The times I hear of a rare bird in my area I get excited especially when it is a lifer. So when I heard a report of a Painted Bunting in San Benito County just over the Santa Cruz County line I went for it.
Viewing entries tagged
CA
It's always exciting to find a rare visitor to your area but when you also get the opportunity to observe behavioral interactions the encounter becomes even more special. I was leading a Santa Cruz Bird Club field trip along the north coast of the county when I got a call from one of the birders in the group that he had found an immature Ferruginous Hawk interacting with Red-Tail Hawk.
Pescadero State Beach (meaning "the place to fish" in Spanish) is located along the coastal Highway 1 in San Mateo County between Ano Nuevo State Park (elephant seal breeding grounds) and Half Moon Bay, CA. The beach is about a mile long with sandy coves, rocky cliffs, tide pools, and the Pescadero Marsh Natural Preserve is just inland. My first stop was to the rocky parts of the beach and when I looked out I saw shorebirds on the rocks but there was something different: a Ruddy Turnstone.
There are about 80 species of wrens in 20 genera worldwide. Wrens are mainly a New World Family, distributed from Alaska and Canada to southern Argentina, with most in the Neotropics. There are 10 wren species in North America, which brings me to the featured photo: the Canyon Wren.