby and I got our binoculars on a beautiful soaring dark-morph Red-tailed Hawk - which was our first of that color morph for Red-tails. It was very striking.
Oh, and it turns out we saw a semi-wild Wood Stork that lives at the Wild Animal Park (but isn't an exhibit bird). We saw a stork flying between exhibits, but I just thought it was an escapee. It did occur to me that it looked just like a Wood Stork - white body and wings, with dark head and black flight feathers - primaries on down - but as I'm unfamiliar with the family in general, I couldn't eliminate other options. But I just read on a birding blog - 10,000 Birds - that there is a wild Wood Stork living there. I don't think we'll count it, though. On the one hand, I'm sure that we saw one, but on the other hand we didn't know what we were looking at, and I'd like to appreciate it better. Kind of like how we've held off on counting Varied Bunting so that we're sure to find it again and appreciate it in color (rather than in a distant silhouette).
We spent the last few days of that week relaxing! But on Monday the 31st, we went birding/walking with Mom and Dad at the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary. We had a pretty birdy day, with high-lights being all three local Teal species together in one place, Northern Shovelers feeding in their circles, an escaped exotic Weaver species, a female Phainopepla, and a Peregrine Falcon. We walked downstream on the trail toward the UCI Marsh, too, and saw lots of White Pelicans, egrets, herons, lots of White-throated Swifts and some Northern Rough-winged Swallows, and loads and loads of Red-tailed Hawks. One field showed 5 in one binocular view, with one more sitting about 2 degrees to the right!
After that, Libby and I headed off alone to chase down some Wilson's Snipes reported further upstream in San Diego Creek. That was a successful chase, too. After a little head scratching and intensive scanning of every little bump in this little urban run-off channel, we came up with 10-15 of the funny looking birds. So, that was our last lifer of the year, on the last day of the year. As we were watching, we also had a White-faced Ibis fly in, and out again, which was just a nice touch.
That afternoon we installed Microsoft Office on my parents' computers and a router, before going off to watch the new National Treasure movie (silly, but fun), and have a delightful fast food dinner. We got home and were in bed by 9:30 so we could get up early the next day for Disneyland!
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