Our Solano County Bird Square

The Napa-Solano Audubon Society recently put out a call for volunteers for their project to develop a breeding bird atlas for Solano County. In these atlases, the study region is broken up into grid cells that are searched for bird species that breed therein. I have been interested in participating in such a survey for some time now, and since we live in Solano County (though the extreme northeastern corner of the county), this is a good chance.

We have been assigned a 5 km by 5 km grid block directly south of us, in easy bicycling range of here. This block is a uniformly flat stretch of farmland. Today was our first real outing into the grid block (I took a look yesterday, but it was too windy and starting to sprinkle). It’s not sufficient just to record the presence of a bird species: instead we need to find actual evidence that the species is breeding, such as sighting them at or around a nest. We had no confirmed breeding species today, but did have three probable species, the best sighting being a pair of white-tailed kites displaying near a farmhouse. The season is just beginning, and we’ll have many more forays to come.