Coastal Migrations

We went to Bodega Bay this weekend to visit Pica’s Mum. We got there too late in the afternoon yesterday to do much in the way of exploring, but this morning we did our usual poke around the Bay. We weren’t birding very intensively, as Pica and I were more interested in doing some sketching and digiscoping. The tide was very high, so our first stop was Doran Pond, on the east side of the bay. There were a few peep in there, lots of dunlin, some dowitchers, and a couple of egrets. At right is Pica’s painting of one of the egrets.

I meanwhile worked on photographing the shorebirds. The light was very good, but digiscoping is still very much a challenge! The biggest difficulty I was having was focusing—how to get the autofocus to behave through the scope. Next time I will experiment with manual focusing. At left is one of my dunlin images.

While walking on Doran Beach, Mum meanwhile found washed up many translucent sails from small jellyfishes. She asked another beach walker about them, and he said they were called by-the-wind sailors, or Velella velella. When dried out, the sails open flat making a perfect heart shape.

We then went up to Bodega Head where we did a couple more quick paintings. And looking down on one of the rocks, we saw a black turnstone in breeding plumage.