Thursday, February 16, 2012

Bird Geek Week: Tijuana Estuary and Rare Bird!

OK, fellow bird geeks: get your scopes and binoculars ready: The Great Backyard Bird Count starts tomorrow!
Last weekend I took a bird-watching stroll down at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. As its name implies, it's right down at the Mexican border.
We saw a juvenile harrier (also several hawks and a kite).
The endangered clapper rail is there on the right with his duck friends at left. Their numbers have dipped disastrously with the loss of estuarine and wetland habitat.
That is a curlew up there...super-long and pointy beak. My beloved little Canon Elph camera really isn't the right equipment for this sort of thing, but hey!
And a little Anna's hummingbird. We also saw a great egret, a snowy egret, a godwit, phoebes, and of course sparrows and finches. And bunny rabbits, on the menu for all of the circling raptors.

Birds--they rock!

1 comment:

JuJu said...

Your day sounds so great! Much better than being stuck inside with bad air and no soaring birds. Thank you for sharing!!!

OMG, there are two words on here now. HOW am I supposed to combine subjectivism and halfick into a sentence???