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From: Justin Hite and George Appel
Date: 18 Sep 2006
Time: 09:53:06 -0400
Remote Name: 65.241.2.253
George Appel and I braved the deer hunters today (the rangers stopped some guys yesterday riding loaded shotgun looking for their deer down in the Rush area) to bird Rush from 395 to the delta. As we inched up to the little cove just east of the river mouth down at the delta we saw a Sabine’s Gull. Then we saw a second one beside it. They’re both adults, and both a tiny bit further along in molt than the one that was at the delta three days ago. They’re really amazing birds, an unbeatable combination of beauty, rarity, and tameness. They were eating alkali flies that couldn’t yet fly that had just emerged from a field of alkali-fly-pupae-coated salt grass flooded in a foot of water this year by a rising Mono. Not very sporting, but very nutritious. Earlier in the morning George and I saw a Merlin at the Cain Ranch (the big stand of Lodgepole Pine at the junction of 158 and 395 – make sure not to trespass if you bird there, you can drive on the dirt road just east of their property) at about 10am, as well as a Northern Mockingbird and a good number of Audubon’s, Orange-crowned, and Yellow Warblers, and a lot of young messy-looking Robins. David’s book has 9/22 for the early Merlin date, so depending on what’s been seen in the last several years, this might be an early record. There were also about five White-throated Swifts (a bit of a surprise) swirling around with the lovely Violet Green Swallows at the Cain Ranch. Couldn’t find any of McCreedy’s Vaux’s Swifts, which was a bummer. Later on when we were down at the Rush Delta (about an hour after being at the Cain Ranch), we saw a Mockingbird again, and were speculating that it might be the same individual having just wandered down the river to its mouth, considering how rarely you see them up here. There was also a Prairie Falcon cruising high and fast over the delta, B-lining it to somewhere and not even scaring the gulls as it went. The Mono Basin is rad. It’s good to be back.
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