Slacker Birders

Even though the change to daylight savings time today gave us some excuse, heading out at 10:30 AM for a session of breeding bird atlasing is still quite late. What can we say — we’re slacker birders. For the Yolo County Breeding Bird Atlas project, this year we surveying two 5 by 5 kilometer blocks out by Esparto at the head of the Capay Valley.

On the first block, we didn’t do that well, seeing all of three species. There was a steady 15-knot wind from the northwest, and the supposedly quiet country road we turned off on was in fact quite busy, including the passage of about 15 motorcyclists in a row, off on a Sunday cruise to somewhere. We spent much more time in the block to the west, especially enjoying our session in the Capay Cemetery, a nice birding spot.

In one of those meant-to-turn-right-but-said-left maneuvers, we ended up returning through Esparto, normally a sleepy rural town but we found ourselves in a traffic jam — hundreds of motorcycles, vintage cars, the city park filled with people and stalls, a band playing last century’s rock music — we later learn we had stumbled upon the annual Capay Valley Almond Festival, now in its 95th year. Slackers that we are, we avoided the crowds at the Hog Canyon Deli there, and headed back to Davis for our usual weekend taqueria lunch.