Bird Journal Entry #1:

DATE: 1/30/2020

Location: 37.774417,-122.455029 approx.

Site Description: The place we visited for our first outing was to Golden Gate Park right off of Stanyan and Fulton. The landscape was a riparian forest type with a mix of bushes, some tall trees, and many angiosperms. Golden Gate Park was built on sand dunes and this is artificial. The main bird species spotted during this 2.5 hour trip were rock pigeons (17) , Anna’s hummingbird (6), mourning dove (1), red tailed hawk (1), red-naked sapsucker (1), black phoebe (1), stellar’s jay (1), California scrub-jay (1), common raven (15), chestnut-backed chickadee (2), bushtit (10), dark-eyed junco (5), golden- crowned sparrow (35), California towhee (1), and the red-crowned kinglet (1).

Species Account: The species I enjoyed seeing the most from this week was the chestnut-backed chickadee. I spotted the bird about 50m off of the main path inside the Stanyan park entrance. The bird is small and  ball-like shaped with a darker brown head, a white patch under its’ eye, and a lighter cream colored stomach. The bird were social with one another and tended to hop around from branch to branch. The habitat we saw the chickadee in was very riparian. A few of the birds were interacting with one another.  The species tend to be very active and in Winter migrate toward Kinglets (Chestnut-backed Chickadee Identification). That is interesting because we spotted one Kinglet. Also, they are distributed in many places, for example in trees, parks, and cities. The type we spotted is seen along California’s central coast because they have more of a brown-red coloring near their tails. Their diet mostly consists of berries, fruits, and seeds. Since they are smaller birds, they can’t prey on anything very large.

NarrativeWe began the trip around 9:45 am and walked into Golden Gate Park from Fulton St. and Stanyan St. The weather was about 51 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky was sunny with patchy clouds. We went for the first time to get a sense of how the binoculars worked and to get int the rhythm of spotting birds. We only walked about 100m in and began seeing birds. I was surprised how hard it could be to find birds even with binoculars because they are so quick. One of the first birds I saw was the dark-eyed junco. I spotted it in a tree and we all struggled to locate it. For the next two hours we only walked about another 400 m or so around the area to spot 14 other species of birds. There were some “tweakers” trying to spot rare birds with telephoto cameras. The bird species we saw were very common for the area, except around 11:40 am we followed a tweaker and spotter what they thought was a Red-Naked Sapsucker. This species has not been seen in Golden Gate park in 20+ years. Not long after we walked back to school at around 12 pm. Overall, our first time out in the filed was extremely successful and we have been able to see how one can spot birds efficiently.

 

https://ebird.org/checklist/S63942082

 

Citations:

Chestnut-backed Chickadee Identification, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Chestnut-backed_Chickadee/id

 

Chestnut-backed Chickadee. (2020, January 6). Retrieved from https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/chestnut-backed-chickadee