Birding
Where I've been/What I've seen
With almost my entire family sick somehow, I decided to try to escape the house and chase a nearby Grace’s Warbler at one of my patches (San Dieguito Lagoon/Crest Canyon OSP), which happened to be maybe a 15th county record according the CBRC. So anyway, I arrive at the canyon and travel up a nearby side street for maybe an eighth of a mile until I come to the house with three pine trees in the back, perfect looking habitat for a Grace’s. Sure enough, I hear the distinctive Grace’s chip note before long and try to pish for it to come nearer. This bird, despite being plenty vocal, made an appearance only once before I had to go back to the car and head home (it was starting to get a bit dark with it being overcast). Here’s a very low-quality picture of this incredible warbler:
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Hello! Been quite a while since I did my last post (2 months wow, thanks school), and I recently got back from a casual trip to London, so here goes nothing. Despite this trip being mostly for leisure, I still managed to get some birding in, bringing in somewhere around fifty lifers, well above my target species list. Most of my birding around the city was casual and included birds that I mainly saw when doing touristy things.
The next day (Christmas), I woke up to go on an early morning walk (which happened to be 8am) to Kensington Gardens. This was my first time “birding” per say, and the number of birds which I saw was likely reduced due to rain. Here is where I found my lifers Common Pochard and Tufted Duck, probably my two favorites at this location. Also new to me were Egyptian Geese, Eurasian Coot and Moorhen, Rose-ringed Parakeet, and Eurasian Wren, among others. I didn’t really see anything new until the 28th, the day my family had set aside for me to go birding in one of the neighboring counties (which happened to be Hertfordshire) in the Lea Valley. I went out with a local, one of the owners of Birding London, a nice birding tour company that operates in the counties around London. My targets for the day were the few shorebirds around, as well as many of the harder to get passerine birds around the city.
At this next stop we did not pick up very much that was new for the day, however I’ll go over the highlights. We made a few stops at the blinds along a trail where we picked up a Chiffchaff, White (Pied) Wagtail, dipped on Common Kingfisher, but also heard a few Water Rails over in the section of the preserve with reeds.
Unfortunately, I had to go to the airport at this point, concluding a very fun trip, I ended the trip getting around 50 lifers, and several more European subspecies that I would probably not see back in the states.
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