SUNDAY SIT SPOT REPORT
I love getting an early start and today we made it to the parking lot at William Pond just after 8am. We missed last Sunday but are otherwise on a Sunday-Sit-Spot Roll.
The almond trees are almost done blooming and now have green leaves, mugwort is fresh and green and new, vinca is just blooming.
A couple weeks ago we saw a sapsucker in the almond tree and wanted to check out if there were holes in it. Sure enough, they were covered with little lines of holes but the intertwined oak trees were not.
In the "upper" woods we saw quail, scrub jays, I think California Towhee, dove. We also saw kinglets. I'm interested to look back at my calendars to see when we've stopped seeing kinglets in past springs. They fly to their nesting places away from here for the summer.
The cottonwoods just up trail from the beach are often busy with Acorn Woodpeckers, and Starlings. Today I saw what I first thought was a handful of little bushtits up high flitting around the branches. With my binoculars I realized they had the longer beak and strip-i-ness of a wren. I don't know very much about wren ID yet, but a quick glance at Sibley's it looks like it could be Bewick's, House, or Marsh by location. By looks, I think Bewick's although the size is bigger than a bushtit so maybe they weren't wrens at all or my sense of size is off.
At the beach the snag was empty when we arrived, but the kingfisher arrived soon after. This kingfisher had brown on it and I looked that up. According to Sibley's that brown is indicative of a lady kingfisher.
We didn't see an egret until we were just about to leave, one flapped in to the spot in the shallows on the beach side of the river where we often see them.
A highlights was an old bushtit nest that looks like it had been blown down, but the branch it was on was caught low in a boxelder tree. This nest was mostly fishing line. This was both so sad and so amazing. Born in a plastic nest, but of such craftmanship!
There were fishermen on the island just across from the beach. We were to the south of beach, above the water, and saw some major splashing. I thought it would be a water mammal but it was a HUGE fish. Maybe 18" long? Black with white patches and a colorful-ish spotty tail. It was thrashing around and then still for a while. A log floated up to it and it swam under. After that it was still again but had it's top fin out of the water and sometimes the top of its tail fin out too.