October 2018

My first real chance to bird in the month of October was around Lake Tahoe on October 12th. My wife and I went to Taylor Creek to see the salmon run - no black bears - and saw a local specialty, White-headed Woodpeckers as well as high elevation birds such as Red-breasted and Pygmy Nuthatches and Mountain Chickadees. Efforts to find Sooty Grouse or Mountain Quail were again to no avail, and we also dipped on Black-billed Magpie. On the 13th we took a cruise on the lake on a paddle steamer and found the lake to be lacking in birds. Vegetation and fish are well below the surface and only in one cove did we find a few birds such as Pied-billed Grebe.

Back home the following weekend, I went with Tom and Kathryn on October 20th and found things much more quiet than on my September visit. The highlight was a group of gulls, with 4 obvious Ring-billeds, 2 Franklins (my first of the year) and a large brown immature gull. We spent a couple of hours looking at the gulls and their relative sizes trying for better looks at the large gull. We left having penciled this in as a Herring Gull, got excited when Lauren replied to a first photo saying it could be an Iceland, but after others went out the following morning to find the bird more cooperative and posing for better photos, it was decided that it was a small-billed Herring Gull.

I returned to San Jose the following weekend and on the 26th I went to Alviso chasing some rare birds. Ina a remarkable half hour I quickly found the Pacific Golden Plover - only my second ever - and the Ruff. The latter was much more cooperative than it had been for em in either of the previous two years, and I saw this bird again on subsequent trips. I then found the bird that I took to be the immature Pectoral Sandpiper, but my photo of the bird turned out to be a Least Sandpiper and was rejected by the local eBird authority; but my bird was larger than the peeps around it and I suspect I took a picture of the wrong bird using my point-and-shoot camera! I then saw a Stilt Sandpiper in the Spreckles pond and even posted for the first time to the list serve. However my description on eBird was insufficient for the local eBird authority and this was later rejected, although another birder had confirmed my sighting.