Growing the list

When you first start birding, or, as in my case, resume after a long gap in a new place, the identification of new birds ("lifers" as they are called by bird-watchers) occurs with gratifyingly high frequency. I have only about 60 birds on my list so far, and it's enjoyable to watch that list grow steadily.

American White Pelican

White-faced Ibis

From this perspective, the trip to Salton Sea was wonderful. I saw about thirty birds, many of them new to me. These included American White Pelican, Eared Grebe, Bonaparte's Gull, Least Sandpiper, White-faced Ibis,  Cattle Egret, Abert's Towhee, Tree Swallow.

Following the leader 

What you often remember about a bird is the setting you saw it in the first time. I hope I won't forget the sight of more than 50 cattle egrets in the fields near the lake, that comedic group of four iridescent white-faced ibises strutting in a line behind a snowy egret who seemed puzzled at this newly-acquired band of followers, turning back to look at them nervously from time to time, the freedom of the tree swallows conducting aerobatics in the evening light...

Dead Tilapia litter the "sands" of the Salton Sea beach

I must record that the Sea itself seemed a little less bleak than I had expected from all the videos and descriptions on the web (see my previous post). Then again, most of those articles and videos were describing what this place feels like in the summer, which must be quite different with its oppressive heat and pervasive smell of decaying fish. On this winter weekend, the beach was indeed unusual because it consisted entirely of the broken bones of dead fish and there were skeletal remains strewn about everywhere, but the weather was extremely pleasant, the smell was not too terrible, and the water was vast and calm.

Mudpots look like mini-volcanoes

Bubbling mud inside

There were many interesting sights and sounds near the sea, immense stretches of cultivated fields, a fully camouflaged hunter I mistook for a bush until he moved, the occasional report of hunting rifles. On Davis road, not far from the wildlife refuge center, we came across an interesting field of many bubbling mud-pots. The hot mud squirting and oozing from them formed conical  shapes 3-5 feet tall, looking rather like miniature volcanoes.

A geothermal plant near the Salton Sea

In fact, the area is full of geothermal activity, and there are several operational geothermal power plants there, in which water is injected underground and is turned into steam by the heat, powering turbines to generate electricity. A fully renewable energy source, most common in Iceland. Seeing it here brought back  long-forgotten memories of a high school science fair project, of sultry afternoons in a dark room where I worked with classmates to build a model of such a plant.

As we drove back, the setting sun silhouetted the mountains to the west in a beautiful shade of blue, and the many-hued sky yielded alternately bright and dark and glimmering reflections in the water.

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Feeding our morning visitors  

A simpler pleasure is a close encounter with birds. On Saturday, my younger son was delighted to find a pair of Mallards, a male and a female, at the back door of the rooms where we stayed. He fed them some bread, thrilled that they stood trustingly inches away from him. We examined them closely, counting their toes and noting the webbing (which my son referred to as "flippers"). The next morning, at the same time, we pushed back the curtains to see that they were not only back, but they had invited their closest friends to join them for the Christmas breakfast. Both couples fed on bread and shuffled silently away.

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Lake Perris

  

On the way back we stopped by to picnic at Lake Perris, a nice stretch of water in San Jacinto, only a little over an hour away from L.A. We passed by large dairy farms on the way there. One of these had a large patch of standing water where hundreds of Ring-billed Gulls had alighted, along with a few delicate Black-necked Stilts. By the lake, I got a good look at a Cassin's Kingbird, which too I had not seen before.

(Photos courtesy: Zhen Krishnamachari)