Springtime is Blooming at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

Spring has sprung and we're driving through the auto tour at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, looking for birds and wildflowers. And I'm happy to report that we found both!

Birds in the video include Great Egret, Western Meadowlark, Northern Shoveler, Black Phoebe, Cinnamon Teal, and the Snowy Egrets were the real showstoppers! Be sure to watch to the end of the video for a sample of the crazy song of the Great-tailed Grackle...

Let's go birding!

Birding Quandary

Before I get to the quandary I promised you yesterday,

here are some more pics from the

Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge

Auto Tour:

Western Grebe

Pied-billed Grebe

Red-tailed Hawk

Here's a cool pic of one of the canals on the auto tour...

That's a Great Blue Heron standing on the silver pipe!

Okay, yesterday I said I was going to post a quandary for you--and here it is...

We saw our very first Great-tailed Grackle (you can read that post here) the other day on Road P. It was a female and she was a beaut! Fast forward to our trip to Klamath. We saw this bird on the auto tour and instantly thought it was also a Grackle. (Once you see a bird once, that species seems to pop up again and again!) When we put the photo into the Merlin ID app, it confirmed our guess.

But there's something missing from this Great-tailed Grackle...The GREAT-TAILED part!

What happened to her tail??? These photos look like some kind of optical illusion or something and I can't explain what I'm seeing.

 Here's the one we saw on Road P so you can compare...

So, any theories? We're scratching our heads over this one and would appreciate any input you might have!

Up next on tomorrow's post: No quandaries, just egrets...

A harsh name for a cool bird...

It's always an exciting day when I'm able to add a new bird onto my Big Year list, much less my lifelist. Today, I got to add a Great-tailed Grackle to both!

We saw this female on County Road P, which is located near the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge.

I knew right away when I saw it that it was something special. I've never seen one before in person (on every range map I've looked at they aren't even supposed to be in our area) and she is quite striking--and much bigger than the average Brewer's Blackbird she's perched next to!

I didn't notice any males around, but I could have been distracted by the 40 egrets that she was hanging out with that I posted about yesterday.

Tomorrow, I'm dedicating an entire post to my absolute favorite bird...