The picture above is of a White-Crowned Sparrow. This is a pretty common bird, but I need to add it to my life long list anyway. I rather like the picture though as it sits atop some brush at Point Lobos.
The male and female Buffleheads, pictured to the left, were photographed at Crissy Field in San Francisco. Their photos aren’t the best, the darn things kept diving at exactly the wrong time. I wish that I could have taken better pictures, because for ducks they are a bit exotic.
The picture below is of an American Coots, also from Crissy Field. A rather drab looking bird, walking along a drab shoreline in the still cloudy and drab part of what became quite the bright and fine day. I think that the zoo might have this species and that I have photographed it there first, but this is much more sporting.
The final picture with this post is of a Brewer’s Blackbird. It is another common bird in California, but is not native to the midwest. I think that this wraps up all of the birds that I saw and can identify in California.
Today’s header shows an American Pelican in flight. This picture was taken in Saint Louis and not California. I did see pelicans in California and even managed to get a silhouette shot of one that I have already used as a header, but this is a better photograph.
This month, on the first morning that I was in California, I woke up in my hotel room. The wake up call had just come, I answered it and then turned on the TV. I was hoping to catch the weather. I flipped through the channels until I got a local news broadcast. What I caught first, was the tail end of some news article, but what the announcer said stuck with me. He was explaining about some video that had just been aired and was now posted on the station’s website, “You are going to want watch it in IE and not Foxfire, it will play much better that way.” With that one sentence, I knew that I was not in the midwest anymore, but in Silicon Valley. I never did learn what the video was about. Frankly, when a TV announcer makes such an exclamation, the content that he was talking about is probably over my head anyway.
