[EBB Sightings] Del Puerto Canyon field trip

Dear Birders:

Consider this: A tiny dark Costa?s hummingbird sitting high on a
cottonwood snag overseeing a patch of blooming tobacco bush bending in
the wind; a roadrunner crossing an open field and then disappearing
behind a boulder orange with lichen; a golden Eagle soaring over a high
hill; a Lewis Woodpecker flapping like a crow returning to its favorite
snag. These are a few of the predictable delights that are part of the
annual Mount Diablo Audubon field trip lead by Jean Richmond to Del
Puerto Canyon last Thursday. 

Del Puerto Canyon road takes off from Highway 5 near Patterson. 
Following a stream, it slices through the Diablo Range just east of
Mount Hamilton.  Twenty-eight miles later when you come to the
intersection of Mines and San Antonio Roads, you have crossed parts of
three counties ? San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Santa Clara, and you have
made a transect of part of Central California?s wildest and most
beautiful landscape. 

We entered the dry and brown hills on a very windy morning seeing along
the fence lines a number of both Savannah Sparrows and Western
Kingbirds.  Once we were into the canyon, we began to see and hear
Bullock?s Orioles in the cottonwoods, leafy and lovely but with their
tops most often blasted bare by the wind.  At ?Graffiti Rock? a young
Great-horned Owl and an adult bird were hunkered back into a seam.  

Our lunch stop at the campground just beyond Frank Raines Park yielded
up the hoped-for Lawrence?s Goldfinches and the Phainopeplas. In the
San Antonia Valley with its deep pastures and Valley Oaks we all had
good looks at the Lewis Woodpeckers.  But no Wood Ducks this dry year
as the ponds are shrinking fast and the sheets of wildflowers had
either bloomed or were absent. 

Stopping briefly at Murietta Wells in the Livermore Valley (our fourth
county) we easily found the reported Eurasian Collared Doves.   Though
we had to settle for fewer wren species than last year, and the
wildflowers were less abundant than after a wet winter, these canyons
and valleys of the Inner Coast Range are a heartening reminder that
parts of Wild California are still intact.

-Phila Rogers            






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