Gualala Birds

Last week, DeeDee and I returned to the Bay Area for a couple days to celebrate our granddaughters 5th birthday.

Surprisingly (?) while at the party, I got a new lifer – #158 Rock Pigeon. I always re-iterate to my wife that we are sophisticated people and we shouldn’t say “Seagull”, rather “Western Gull” or “Glaucous-winged Gull”. When I pointed out the Rock Pigeon, DeeDee asked are there more than one pigeon? I didn’t know – until getting home and realizing I had last summer identified a Band-tailed Pigeon in Gualala. (There is one more pigeon in the US – the White-crowned Pigeon which seemingly only exists in Florida.) That’s enough words on “pigeons.”

After the birthday party ( in Berkeley ), I asked DeeDee if she wanted to take a quick trip to Cesar Chavez park to see if we could spot the burrowing owls. Last year we attempted to see them, and missed. And wouldn’t you know it – this year we missed them too. eBird had shown they were spotted a couple hours before AND after the time we were there. I guess we will try again next year.

The good news is while at the Cesar Chavez, a couple of the water fowl looked new to me so I did some quick photos to i.d. them later – and that proved to be worthwhile as I added #159 Greater Scaup, #160 Lesser Scaup, #161 Horned Grebe and #162 Clark’s Grebe to my life list. The Clark’s Grebe looked very similar to the Western Grebe I had identified years before – but I now know the trick to differentiate them (black below/above eye.)

The weather has been cold and rainy – not particularly conducive to me getting out and birding. I’ve managed a few trips to the Gualala Regional Park without much to show for it. Slow time of winter I suppose.

I just got a new lifer yesterday, but it comes with a bit of a story.

My wife and I are eating lunch in our kitchen, when I notice something different about this little-brown bird sitting in the tree with all of the robin’s.

We keep a small set of binoculars on the kitchen table, and I quickly did a quick look at this bird – and I immediately said, “This bird is different!”

I went to my office, grabbed my camera — and thank goodness — did a couple of emergency photos thru our kitchen window before opening the front door. My thought was opening the front door might spook the bird – and it did. I opened the front door, and the LBB was gone.

Well, I had my emergency photos that turned out OK so that was enough to start with.

My initial viewing of them suggested this bird look like an Orange-crowned warbler – a bird I’ve only seen a couple times in the past year. But the coloring was off a bit – but it could have matched a juvenile orange-crowned warbler.

I finished lunch, then birded around the house a bit to create a small eBird entry, and I posted the bird as an orange-crowned warbler with a few photos.

eBird immediately bitched at me – “This photo is a Nashville Warbler.”

Wow! A new bird! I went to my bird guide and looked up the Nashville Warbler and … sure enough, it seemed like a likely candidate. My beginner eyes still have a hard time determining finer details like beak shape, the length of the wings and “dull grey” vs “concrete” coloring.

Regardless, I figured if eBird says it’s a Nashville, and the bird guide showed it in my range at this time of year, I’d enter it.

But… there was no entry in eBird to enter it.

What?

1. eBird insists it’s a Nashville Warbler
2. eBird gives me no entry for a Nashville Warbler.

I reached out to a local Mendocino Birding email list and asked for verification; an excellent birder, Lisa, verified that it was a Nashville Warbler, and explained that eBird “hid” that bird entry because it was too early in the season for Gualala to see them. Evidently, this bird started migrating a little early.

Lifer #157 – Nashville Warbler

I’ve been a little slow to visit possible birding spots around Gualala, mostly sticking near home.

The Gualala Point Regional Park has been about the most ambitious I’ve been, but this year I’ve also started to investigate the “east” side of the Gualala River ( by the campgrounds) and a small little area called Mill Bend Preserve – or as I tell my wife, “I’m going to the Kayak launch.”

Mill Bend Preserve is a mighty big name for such a small area – I do believe it’s biggest reason duh etre is for kayakers and paddle boarders to launch into the Gualala River. There is a small ( very small ) shoal that you can talk north along for a minute.

The first time checking it out as a potential birding locale, I heard a Downy Woodpecker talking like crazy. I looked and looked and looked and I could not see him. I knew exactly where to look, but it was like he was invisible – until I saw his head poking out of a tree ! This was my first encounter with a bird living in a tree.

For as small as Mill Bed is, it’s been giving some good views of Kingfishers, Bald Eagle, Mergansers, Buffleheads and last night I saw a family of North American River Otters.

At first, I thought the otters were seals – watching them play, and jump onto a rock to clean themselve I realized these weren’t seals. I didn’t know otters got to be so big – I assumed otters were… maybe house cat ? sized. But these playful mammals were large!

I spent 40 minutes patiently waiting for the juvenile Bald Eagle to leave his perch, my dream of catching a BE diving into the water and pulling out a fish won’t stop. Unfortunately, he decided to fly away in the opposite direction. No matter, the light was fading.

I haven’t given up on home birding – I got a great show of a Red-shoulder Hawk hunting and capturing a snake and patiently worked my way into position for seeing the years first Pileated Woodpecker… very good finds for me.

My year total for bird species sits at 80 – not to bad considering the entirety of 2025 was ~ 126 species.

Quick shout out to a book I’ve been reading recently, “Warblers & Woodpeckers.” It’s been a fun story about a father and son doing a big year birding. I’ve been reading it at night in bed to my wife and she’s enjoyed the story.

My wife purchased me a bird feeder for Christmas. I was pretty excited to get it as I was hoping to be able to see some locals closer up.

We celebrated Christmas in the bay area, and returned to Gualala — without the feeder. This was a conscious decision as our home in Gualala doesn’t have a good area for a feeder.

We returned to the bay this week for a few days, so I managed to set the feeder up early one evening. My expectations were in check as I’d read repeatedly that it can take 10+ days before birds will visit the feeder.

The next morning, I excitedly saw my first bird on the feeder – a Lesser Goldfinch. I was tickled pink. I logged into work and did the morning slog of meetings, and came back out later in the morning for a cup of coffee — and there were now a dozen birds on or near the feeder.

The Goldfinches ( House and Lesser ), Chestnut backed Chickadees and White-Breasted Nuthatches were on the feeder while the Dark-eyed Junco’s, Mourning Doves and Sparrows were doing clean up on the ground.

The Robin’s were on the fruit bushes, a flock of Cedar Waxwings joined them – a hawk watched on a neighbors tree.

I’m convinced all the bird came to see the new feeder – whether they were eating or just watching.

The past couple days haven’t slowed down much and I fear I won’t be able to keep the feeder stocked when we’re back in Gualala.

It’s a good problem to have and not it makes me want to re-think getting a feeder for Gualala.

Maybe a nice suet feeder for the woodpeckers… yes…

One last note – we some visitors outside our house in Gualala recently that I thought I’d share.

I saw a fun Youtube video earlier this month that talks about doing a New Year Day bird count – the idea being, for a new year, all your bird counts are reset for the year.

Seemed like a fun way to keep birding interesting, so I set a goal to get out on January 1st and do my best at creating a big bird count.

But before that, I need to do a little house-keeping.

I recently added a Barn Owl to my eBird lifelist – this is a bird i had encountered in 2014 but never added to my life list. This is the owl photo on the main page of this site !

By adding the barn owl, all of my lifer numbers since that bird have advanced – so bird #124 is now #125. I’m not going to go thru all my posts here and update the lifers number because you really don’t care so I don’t either.

OK, back to the new year bird count.

Well, the weather reports leading up to today looked dismal – rain all day.

The good news is the rain has simply been intermittent and never heavy.

I started this morning at about 8:30 a.m. – I took the dog out to do her morning business, and started my list. I put her back in the house after 10 minutes and spent the next 30 minutes adding more birds ending up with 15 birds by 9:00 a.m. That’s a good count for me on any day, so the fact I got that so early looked good.

Before lunch, I told the wife I was going to go to the downtown trail and see what else I could manage – My hope was to hit 20 birds for the day – with 25 birds being a record for just me as a solo-birder.

I knew going down to the water I’d see numerous gulls, and I’ve been terrible at counting species of gulls. Also, I was almost guaranteed to see a brown pelican and the red-winged blackbirds. I was pretty confident I could get to 20.

Happy to say I smashed that with another 18 unique species seen – adding 5 (!) lifers and bringing the days total to 33 unique species. Awesome ! Sure enough, I managed 2 new gulls, a new grebe, a new sparrow (Fox) and a beautiful duck – the Bufflehead.

Lifer #147 – Bufflehead

Lifer #150 – Pied-billed Grebe

Lifer #151 – Fox Sparrow

I also saw an exciting visitor – a Bald Eagle. I always get excited when seeing Bald Eagles !

Here is the complete list, with new species in bold.

1. California Quail
2. Eurasian Collard Dove
3. Anna’s Hummingbird
4. Acorn Woodpecker
5. Northern Flicker
6. Stellar’s Jay
7. California Scrub Jay
8. Common Raven
9. Wrentit
10. Northern Mockingbird
11. Hermit Thrush
12. American Robin
13. Dark-eyed Junco
14. Spotted Towhee
15. Yellow-rumped Warbler
16. Bufflehead
17. Common Merganser
18. Short-billed Gull
19. Western Gull
20. American Herring Gull
21. California Gull
22. Pied-billed Grebe
23. Great Egret
24. Brown Pelican
25. Turkey Vulture
26. Bald Eagle
27. American Kestrel
28. Black Phoebe
29. Fox Sparrow
30. Golden-crowned Sparrow
31. Red-winged Blackbird
32. Brewer’s Blackbird
33. Townsend’s Warbler