Lake Solano In The Rain

We stuck to our plan for the weekend to go on a Bigby ride out to Lake Solano, having just taken our tandem in for a major tuneup. Our target birds included hooded mergansers, Barrow’s goldeneyes, sapsuckers, and pileated woodpeckers. Our friend Barbara, taking a look at the forecast of a 40% chance of rain and showing more sense than we had, decided at the last minute not to tag along, but we still planned to meet Vance at his office on Putah Creek Road about two-thirds of the way out. Vance works for California Audubon with their landowner stewardship program and is a serious cyclist and sometime bike racer. When we arrived at his office there was a bit of drizzle but after checking the weather radar we thought it would let up soon so we carried on. I put on my raincoat at that point and was definitely happier.

We rode to the south side of the lake by which point it was definitely not letting up. Scanning from there we saw lots of common mergansers, a few hooded mergansers, double-crested cormorants, and Vance saw his first Wilson’s snipe of his Bigby. We pulled in at the boy scout camp at the southwest corner of the lake, where there had been a report earlier of a white-throated sparrow. We walked around there a bit, heard our first acorn woodpecker, and saw a couple of fox sparrows. No white-throated, and by this time it was not letting up even more.

We got back on the road, headed west to circle around the lake and stop in at the campground by the Lake Solano dam where pileated woodpeckers have been seen. No pileateds there. By this point we were wet, chilly, and 22 miles from home, so we took a bit of shelter under the eaves of a campground building while eating lunch of half a peanut butter sandwich and a mandarin orange. We then headed off on the five-mile run to the town of Winters for a chai latte and a hot chocolate at Steady Eddie’s. It actually let up by that point.

Thus warmed we headed east on Putah Creek road home. It wasn’t raining much at all by then, and we were moving at a good clip, but soon the fact we hadn’t ridden that far in quite a while caught up with us, and we limped our way into Davis, laughing our way through the final downpour the last mile. We got in the door at 3 PM after riding about 43.75 miles, and immediately headed for the hot shower.

New Bigby species for me included:
Hooded merganser
Oak titmouse
Wild turkey
Hermit thrush
Fox sparrow
Spotted towhee
Pacific-slope flycatcher
Acorn woodpecker