?Hi all, Today I lead a trip for SFO group 8 and none of us had a scope. Mine last week had got stuck with zooming-in mechanism. So I had sent it to the Vortex to 'unzoom'. It was back on Saturday morning according to FedEx tracking but it is sitting in a delivery van for a business day. So we tried to learn identification based on 'giss', behavior and other binocular visible characters. We had great birds.
First we stopped at Stewart park. As we pulled in, in a small puddle there were three birds, so we stopped for identification. From there we walked to the pond near the bridge and then we walked around swan pen pond. There were lots of Common and Hooded Mergansers, some displaying, Wood ducks (both males and females but males outnumbered the females), Buffleheads, Blue-winged Teals (3), lots of Greater Scaups and Ring-necked ducks on the main lake. Surprisingly there were no Redheads on the lake. But later I did see two of them flying by form the Fall Creek canal, but did not have chance to show it to the participants. We also had great day with raptors. Right at the lab we saw a pair of Red-tails contemplating on a electrical pole. Slightly down the road in front of Kip's Barn there was a pair of Kestrel, they too seemed to be wondering about the weather conditions. Down at the Stewart park, a subadult Bald Eagle flew over us, a Peregrine Falcon sat on a tallest tree on the edge of Jetty woods, on the east side of the Golf course. Twice we saw Osprey, once we had a very good look at it feeding on a fish, but most of the time it faced away from us while perched ion a tall tree. From here we went to Golf Course to look at the Great-horned owl. It was sitting on the nest and gave a very good viewing to us. While we were watching the lake we had quite a big wave of Tree Swallows. Overall we must have seen 20+ birds. At one point when I pointed my binoculars towards the sky I could see many small dots and they were Tree Swallows. >From here we went to Monkey run to look at some woodland birds, our field >trip's goal was in fact upland birds, but because of poor weather conditions >everyone was headed to the lake. Monkey Run was initially very quiet, but we >did see some nice birds. A Red-breasted Nuthatch sat on a tippy top of a tree >and trumpeted his tunes quite vigorously for long time! We also flushed a >Ruffed Grouse from his secret lair. Over all we enjoyed the birds and we proved one can do birding without the aid of a scope. Over all we had 47 species. Only I saw three Yellow-rumped warblers land at the tip of the trees from the sky and took off fairly quickly. They seemed to be migrants just arriving form their long journey. Cheers Meena Meena Haribal Ithaca NY 14850 42.429007,-76.47111 http://www.haribal.org/ http://meenaharibal.blogspot.com/ Ithaca area moths: https://plus.google.com/118047473426099383469/posts Dragonfly book sample pages: http://www.haribal.org/dragonflies/samplebook.pdf -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
