Monterey Bay Birding Festival

Friday, September 26, begins the Monterey Bay Birding Festival. I've been looking forward to this weekend since last year. The photo above is from last year's trip.

This year Red will be attending along with my husband and me. I've considered Red to be my professional (or at least semi-professional) photographer. Tomorrow's event is called California Specialties. It begins at 7 a.m. and we have about an hour's drive to get to the check-in place in Watsonville. This is a full-day's trip focusing on birds like yellow-billed magpie, Calif Thrasher, snowy plover, Lawrence's goldfinch, etc. We will be traveling from the Pacific beaches to the foothills of the Salinas Valley (think John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath").

Saturday's trip starts even earlier, 6:30 a.m., which means we will have to leave home around 5:30 a.m. Ugh! Oh well, it's for a good reason. The morning event is called Rancho Del Oso which will give us the opportunity to bird in riparian areas around Monterey pines and mixed evergreens and the coastal redwoods. We should hopefully see wrentit, pygmy nuthatch, hermit warbler, northern pygmy-owl, marbled murrelet and various woodpeckers. We may even see raptors. Since this is a half-day event we also signed up to attend a couple of afternoon lectures given by Jon Dunn. Each lecture is 90 minutes long focusing on honing one's birding skills. The first one is on identifying large shorebirds, and the second lecture will be on identifying small shorebirds. I'm sure glad the lectures are split up regarding small and large shorebirds.

Then on Sunday we will be attending another full-day trip to Pinnacles National Monument. This will be a super exciting trip for me because I am hoping to get a look at some of our California Condors that have been residing there. We should also hopefully see other birds like canyon wrens, greater roadrunners, prairie falcons and loggerhead shrikes.

Hopefully I will have lots of photos to post. I'm also expecting Red to post to her blog, too. I hope everyone else will have a great birdy weekend. I know I'm planning on it.

Monterey Bay Birding Festival

The third annual Monterey Bay Birding Festival will be Fri, Sat, Sun, Sep 21, 22, 23 this year. Go to their web site by clicking on the link above. Here is the checklist of birds seen last year during the festival. There are so many trips planned it is hard to decide which trip(s) I would like to attend. The Monterey Bay area, a large part of the central coast of California also known as the Pajaro Valley, is quite extensive and geologically diverse - such as wetlands, marsh areas, grasslands, woodlands, etc.

Various and numerous trips are offered and the cost is certainly more than affordable for each trip. Most trips seem to have a limit of 20 attendees - so the earlier one registers, the better the chance of getting your choice of activity.

Oh, so many choices! Watsonville wetlands, Monterey Bay, Elkhorn Slough, Pajaro Dunes, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, Carmel Valley and River, or Pinnacles National Monument. Two of the trips offered are pointing out that there is a possibility of locating a California Condor - those trips are full-day events - one to Big Sur and the other to Pinnacles National Monument. The Big Sur trip will also have bird banding demonstrations.

Can you imagine an opportunity to see more than a hundred species of shorebirds and songbirds?