{"id":104,"date":"2011-09-15T17:26:20","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T00:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/?p=104"},"modified":"2011-10-27T06:52:07","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T13:52:07","slug":"good-to-get-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"Good to get Home"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Snowy Egret on Salton Sea<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the past week I visited the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge to do some birding, and of course when I go birding I bring my camera.\u00a0 Although I have visited this refuge a number of times in the winter, it\u2019s been a long time since I did any birding there during the summer, and for good reason.\u00a0 You will find during the summer months that for most days the temperature is generally over 100, with 107+ not being unusual.\u00a0 My passion for birding and photography decreases proportionately to a temperature increase over 95!\u00a0 I was fortunate, though, because one day while I was there thunderstorms covered the area and a record<\/strong>(according to their news accounts) amount of rain fell, \u00bd inch! During that particular day the temperature didn\u2019t get past 90 and I enjoyed some good birding and took some decent pictures. \u00a0 For a short while, though, with the gray clouds and rain, it was reminiscent of the Northwest and I missed home and the Ridgefield NWR.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always good to get back home to the NW and to our home refuge.\u00a0 Speaking of the home refuge, I\u2019m sure most of you are aware that the River \u201cS\u201d Unit has been closed since September 12 and will remain closed till the end of the month. This closure is for road repairs and the construction of new turnouts and a new section of road.\u00a0 The Carty Unit will still be open. Since most of my time volunteering, birding, and taking pictures is done at the River \u201cS\u201d Unit, I will miss not being there.\u00a0 I will also miss not being able to contribute to the Weekly Bird Sightings Page<\/a> on the Friends website.<\/p>\n

This Weekly Bird Sightings Page is pretty much self-automated now. Of course, the sightings from about 25 birders who contribute to the database is still needed.\u00a0 This database automatically puts the birds in taxonomical order and keeps record of the sightings for each week.\u00a0 This will provide a valuable resource for the refuge as they look at the abundance or rarity of particular species for any given time period. You will notice that there are three links on this Sightings Page for 1) a Compilation of Sightings List since January 1 of the current year, 2) the Archives of Weekly Bird Sightings since we started recording them (2007), and 3) the Target List, a list of birds that were seen the previous week but not yet seen for the current week. \u00a0All of this is done automatically, thanks to my son Todd, who donated his time a couple of months ago to make this page much more efficient and also to make it a much more valuable resource.<\/p>\n

Some of the unusual and rare birds that have been sighted at the refuge since August 12 have been: Greater White-fronted Goose, Redhead, Black-crowned Night Heron, Snowy Egret, Red-shouldered Hawk, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Cooper\u2019s Hawk, Merlin, Peregrine Falcon, Black-bellied Plover, American Golden-Plover, Semipalmated Plover, Lesser Yellowlegs, Sanderling, Solitary Sandpiper, Semipalmated Sandpiper, Baird\u2019s Sandpiper, Pectoral Sandpiper, Short-billed Dowitcher, Eurasian Collared Dove, Rufous and Anna\u2019s Hummingbirds, Eurasian Collared Dove, Hairy Woodpecker, Pileated Woodpecker, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Pacific-slope flycatcher, Black-throated Gray Warbler, and Chipping Sparrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past week I visited the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge to do some birding, and of course when I go birding I bring my camera.\u00a0 Although I have visited this refuge a number of times in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,22,18,17,19,23,21,20],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings","tag-birds","tag-blog","tag-refuge","tag-ridgefield-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-river-s","tag-salton-sea","tag-sonny-bono-refuge","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.windemuths.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}