MGWA

After a couple of days of nasty (bad nasty) weather I got out today to find...BIRDS.  There had been a Macgillivray's Warbler skulking around the Fenway Victory Gardens last week and though I didn't have great hope of finding it, I WENT FOR IT.  And I found it...

Warbs

Doing my best to get decent warbler photos...

Macgillivray's Warbler


Hermit Warbler crushing a fly

GUCR banding day

Banding was a great success yesterday, catching around 75 birds with nine nets, including 8 species of warbler (Yellow-rumped, Orange-crowned, Black-throated Gray, Townsend's, Macgillivray's, Wilson's, Hermit and Yellow), an Evening Grosbeak, a male Western Tanager, a Warbling Vireo, a bunch of Song Sparrows, and others.

My first Evening Grosbeak, surprisingly not bitey


Monstrous indeed


Hermit Warbler




Hermit and Townsend's


Warbling Vireo


Female Macgillivray's


Male Macgillivray's. We had a few of these, but one of them is known to be at least 9 years old.


Black-throated Gray


Yellow


Amanda with a Stellar's Jay, hood up in response to the terrible mosquitoes, which were close to a first for us in the Sierras yesterday

Full swing

Sleeping past 4 feels pretty good. I started point counting and nest searching on my own this week, which was mostly a success, but I only ended up with one nest, though it was the first Black-backed of the season:




Tomorrow, and a couple of days next week Amanda and I are going to help out the north crew with banding and demonstrations for a group of sixth graders. It should be interesting to see the banding site, which is right around this lake (Willow Lake):



And hopefully catch some of these:

Macgillivray's Warbler


Cassin's Finch


Mountain Chickadee




Here's a quick look at our living situation before we fully moved in.


Our room. We now have raised cots, we're moving up in life!




Also, welcome to my office, burned Sierra landscape!

Around the lake

Birded around our barracks today then headed around the east side of Lake Almanor to find more of the birds we will encounter during our point counts.

Difficult to photograph Macgillivray's Warbler


Maybe my favorite bird around here, Mountain Chickadee




The group at Chester's old airport strip


We also found this much less common Hooded Oriole

Mac

Two days ago we had 50 birds at RECR, and today we had 73 at MUHO! Pretty much all hatch year birds. The youth is certainly dispersing. Today it as mostly (25ish) wilson's warblers, but we did have one stud, this macillivray's warbler. They are around some, but I haven't seen one since I've been here, so it was exciting to see.