Sunday, December 28, 2008

Many Birds Sighted



We were out at Stinson Beach for a few days with family and I did a lot of bird-watching. My mom is my fellow bird-watcher (she calls herself "obsessed"). She has a serious harness-contraption for her binoculars, which puts less strain on your neck. I have a little bit of binocular envy since hers are a lot better than mine.
The oddest birds we saw were vultures sitting on the ground and in trees, lots of them, sometimes up to ten at a time. The smallest bird we saw was a Bewick's Wren, in a bush. In the water we saw many wigeons, mallards, scaups, buffleheads, goldeneyes, and surf scoters. I saw a northern shoveler, and she saw a northern pintail and a green-winged teal. On the beach we saw marbled godwits, willets, curlews, and whimbrels. She saw avocets and I saw a killdeer and a semipalmated plover.
I think my sister thinks we're weird. She took a lot of beautiful photos of the winter beach scene (all the beach photos on this page are by her). I like how she captured that silvery look of the beach in December.

There was also swimming (in the swimming pool), driving-practice, tennis, poker-playing, reading, talking, and a lot of cooking and eating.

1 comment:

Susan said...

Daphne! Your post made me laugh so hard. We are at Stinson now (and loving it). But today my husband and I were walking on the beach and of course we saw many birds we had no idea what they were. So he'd say "That's a curly-beaked twit," and then "That must be a short-beaked twit," and I just laughed. Your post made me feel almost embarrassed, but I laughed.