This work week has been pretty smooth, so I've been concentrating my attention on birding. If you are not at all interested in birding, don't bother to read the rest, since it reads like a backyard ecology grade school report!

I am definitely an amateur "birder" these days, especially since the move to the West Coast has brought in a whole new batch of things to identify. For starters, in Auburn at our hotel there are tall thin decorative pines that attractive an entire flock of what I believe are Brewer's Blackbirds, who make wonderful "chuck chuck" noises and are fun to watch swirl and settle, swirl and settle. In looking up these birds I learned how to tell the difference between the ubiquitous European Starling and Blackbirds -- Starlings: often speckled, often irridescently greenish/purpleish, plumage looks a lot rougher, dark eyes, yellow bills; Blackbirds: clean, smooth, black plumage, less noticeably irridescent, generally yellow-eyed and black billed. They are often larger than Starlings too.

At the deli where we eat our lunch, there is a single brownheaded cowbird who is missing his foot. (He has his leg right down to the ankle joint, just the actual foot is missing.) He gets along just fine amidst the sparrows who frequent the deli, and ultimately I realized that since cowbirds are "brood parasites" -- meaning the parent cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds' nests and leave their young to be raised by "foster" families -- that this cowbird most likely was raised by these sparrows.

I've also been introduced to the Western Scrub Jay, which is in the family of blue jays -- it's got that lovely blue jay color, but it has a grey "vest" and no crest, and a dashing white stripe above its eyes. On my road trip I was exposed to Steller's Jays as well, which look exactly like a standard Blue Jay whose head has been dipped in black ink up to the neck. They are quite eye-catching.

Finally, while lazing in the hot tub my coworker and I noticed some gulls soaring inland. Everyone expects gulls to be closely tied to the sea, but they love lakes and ponds just as much, and as scavengers can survive quite nicely in open grasslands (and often, parking lots!) too. Out here, though, the gulls are most likely California gulls, and in hearing of this and deciding to find out what differentiates them from the East Coast Herring Gull, I was surprised to find that Gulls go through quite a variety of plumage before hitting their standard grey and white. In fact, even for experienced birders, it is hard to tell the difference between varieties of immature gulls, which start out almost uniformly brown and go through the entire spectrum of speckledom before becoming white and grey. The best way to tell gulls apart is when they're in their adult form; the Herring Gull has light eyes (i.e. yellow) and pink legs and is generally slightly larger, while the California gull has dark eyes (i.e. they look uniformly black) and yellow legs.

Back in San Francisco, I have had the delight of exposure to two new kinds of birds: Cormorants, which are sleek black birds who literally dive underwater for fish; and black-chinned hummingbirds (who frequent our back garden), whose males look much like Ruby-throated hummingbirds (i.e. emerald green coat, whiteish/grey bellies, and beautiful rich purpley throats) except that the b.c.hummers have a slight strip of black above the violet, while the rubies don't. The only reason I'm confident that I saw a b.c. hummer is that Rubies stick to the East Coast and Black Chinnies stick to the west.