The Great Migration
Waterfowl have taken up residence, late this autumn, in the rice fields and wetlands of California’s great central valley.
Televised images of a mass ascension of snow and Ross’s geese lifting off from flooded rice fields north of Sacramento, seen on last night’s news, compelled me and a fellow photographer to drive north to the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge today, where we stood with local photographers to await their arrival.
One of the regulars said, “It was magical yesterday, the best I’ve seen. Tens of thousands of geese arrived at 10 and stayed until one.”
It looked promising. Spread across a pond at the entrance to the refuge, hundreds of pintails, mallards, shovelers, coots, stints and wigeons bobbed, preened, courted, demonstrated, strutted and napped.
Then, great flocks of the “white birds,” as the locals called the geese, approached from the west in mile-wide Vs that undulated across a gray sky. They flew thousands of feet above us, then continued eastward, but their departure didn’t discourage the locals.
“That’s a good sign,” they encouraged, “The wind is perfect. They like to land into it (meaning they’d be facing our cameras when they touched down). Yesterday was so good. It’s sure to be as good, today.”
Again and again, the photographers would say hopefully, “Here they come,” only to have them fly too high over or too far north or south of the refuge. Swirling cyclones of white geese appeared to be circling areas just a mile away.
Massive formations of the white birds continued to fly east in successive, long, flapping, gliding ribbons.
In the end, they stood us up. We didn’t see the mass ascension we’d driven north to experience, unless you call the above image of ducks spooked by a passing Winnebago, as one.
Instead, we settled for images of wigeons, egrets, coots, stilts and pintails enjoying their sanctuary, and later returned south through Yuba City along CA-99 past tundra swans that bent their long necks to forage the flooded shallows of rice fields.
Though we missed seeing a mass ascension, California’s great migration of waterfowl occurs in northern Sacramento Valley rice fields and wildlife refuges, from mid autumn into winter. So, many more opportunities exist to witness one.
On refuge auto tour routes, the best viewing is from inside your car (which acts as a blind) and when parked on levee roads beside rice fields. Precautions: stay in the center of levee roads – as their shoulders are soft- and getting out of a car will spook the birds (it’s also prohibited).
When wildlife viewing, approach only so close that the animals are not agitated. If they move away, you’re too close. Instead, bring them closer to you by watching them through binoculars (8 x 42 is a good choice – monoculars for kids, $13 on Amazon) or photographing them using a telephoto lens (300 mm and up). With long lenses, a gimbal tripod mount balances the heavy lens and helps keep the image sharp when following a bird’s flight.
At a few locations in refuges, photo platforms allow photographers to get out of their cars, close to the action. The birds get used to people standing on the platforms, but unusual or unexpected events – like a Winnebago driving past – will spook them into the air and away for minutes on end.
Four photo blinds are available by advance reservation. CLICK HERE for more information. In springtime, nesting wood ducks are often photographed from these blinds.
The Sacramento NWR ($6 entrance fee – all others are free entry) is located beside I-5, immediately south of Willows. Its visitor center helps orient you to the refuges and guides you in identifying the birds. Sac NWR has an auto tour loop, trails and naturalist-guided programs. The refuge is open between an hour before sunrise and an hour after sunset.
Other wildlife refuges in the Sac NWR complex include Colusa, Delevan, Sacramento River, Sutter, Llano Seco (best before 10 a.m.), Butte Sink, North Central Valley and Willow Creek – Lurline.
Mass ascensions are most dependably seen at the Colusa NWR entrance photo platform (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) in late autumn and early winter. CLICK HERE for a map of birding hotspots in the Northern Sacramento Valley.
Though, as we experienced, wildlife viewing is never dependable.
- Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
Four Shopping Days Left
If you plan to shop for fall color, there are just four shopping days left, until the winter solstice.
One of the few places to find that last-minute gift of fall color is Los Angeles County, where a few trees are still carrying autumn leaves.
LA County Arboretum color spotter Frank McDonough sends these gifts of the season, complete with a bad pun.
In fairness, Frank asked the question and we put a bow onto it by providing an answer. Happy holidays.
- LA County Arboretum and Botanic Gardens, Arcadia – Peak to Past Peak, You Almost Missed it.
25° x 36° x 118°
It was 25° when Bruce Wendler passed the Alabama Hills at 36° 35′ 41.141″ N by 118° 6′ 11.232″ W, yesterday.
Cold enough for a winter day, yet it was still autumn. The proof? These pictures.
- Alabama Hills (4,534′) – Past Peak, You Missed It.
Walking Right Past Them
If you’re not attentive, it’s easy to walk right past mushrooms.
However, as Gabriel Leete shows in this collection, when you do, you’re missing a beautiful aspect of late fall color, as their color and form are endlessly fascinating.
Gabriel works at the California Welcome Center in Anderson (I-5, south of Redding). Just north of the Welcome Center is Anderson River Park where Gabriel often looks down to find mushrooms, though Gabriel also treks to the North Coast to discover them pushing up through the detritus.
Mushrooms appear on forest floors, soon after it rains. They grow quickly because rather than use cell division, as animals and most plants do, they employ cell enlargement, allowing mushrooms to grow as rapidly as they can take in water.
Within hours, a mushroom can grow from something the size of a pinhead to the Cortinarius that Gabriel is holding below.
Gabriel has been hunting mushrooms for nearly two decades and knows his fungi. He’s the first to say, that one person’s edible chanterelle might, upon closer inspection, be a poisonous variety of Cortinarius. So, expertise and caution are required when adding wild mushrooms to your diet.
However, he also believes mushrooms have gotten a bad rap. They’re full of B vitamins, gmushrooms.com writes, “especially niacin and riboflavin, and rank the highest among vegetables for protein content. But because they are low in fat and calories, Western nutritionists mistakenly considered them of no food value (a fresh pound has only about 125 calories). Yet in dried form, mushrooms have almost as much protein as veal and a significant amount of complex carbohydrates called polysaccharides. Shiitake mushrooms are among the most delicious & very nutritious.”
Because they grow from decaying matter, they’re all somewhat disgusting, but also things of beauty. And, of course, they can be deadly.
In 2012, The London Telegraph reported that 18 Italian mushroom hunters, “died in just a 10-day period. Many of them had forgone proper footwear, clothing and equipment and died after steep falls down Alpine slopes.” One of them was a 65-year-old woman who fell 40 feet to her death near the Swiss border.
My sordid attempt at humor aside, while there is the hazard of hunting them on wet, slippery slopes, there is also the possibility of eating a poisonous variety. Of one thing is certain, there’s no sitting on a fence when judging a mushroom, even though they often do.
Here are some of the beauties and beasts, Gabriel has found on recent walks through the woods.
Open Your “Golden” Gate
Fog is enshrouding San Francisco’s fall color in a atmospheric glow. On a visit to The City, Darrell Sano found it magically mist-ical.
- San Francisco – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
SoCal’s Awesome Autumn
Southern California color spotter Alysia Gray Painter of NBC knows her fall color.
Each year, she’s been one of the first color spotters in Southern California to alert us to color appearing in her region, and today headlined a post on NBCLosAngeles.com about SoCal’s late-peaking fall color, “Wow, Now.”
To read it, CLICK HERE.
She wrote, “How cool, and SoCal is it, that fall lingers a little at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, even as its famous roses pop in time for the Tournament of Roses?”
Hella cool, we reply from NorCal. There’s nothing more SoCal than that, dudes. So, Go Now!
- Los Angeles – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
- Burbank – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
- Arcadia – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
- Woodland Hills – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
- Long Beach (Atlantic Blvd, Bixby Knolls) – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
California Gold
“California Gold,” is one of UC Berkeley’s school colors. It’s also a color seen peaking at Hearst Mining Circle, across from Evans Hall.
UC Berkeley color spotter Jeff King discovered California Gold among venerable gingko biloba when crossing campus, today.
Looking up, he saw the other of Berkeley’s school colors, a sky filled with peak “Berkeley Blue.”
- Gingko biloba, UC Berkeley – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
Fall in the Fog
For most of the year, fog hugs the California coast. It’s a morning phenomenon, burning off by midday.
However, from November to March, the combination of warm moist ground blanketed by cold, still air creates Tule fog a thick ground fog that settles into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and pushes west toward the coast where it seeps into valleys before being blocked by coastal hills.
Tule fog is thickest in December and early January. Think Sherlock Holmes’ London-thick. At times even street lamps or headlights cannot cut through it for more than a few feet.
Horrid stacks of vehicles come to screeching, cataclysmic collisions when it is at its worst. The CHP advises:
- Check weather reports before driving on highways during Tule Fog months;
- If you know it will be foggy, consider delaying your trip until it clears;
- If you’re on the road and run into fog: drive with headlights on low beam (high beams create a wall of white light that keeps you from seeing ahead);
- Watch for CHP pace cars to guide you;
- Avoid crossing traffic lanes;
- The denser the fog the slower you should go (if you can’t see more than three lane stripes, move to the right and slow down);
- Drive with the driver’s window open to hear traffic ahead;
- Stay in a lane, don’t straddle a line (if you can’t see the lane stripes, it’s too unsafe to drive – get off the highway);
- Move around stalled or stopped vehicles, don’t sit behind them;
- Do not stop on highways except in emergencies; and
- If you must stop or your car is disabled, don’t stay there. Move to the far right shoulder of the road and get off the roadway, turn off all lights and get everyone out of your car and far from it (common fatal accidents in fog are caused by speeding drivers attracted to follow whatever tail lights/car they see ahead, even if it is stopped).
Bay Area color spotter Darrell Sano decided to take one of his favorite hikes today. What he didn’t expect was that he’d be in the thick of it.
The sun struggled to burn through the cloudy atmosphere. As he drove through the Caldecott Tunnel toward Martinez, “a band of fog diagonally covered the homes above the highway. Once through the tunnel, the fog was even thicker.” he wrote … the opposite of the Bay Area’s usual fog pattern.
At Briones Regional Park, the air was damp with fog, with no chance at all to view the vistas that once topped surrounding hills, though his aerosolic envelopment made the hike all the more special.
Darrell found the last remnants of fall color carpeting the woodland floor, mostly ochre, without saturation, Past Peak, though still beautiful.
Though obscured by fog, faint color, subdued but still evident, could be seen.
Apparitions emerged, a distant hiker, cows cloaked by mist, heard mooing but rarely seen.
As he walked through the diffused air, he thought about his last hike in August along the same trail and how different it was, realizing that our search for fall color is often filled with unexpected surprises.
- Briones Regional Park, Martinez – Past Peak, You Missed It.
Gingkos Come Alive
It’s almost as if Gingko trees know the lyrics to “Come Alive.” As, they’ve become The Greatest Showman, at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Gardens in Arcadia.
Come alive, come alive
– Come Alive, Joseph Trapanese and John Debney
Go and light your light
Let it burn so bright
Reaching up
To the sky
And it’s open wide
You’re electrified
Frank McDonough sends this holiday postcard of late autumn color from “The Arboretum,” remarking that “The color is still at it.” Indeed it is.
- LA County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, Arcadia – Peak (75-100%) GO NOW!
Nature’s Resilience
Images of the devastation wrought by the Camp and Woolsey fires haunt the closing days of an otherwise beautiful autumn.
However, Southern California color spotter Kathy Jonokuchi found hope on a visit to one of her favorite birding locations in the Santa Monica Mountains NRA at Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa.
The area was spared being consumed by the Woolsey Fire, though it is still recovering from the Springs Fire of ’13 and ashen scars blight surrounding hills.
Two threads of local history intertwine at the site. Ranch structures represent its pioneer ranching past, while native plants reflect the environs where Chumash Indians lived for thousands of years. before the ranching era. Big Sycamore Canyon Trail descends from Satwiwa to the Pacific Ocean along an historic Chumash trade route.
The Satwiwa Loop Trail is designated for hikers only, and meanders through an area considered sacred by the Chumash. There, within areas of coastal sage scrub that were not burned, live deer and coyote. Sweeping views of Boney Mountain and Sycamore Canyon can be seen along the trail, as well as many raptors.
The Satwiwa Native American Indian Culture Center is open on weekends from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Native people lead workshops and presentations and participate in art shows there, throughout the year.
On Kathy’s visit to Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa, a congregation of five White-Tailed Kites (Elanus leucurus) were hovering and hunting. She also saw Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius), this one female, swooping low in search of inattentive voles and slithering snakes.
Kathy reports that at Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa, she’s seen American Kestrels, Cooper’s Hawks, Red-Tailed Hawks and Turkey Vultures.
It’s such an outstanding location for bird watching that Kathy has nicknamed it “Raptorland.”
See, there is a Jurassic Park in Southern California! And, it’s one that’s proven its resilience to nature’s fires. It’s the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
- Santa Monica Mountains NRA – Peak Wildlife Viewing (75-100%) GO NOW!