Bodega Bay

Sketching Bodega to Bodega Bay and The Birds

I wanted to sketch the actual bay of Bodega Bay but I wanted to find the right perspective (is there really such a thing).

I settled on a pullout near Spud Point Marina looking north.

It was near this location where Rose Gaffney’s house was located. Gaffney was a local rancher who led the protest against PG & E when they wanted to build a nuclear power plant at nearby Bodega Head.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted to use this location as “Mitch’s House” in his new film “The Birds” (1963). Gaffney was not a movie goer and had no idea who Hitchcock was.

The crew built a set with other outbuildings around Gaffney’s house. The house burned down in the late 1960s and the area today bears little resemblance to when the film was filmed here in the early 60s.

One filming location that has not changed since 1963 is the Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega (not to be confused with Bodega Bay, which is eight miles away).

This was the location used for the school during the corvid attack in The Birds.

The schoolhouse was built in 1873 out of local redwood. At the time of filming the building was no longer used as a school and the structure was derelict. Since filming took place the school was used as a bed and breakfast but now it is a private residence.

I pulled up on the street that the children ran down as they were attacked by a murder of crows. In the film they are running towards the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay. With a little movie magic, camera angles, and matte paintings it appears that the schoolhouse and the Tides are in the same location. In reality, eight miles separate the two locations.

While the school looks much the same, redwoods have now grown up around the schoolhouse and I included them in my sketch.

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Sonoma Coastal Sketching

One a recent weekend trip with the lads on the Sonoma Coast I added some coastal impressions to my sketchbooks.

I have sketched the coastal locations of Bodega Bay and Sea Ranch many times.

On the drive up I stopped at the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay for lunch (made famous in Hitchcock’s The Birds). I had a table with a view of the bay and the Bodega Head across the waters.

After lunch I walked along the wharf where I saw a group of sea lions resting on a dock. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon so I sketched one of them (featured sketch).

The sea lion on the left is begging to be sketched!

After my sketch I drove north on Highway One towards our cabin in the woods just north of the Sonoma/ Mendocino border.

From our base camp in Gualala we headed south back into Sonoma County to visit Sea Ranch.

A Sea Ranch espresso sketch.

While I was at Sea Ranch Lodge, I did a sketch of the lodge buildings. I had stayed here once before.

One of my Sonoma County sketching touchstones is the seaslug-like Sea Ranch Chapel. I have sketched this whimsical building every time I am in the area. Every angle yields a new sketch. This time I sketched the chapel from the side, slightly to the rear. I never seem to tire of sketching this unique structure.

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Golden-winged 200

Another Saturday morning, another early start. As the proverbs says, “The early birder gets the bird but the second mouse gets the cheese. ”

20 minutes before 6 AM, I headed north to meet Dickcissel in Marin County. Our destination was, oddly enough, the filming location of the movie that put a generation of people off birds for a lifetime. The movie was Hitchcocks’s The Birds and the location was Bodega Bay. We were headed across the bay from Highway One to Campbell Cove.

We pulled into the parking lot 20 minutes after seven and there were already six cars in the parking lot and beyond the lot we spotted four birders standing on a rise, peering into the trees. This is always a good sign. The more eyes the better.

The birders were standing on a narrow ridge about twenty feet high. We recognized a few as birders from San Francisco and they told use that our quarry had just been seen ten minutes earlier. The good news was the the bird was still around but the bad news is we shouldn’t have stopped for coffee in Novato because we would have seen the California rarity, the golden-winged warbler.

Dr. Insomniac is a devious tyrant. Had we not stopped for his elixirs, then we would have seen the golden warbler.

More birders arrived every minute and the lot was full. We stayed on the narrow ridge, which provided eye level views of the willows while other birders headed to the beach or went into the “cave”, a muddy track under the willows. With so many eyes, someone was bound to see the golden-winged warbler again. The question was, would we be able to get to the right location in time to see the notoriously sulky bird. We took our chances and took a wait and see approach and hoped the bird would come to us!

An hour and a half later our wait paid off. Dickcissel spotted the wayward warbler off to our left. I soon had my binos on the bird, bold, chickadee-like facial pattern, yellow mohawk, and yellow wing bar. The warbler was foraging under the canopy with a flock of white-crowned sparrows. We were able to observe the bird for a few minutes before the warbler dropped down and out of sight.

I quickly became aware that our narrow ridge had become a very crowded place. A woman to my right was thrusting her elbow into my side as she tried to get a view of where the bird was just seen and a man standing behind me was huffing and puffing into my right ear, his warm, coffee tinged breath gave me the willies! We were surrounded by rabid birders who were manically trying to add this west coast rarity to their life lists. This seemed like the worst rush hour subway ride imaginable! It was clear the bird had flown and after a celebratory fist bump, it was time to extract ourselves from the overcrowded ridge without falling to our deaths!

The maddening crowd on the ridge looking into the willows where the golden-winged warbler used to be.