Bird Photography Weekly #38

I'm submitting a California Quail for this week's Bird Photography Weekly # 38
Check out others' submissions for this week. Click on the link above.

Birding Festival - part 1

My apologies for not posting sooner. This has been a very busy week, plus I am trying to read three books at the same time, keep up with reading my birding magazines, keep up with a daily two-hour podcast (Issues, etc), and finding time to spend with the kittens, much less the other pets in our household. I know, whine, whine, whine. But something's gotta give. I have also been disappointed in the quality of my photos. So I am going to ask that you visit Red's blog; she has better quality photos she has posted.

Our first event on Friday was a full day's trip to various places in the Monterey-Watsonville area. Our first stop was Zmudowski State Beach. And it's obvious this was a place where we should have seen mostly shorebirds, but could also see other birds farther out to sea as well as other birds to be seen and/or heard on the dunes.

When we parked our cars in the lot we had a 1/4-mile walk to get to the beach. Between the parking lot and the beach and all around us was agricultural land. Below is a photo I took of some farm workers out in the field for the day.

[Don't forget to click on the photos to see a larger view.]

Once we arrived at the beach we could look all around us and see quite a variety of birds. Looking back toward the dunes I was watching this great egret while others were looking farther north or south or even west (out toward the ocean).

Looking north one could see the beautiful mountains in the distance and we could see a variety of shorebirds out in the lagoon in the foreground. The birds I could ID out here were mostly double-crested cormorants and gulls (for lack of properly identifying them). There is even a male mallard on the sandbar, too. Other folks chose to walk around the dunes and look for other species. In the distance I could hear a California quail calling from the dunes. Only a few folks in our group got the opportunity to see the quail.

As for sea birds we could have seen Sooty or Pink-footed Shearwaters, or Ashy or Black Storm-Petrels. But anything we saw flying out and about beyond a few hundred yards was quite difficult to identify. Even some of the good birders were finding it difficult to determine what was out there. Meanwhile, closer to us within our eyesight we saw many brown pelicans among the many gulls.
Once everyone felt they saw all they wanted to see at and around the beach the group headed for the next stop, Moon Glow Dairy.