And the rest of California

(In a scandalous departure from tradition, the following four entries are written by Abby.)

April 8
A morning trip to Butterbredt Springs, in the middle of a Joshua Tree desert, didn’t yield much at first. But things started picking up after we decided to postpone birding in favor of breakfast (featured events: spilled milk, late-rising birds). An endless and barely-driveable dirt road finally spit us out into semi-civilization, aka the Kern Valley Preserve, where we saw a Tricolored Blackbird mixed in with the redwings. Then we had a longish highway drive, broken up by a Route 99 rest stop with wifi, and later by a life-saving In-N-Out Burger in Fresno. We spent the evening driving back and forth in search of the elusive Millerton Lake campground. After covering the same stretch of road three or four times we finally blundered our way there.

April 9
Our departure from Millerton Lake was hasty, and didn’t involve breakfast, a fact that we later rued. We didn’t end up eating till Yosemite, and at that point cereal wasn’t enough…so we demolished a whole bag of Sunchips as well (though it wasn’t yet 10 am).
After a brief stop in Yosemite Village for information, we drove on to the “Camp 4” walk-in campground, which means we you park in the lot and carry your stuff a few hundred yards to the campsite. Don conked out for a few hours of unplanned nap, but he eventually tore himself from his sleeping bag, and we took a free shuttle to the Happy Isles. The shuttle ride was an experience in itself, a scene of mild pandemonium. This was due to the high volume of passengers and the fact that most of them seemed to have no idea which stop was theirs (for all that, it was surprisingly good-natured).
We had no trouble getting off at our own stop, oddly enough, and proceeded to the horse-trail recommended to us earlier by a red-bearded ranger. As we made our way along the river, I inspected every tributary for American Dippers. Nothing. We did get one nice mixed flock of Golden-crowned Kinglets, Brown Creepers, and our first Chestnut-backed Chickadees (a novel take on the standard black-and-white color scheme).
After that, we took the normal people-trail onto the famed Happy Isles themselves, three islets situated euphorically in the middle of the river. And then, mostly by accident, I saw one! A dipper! If you’ve never seen one, I highly recommend doing so. It’s probably the coolest bird ever. Picture a small but incredibly rotund songbird perching on a rock in the middle of a violently rushing stream…then hurtling headfirst into the river, swallowed up in the blink of an eye. A few moments later it emerges somewhere else with a worm or other such prize. We watched it for as long as it stuck around, which was quite some time. After all this excitement, it was back to camp and bear-proofing measures (in the hopes that our car wouldn’t host one of the three weekly grizzly break-ins).

April 10
We were happy to observe an absence of bear damage when we woke up. We got on the road fairly quickly, but stayed on it for much longer than planned…the ten-minute drive became a forty-minute one because of construction. Finally we got to “Foresta” and hiked around, seeing a new (native!) pigeon along the way, the Band-tailed Pigeon. Then we endured another equally long wait for the same construction project, and finally exited the park. Our last stop in the area was “Savage’s Trading Post,” not only a fascinating historical site (I’m sure) but also the landmark for the nearby trail we took. This trail ran along a steep riparian hillside that was veritably blazing with wildflowers. Another inside tip from the red-bearded ranger.
As we neared Monterey, we stopped at strategically placed tourist office…not strategically timed, as it turned out. It closed at 5, while we arrived at 5:02. We had a particular dearth of info (and especially mappage) on this leg, but muddled through and managed to find our target, the Veteran’s Memorial Park campground next to the Presidio.
We ate a Subway meal and walked along the Monterey waterfront at dusk. A row of seals (remarkable in their ability to look both cute and sluglike at the same time) lay on the shore below, with Black Turnstones running around in between them. We’d never seen this species before, but they looked just like the Ruddy Turnstone, except darker all around. A bit further on, despite the dimming light, Don spotted a couple of Black Oystercatchers, an all-black version of our American Oystercatcher. I managed to manually test the temperature of the water without getting my shoes soaked from incoming waves (a feat if there ever was one).
We drove back inland and uphill to the campground, lulled to sleep not by owls or nightjars, but by yalping sea lions. The fact that their noise carries that far is pretty impressive. At 10 p.m. we were treated to a possibly live (though improbably well-performed) rendition of Taps.

April 11
Morning in Veteran’s Memorial Park: fortunately, woke up before Reveille. A brief visit to Fisherman’s Wharf comprised the sum total of our Monterey cultural experience. After a perfectly revolting breakfast of whatever we happened to have in the car, we drove north up the coast to Elkhorn Slough – an estuarine preserve that requires you to both wipe and disinfect the bottom of your shoes before entering, so you won’t introduce some lethal oak disease or something. I don’t remember what. It’s been a long time since my Williams-Mystic maritime studies field seminar to California. Our next stop: Moss Landing State Beach, home to an impressive array of marine mammals (seals, sea otters, sea lions, and sea-crazed surfing fanatics). Also plenty of Brandt’s cormorants, all three types of scoters, and gulls. It was lateish in the afternoon before we finally got on the road toward San Francisco, and as we’d feared, we ran into some horrible traffic. Don, for one, was saved psychologically by a Taco Bell burrito along the way. I drove the last part into the city, and faced the formidable task of finding a parking place near our destination. We ended up playing musical parking spots with a local guy who somehow was driving two cars at the same time. He pulled up in one, got out, offered to switch places with us (saying he had a bigger spot and a smaller car), pulled a DIFFERENT car into the spot we vacated, and got back into the previous car and drove away. After this excitement we were welcomed into the apartment of Maggie Carr, Don’s former housemate at Williams. We enjoyed the novelty of conversing with people who were not (1) us, or (2) an elderly birding couple.

(Back to Don.)
April 12
Recent feedback suggests that long, relatively unedited journal-style posts are intimidating to read. Also, I’m very short on time. So we hope you enjoy a sparser text for our most recent adventures.
We slept in later than usual (i.e. past daybreak) and headed to Maggie’s lab to help (i.e. watch) with the changing over of a rat brain from one vial to another. Or at least that’s what I think happened. My housemate is a PhD student…weird.
She showed us through the Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park. They have strange sections (like Cloud Forest, Succulents, and Redwoods) that mimic natural settings from around the world. Unfortunately, the corresponding birds aren’t part of the package. This is a state that already has stands of Australian eucalyptus naturalized and thriving up and down the coast. I guess they just get bored with their own trees here? Well, they haven’t been boring to us. Redwoods aren’t great for birds – you can’t see the canopy, for one – but they sure are impressive otherwise. We stumbled across a herd of bison grazing in the park (and winning the award for least creative Latin name ever: Bison bison). Soon after that, we came to a large Dutch windmill. And of course we encountered multitudes of the strange, strange people who make San Francisco famous. The beach was full of them. It was the hottest day they’d had in quite a while, which lined up nicely with the weekend. Perhaps for that reason, the birds were nowhere to be found in the beachy areas. It’s particularly frustrating when you see placards indicating a protected area for a given endangered breeding bird, in this case the Snowy Plover, but you can’t find any sign of its existence there (aside from the…uh…signs).
The coast is beautiful. The public transportation was not on top of its game however, and we ended up waiting a solid half hour for a street-train that, due to the delays, had about three times its passenger capacity crammed into it. We made it back to Maggie’s neighborhood in time for a great Ethiopian meal at a nearby establishment. We met up with Maggie’s boyfriend Paul’s cousin, who in turn brought two friends, so we had a stout party of seven for the proceedings. Instead of utensils, you eat communally, using a spongey bread to pick up assorted foods from a platter. We ate until we were past full, an evaluation that we modified ten minutes later when the prospect of ice cream arose. A rousing though inexpertly-played game of darts capped off the evening.

April 13
Okay, this one will actually be short, I promise. We had amazing mixed berry pancakes in the morning, expertly prepared by Paul. The Golden Gate Bridge was surprisingly uncrowded as we made our way across to the Marin Headlands for some hiking near Rodeo Lagoon. We ended up at a lighthouse with an amazing view of the bay, which contained a ginormous concentration of Grebes in the bay…and some seals, with new pups in the mix, making things slippery and awkward for their mothers.
In the afternoon, what was left of it, we shopped for dinner, which resulted in a wonderful mushroom and leek quiche, the likes of which I fear we will not see again on this trip anytime soon (back to Mac and Cheese for us now…). It was followed by Abby’s famous brownie soup. Katie Belshe, a friend from Williams, joined us, adding to the already substantial merriment.
Instead of going to bed at a decent hour, I stayed up playing with Maggie’s TiVo and watched too much of a favorite childhood movie of mine, “Hook.” Dustin Hoffman with a twirly mustachio? I couldn’t resist.

April 14
We slowly piled our junk into the car and said our goodbyes (thanks Maggie & co. for hosting us so graciously!). We headed up to the Point Reyes area, where we discovered a lot of wind and a consequent dearth of bird activity. The coastal scenery, however, only got more amazing as we progressed northward. And we managed to see a couple new birds along the way: Greater Scaup, Glaucous-winged gull, and Red-shouldered Hawk (the terra-cotta colored California race). We camped in a stand of redwoods, which at least kept us out of the wind, although it still felt pretty darn cold. Tonight’s big accomplishment: eating the canned chickpeas that we’ve had since December.
(See, THAT one was short)

April 15
The morning was a little less windy, which meant for the first time in a while we actually saw some things, at least during the first half of the day. The Wrentit put in his first appearance for us, finally, at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory banding station (which was unfortunately not operating while we visited). Part of the trail there was so enclosed and damp it felt like a rainforest. Winter Wrens greeted us with their long, babbling songs, and we felt that familiar feeling on this trip, that we’d crossed into a different world overnight. We headed out to the lighthouse point in the afternoon, and were again greeted with closed signs, meaning we couldn’t get all the way down to the rocky cliffs. Exasperatingly, we could see a colony of Common Murres down there, as well as Pigeon Guillemots in the water. So two of our new species for the day were too far to really get a good look at. Ah well, we’ll catch up with them later hopefully.

We headed up to Bodega Bay in the evening, driving directly into the sun of course, and camped for the evening at the lovely Willow Creek Campground, which we had all to ourselves. Next stop: Eureka! I hope we shall there find inspiration.