There is nothing like closing out a genus or group of birds. Like seeing all the corvids (jays, magpies, crows, and ravens) that exist in the United States or checking off all buteos (broad winged hawks) that breed within our borders.

This can also go beyond our political borders. Last summer I saw both species of condors: California and Andean, although both birds are placed in a separate genus.

Last Saturday I set out with Dickcissel to close out a genus. In this case Sphyrapicus. I had red-breasted, red-naped, and Williamson’s sapsucker. The only sapsucker missing from my list was the easterner: yellow-bellied sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius). And one had been spending some time in the south in Santa Clara County.

Sewage ponds, landfills, and water treatment plants may not be a place to spend your Saturday morning but if you’re a birder they can be an avian heaven on earth! In this case it was the Santa Clara County Water District in San Jose and the line of pepper trees that lined the Guadalupe River and the percolation ponds. This is where the shy, juvenile, male sapsucker has been spending it’s time.

We first walked the line of pepper trees, willing the shy woodpecker into being. There was no movement and no woodpeckers to speak of, aside from the distant call of a northern flicker. As we headed upstream, towards the dam, Dickcissel called my attention to a bird in a bush. It was not a woodpecker but a thrasher (not the ghost wraith LeConte’s) but California thrasher. The bird sat in the top of the bush, allowing great looks and a few photos.

California thrasher, Toxostoma redivivum.

We turned right at the dam and birded the path that led back to the water district buildings. That’s when we first heard the harsh trill of our first woodpecker! We soon found the source of the call: a female Nuttall’s woodpecker.

This is not the woodpecker you’re looking for!

After watching 75 robins feasting on pepper tree berries we headed back to the river road and the trees that lined the path. After making the 90 degree turn to head back downstream, I saw a woodpecker in a snag right in front of me! “There’s the bird!” I exclaimed, in a quiet sort of way, in order not to spook the shy sapsucker. Too late. The bird bounded into the closest pepper tree.

We surrounded the tree like the LAPD on an SLA safe house but the sapsucker flew off toward the path where we just where birding. We rushed over and got some diagnostic looks before the bird disappeared into foliage.

The yellow-bellied headed back from whence we came and we where on a wild woodpecker chase to get more looks and photos. The sapsucker perched briefly in the first pepper tree and then disappeared again. I went up the path and Dickcissel tried to flank the bird on the pond-side of the trees.

After a short search Dickcissel was on the bird again and I headed over to his position. This time the young male was perched on a near horizontal branch. I noted that this bird is either extremely active or very sedentary. Pete Dunne notes this behavior in the Birding Bible, the Essential Field Guide Companion, that the bird’s behavior is “bi-polar” and we where now observing it’s still stage, where the sapsucker seemed to be impersonating a tree branch, which gave us exceptional looks.

A typical look at the shy sapsucker, always placing himself between a few twigs.

Coda

After spending time with the yellow-bellied sapsucker we headed on a short 15 minute to another location in a residential neighborhood to add another sapsucker to our day.

This was a red-naped sapsucker that was spending time in a sycamore tree on the banks of Guadalupe Creek. Within four minutes of searching I spotted the not-so-shy rep-naped sapsucker on The before mentioned sycamore tree.

When I stepped out of the car it was 6:21 AM. It had taken me an hour and seven minutes to get here from La Quinta. The morning air was chilly, very chilly, the temperature was 27 degrees. And here I was, in the high desert, at the Borrego Springs Landfill.

It’s all about a bird of course, not just any bird but a true nemesis that had evaded me, despite numerous attempts at Joshua Tree, Nevada (near Las Vegas), and even the open space preserve just a mile north of my current, cold location. But the view ain’t bad.

This harsh, sparse, and dry habitat dominated by saltbush and creosote is the domain of the elusive LeConte’s trasher, which is the Sasquatch of the thrashers because it is a pale, drab bird that prefers to run on the ground rather that fly and has the annoying habit of always keeping dense vegetation in between itself and the observer. In other words, it a damn hard bird to see and see well, that is until the pull of defending it’s territory kicks in. This usually starts in January and lasting through March.

The key to finding LeConte’s at Borrego is to arrive before sunrise, walk out west of the landfill and wait for the sun to kiss the saltbush flats and soon you will should hear the distant sound of an unseen male singing. Well hopefully that’s how it was going to happen.

The shoe prints in the frozen desert sands spoke of the other early morning birders on previous days that have come to this location to find LeConte’s. All I had to do, like the Yellow Brick Road, was follow the the footprints that would lead me to the ghost thrasher.

I first hear the rolling-meandering call of a thrasher at 6:41 AM and I rushed to the southwest in search of the singer. But this desert wraith led me on a wild thrasher-case that ended at a dense brush Leaving me gazing into oblivion. Then from my right, I heard another song and I rushed off to the northwest. This time I saw a pale bird with a peachy butt hop to the ground and disappear into a dense thicket. My first, but brief, sighting of this feathered ghost. . . I think.

Off to the northwest I clearly heard another thrasher’s song and as I hurried across the flats (dodging bushes along the way) I could see a distant bird perched up on a snag. Could this be my first good look at a LeConte’s?

I moved closer but the bird was still far off and I didn’t want to flush it off it’s singing perch. I raised my camera and zoomed in and:

no, not a LeConte’s thrasher but a loggerhead shrike. This thrasher really does make you see ghosts and phantoms.

From my left came another thrasher song and like a sail boat tacking across the sands, I set a course toward this new singer.

This time I could she a pale bird singing in a mesquite bush. Again I raised my camera to my eye and zoomed into the singer:

Then I zoomed in some more:

A pale, drab bird with a down-curved bill, peach undertail coverts and a long, dark tail. I was looking at my Nemesis Bird, the LeConte’s thrasher!! Lifer!!! ABA bird number 560! He gave me great views and I was able to capture many images.

As I slowly moved closer the thrasher popped down and out of sight into the bush. I then heard another male singing off to the northwest and off I went.

It was now 7:30 AM, the hour of power! I was able to locate another male perched up and singing on another mesquite bush. This is the bird where I got amazing looks and was able to get some great photographs to document the existence of a desert ghost.

Coda:

While still in the afterglow of my thrasher experience and once I had returned back home to San Francisco, I checked the pockets of my down jacket that I was wearing on that cold morning, west of the landfill. I pulled out gloves, my scarf, and a figure that I had found, half buried in the sands, just as I was starting my search for LeConte’s thrasher. I have almost forgotten about this figure.

It was a plastic, olive green army action figure, the kind that I used to play with when I was a child. Each figure was in a different pose. There was the soldier crawling on the ground, the solder kneeling on his knee, rifle raised to his eye, the dude with the flame thrower, the guy shouldering a massive bazooka, and the soldier on the phone. But the little green soldier that I held in my hand was none of those, but the solider with left arm raised and in his right hand he held binoculars raised to his eyes, as if shouting out, “I think I see it. . .yes it’s a LeConte’s thrasher!”

It was an interesting time to be in a National Park because of the partial government shut down (which at the time of this writing is in it’s third week). Joshua Tree National Park was still open but all the park rangers and maintenance staff where on furlough leave. The advice I received from locals was, “Bring your own toilet paper and trash bags and don’t climb in the Joshua Trees.”

This didn’t stop me from heading into JT (with toilet paper and trash bags) to see and sketch some of the beautiful sights in this high (and sometimes low) desert wonderland.

Plants

Located in the southern part of the park where the high Mojave Desert drops down to the lower Sonoran Desert is a grove of interesting desert plants know as the ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens). These tall plants may look like a type of cactus but they are the sole genus of a Mexican species found the United States, in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. After passing through the incredible Cholla Cactus Garden I stopped at the Ocotillo Patch, pulled out my camp chair and started sketching this amazing desert plant.

The Cholla Cactus Garden, Joshua Tree National Park

Birds

I sketched a few birds that I encountered in JT. When hiking in the desert you do not encounter very much avian life but when you do, it’s really something special. At first glance a desert seems a harsh and dry habitat, seemingly lifeless, but only after spending some time in the desert to you see the life that is perfectly adapted to this extreme environment.

I sketched three birds that I encountered on the Maze Loop hike (~4.6 miles), located in the northern part of the park. The black-throated sparrow, Gambel’s quail, and phainopepla are all common desert species that are relatively easy to see on a desert hike in the high Mojave Desert.

Black-Throated Sparrow

Gambel’s Quail

Phainopepla

On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings

 

                                                      A Horse With No Name

                                                      America

I was in the high desert of Joshua Tree National Park for the plants and birds and rocks and yes even the things.

I always enjoyed sketching sculpture and architecture because unlike animals, they ain’t going anywhere soon. The rock formations of JT are nature’s sculptures and sketching them is a desert meditation where you lose yourself in the lines and contours of weathered rock and at the end of the sketch you come away understanding that rock just a little bit more.

On my second visit to Joshua Tree in two years, I focused much of my sketching time on rocks, some famous like Arch Rock and Skull Rock but others that bear no known name. I named these rocks such as Repose Rock (above) but I’m sure other visitors have given it other names. Jelly Bean Rock seems like a likely canidate.

Skull Rock is probably one of the most visited sights in JT. I suspect one reason is that the rock bears an uncanny resemblance to a human skull, the other is that is about 20 feet off the main road and does not require a hike or even a brisk walk to see it.

Here is a self-named rock that I sketched in the popular rock climbing destination called Hall of Horrors. This I call Balanced Rock and in the sketch I also included some of the plants and some of the “things” but no “rings”.

This year I was up to my ears in report cards and conferences and I have little fuel in the tank to create my annual holiday linocut prints. But once I started to sketch out designs for this year’s print, my artistic batteries started to recharge.

Two of my previous snowman prints at my mother’s house. The one above is from 2007 and the print below is from eight years later. I have definitely improved my technique and understanding of the medium.

Since 2007 I stopped buying things for family and friends and I started to create an annual  holiday snowman print instead. This seemed to me to be in the true spirit of Christmas gift giving. You weren’t going to find me queuing in front of a big box store on Black Friday at an unGodly hour, ready to stimulate our consumer-rich economy! I pulled out a sketch book instead!

I thought that I wanted a snowman standing in front of a conifer. I first conceived the design as being symmetrical with the silhouetted tree and snowman in alignment. Adding a scarf  was going to throw off the symmetry but I can’t resist a flowing, wind-blown scarf!

After I had decided on a final design, it was now time to carve the imagine into linoleum. You never get a true sense of what the print will look like until you charge the block and make your first test print.

Printing is not always a very a pretty process. I use oil-based ink because I hand tint the prints with watercolor. This is very messy and I only want to do it once so my print run was 20 prints.

Happy Holiday to all and a Happy New Year!

Perhaps no family suffered more during the horrors of the winter of 1846-47 than the Donner family. The Donner Party was made up of many families, trying to make it to California’s bountiful Central Valley.

George Donner was elected the leader of the party, and now the party, lake and pass now bears his name. Seven members out of 25 of the Donner clan perished in that winter of record breaking snowfall. But they did not camp with the others on the eastern shore of Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) but because of a broken wagon axel, they stopped for the winter in the Alder Creek Valley, six miles from the lake that now bears their name.

The site of the Donner Camp with a tree that was later planted by the Donner survivors.

The list of those who survived and those who perished at the Alder Creek camp site.

The area now is peaceful and if it wasn’t for the signs on the interpretive loop trail, you would never know of the horrors that the Donner family suffered in the winter of 1846-47 with he record amount of snowfall that winter. There is very loyal evidence of the camp. Tree stumps that were visible at the beginning of the 20th century are all gone.

An interpretive sign at the start of the trail with the ominous title, “The Nightmare Begins”.

In a pioneer group infamously known for it’s cannibalism, there is a deep sense of irony that the location of the doomed Donner camp at Alder Creek is now know as the Donner Party Picnic Area.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Pioneer Monument on the eastern side of Donner Lake.

The final stretch of my Highway 49 road trip was by far, the most scenic of the entire highway. The last 109 miles, from Grass Valley to where 49 ends at junction with Highway 70 at Vinton, takes you to higher elevations than at any other part of the highway and the highlight was Sierra Valley.

At about 5,000 feet above sea level, Sierra Valley is a broad, flat valley, rimmed by low mountains. When driving this lone stretch of 49, you are more likely to encounter cows than other people. This is a stretch of 49 that encourages reflection and peacefulness. They are a few towns along the way: Sattley (Population 49), Sierraville (Population 200), and the jumping metropolis Loyalton (population 695).

Population: 49 on Highway 49. I wonder how often this coincidence takes place?

Where as the first part of 49 from Nevada City was television, hemmed in with trees and cliffs, entering the Sierra Valley was like watching a wide screen western epic. I was passing through a John Ford film, without the monuments of Monument Valley but the wide open spaces that are not always easy to find in California. It’s a type of landscape that would make Bing and the Andrew Sisters croon, “Give me land, lots of land with the starry skies above, don’t fence me in”.

I finally found “my” creek!

The benefit of being in Sierra Valley in October is that wintering raptors are starting to take up their winter quarters. I started to notice an uptick in red-tail hawk numbers, perched on the power poles. This is a very common hawk in the west but their numbers were a little uncommon.

Then I saw a large pale hawk off to the left. Now this was a true winter visitor to the valley. This was our largest buteo ( broad wing hawk), the ferruginous hawk. Buteo regalis! I pulled over and grabbed by car binos. Above one wide cow pasture there were three ferruginous hawks in my field of vision! The most I had seen in the sky at one time.

Here’s where Highway 49 begins in Vinton and it’s where I turned around and headed south for the first time on my road trip.

Once I had driven to the highway’s end at Vinton (Population 0) I headed back south and I stopped to photograph a highway sign with the scenic background of Sierra Valley. I looked up at the power pole and there I saw another wintering raptor perched on the cross arm: a prairie falcon.

Who doesn’t love Cowboy poetry?