California Life Birds

I know it's been radio silence around here lately, but after spending two weeks in California, I came home with that horrible flu that everyone is getting.  I missed work the first week of 2018, then last week I went to work and crashed immediately upon getting home.  Today's the first day I have sat down at my computer longer than it takes to write an email to work telling them I'm home sick.  I'm still on the mend, but I have made some good improvement in the last 48 hours.  I'm hoping to be at least 80% of normal strength by the time I go to work again on Tuesday.

We had two goals for our trip to California:
(1) See birds
(2) Play with my sister's awesome kid and their dog
...OK, and (3) Spend time with my family in general ;)

While seeing birds of all kinds, we hoped specifically that we would see some new birds.  And we did.  Here are the new additions to my ABA life list, bringing my total to 527 species.

1.  Lawrence's goldfinch
2.  Gambel's quail
3.  Golden-crowned sparrow
4.  Oak titmouse
5.  White-headed woodpecker
6.  Red-breasted sapsucker
7.  Lilac-crowned parrot
8.  Yellow-headed parrot
9.  Costa's hummingbird
10.  Red-whiskered bulbul
11.  California thrasher

I managed to get photographs of two of these species.

We saw the Gambel's quail at the (I'm not making this up) Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge, where they hung out in good numbers around the front of the visitor's center, mixing it up with desert cottontail rabbits on occasion.

The red-whiskered bulbul...this is insane.  The bird wasn't even on our radar as a possibility because, well, see the page in Sibley for yourself...

The only place it's shown on the map is a tiny dot in Florida.  But if you read the range description, it does say "some also in Los Angeles area."  And apparently one of those places is the Los Angeles Arboretum.  When we saw it, we didn't even know where to begin with identifying it because it doesn't look anything like any bird we know.  But I got the idea to look at the bird check list for the site, and when I saw red-whiskered bulbul, I knew that had to be it.  The briefest look at the bird in Sibley confirmed it.

Um, seriously, I can't believe I got such a decent photo of the bulbul with my little camera.

The Bird of the Week for the northern California part of our trip was a Cooper's hawk that landed in a tree outside the dining room windows at my sister's house.  Later, he made a dive for dinner but missed.

So even though birding in Southern California had its frustrating aspects--including the day that we spent at Big Morongo being so ferociously windy that we saw literally about half a dozen individual birds there...and locations at the Salton Sea being so abandoned that the sign-in sheet at one of them collapsed into dust when Robert touched it--we did manage to come out of our visit with some very nice additions to our list.

The bulbul was the highlight of the trip for me.  The worst part was that despite spending hours trying to relocate the red-breasted sapsucker in the San Jacinto Mountains, we never found it again, so even though I got a good look at the bird, Robert didn't see it at all.  Oh well, we will be back and will try again!