Mike in the Wild

I had just finished lamenting   in my last post   over the dearth of "wow" moments in this year's bird sightings when I drove into just such an event three houses up the street from my home.  In fact I actually drove under an entire flock of them. I've seen cedar waxwings only once before, near my sister-in-law's home in Ventura County near Los Angeles.  There might have been two dozen of them gathered high in some trees in that tightly manicured neighborhood.  Even when I was more than twenty feet below them, my camouflaged presence so close to their perch's leafy canopy scared them away.  Nevertheless they kept returning to the same couple of trees which allowed me to get a few photographs over the course of a weekend. I wasn't quite that lucky with last week's sighting though.  As I drove along my street, I noticed the group of birds in a palo verde tree.  Since the tree hadn't burst into its spring blooms yet, the eight or nine individual ...

It makes sense that a state right next to Arizona would have similar birds.  But what stands out from a couple days birding in southern California is that such a wide variety of birds can be found in such a small geographic area.  And the birds we generally see in the Copper State at higher elevations are found in lower elevations in the Golden State. I birded mostly in the Wood Ranch area of Simi Valley, a bedroom community 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.  This location afforded easy access to the Lang Ranch Open Space  - part of the greater Conejo Open Space Conservation Area - and a network of parks and trails that link up with the greater Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.  You could theoretically hike to the Pacific Ocean, approximately fifteen miles to the south.  But I stayed close to the trailhead, enjoying panoramic views of the surrounding Simi Hills and Santa Susanna Mountains. The terrain was mostly grassland - its ...