Date: 5/17/25 8:53 pm From: Stan Walens via groups.io <stan.walens...> Subject: [SanDiegoRegionBirding] Black Swifts: University City; PSA: Princeton Press book sale
I spent the late afternoon and evening working out in my native plants garden.
As the weather worsened and the clouds lowered, I stopped weeding and just watched the sky over Railroad Canyon, which runs east-west between I-5 and Rte 805, across the street from my house.
I have seen black swifts using the updrafts from this canyon several times in the last 43 years.
Sure enough, as one cloud front crossed over my house at around 6:45, a pair of black swifts swooped low just above the rim of the canyon heading northwest.
Gone in maybe 10 seconds.
This reminded me: 15 or so years ago, Jay Keller found that black swifts would come to lower altitudes in the evening over the west part of Mission Trails Regional Park, accessed from the east end of Tierra Santa Blvd. You park there and walk southeast until you are looking over Mission Gorge. This information used to be available in the listserv, but I think it was lost when the old listserv was replaced by this one. It’s a good area to try from, especially on cloudy evenings.
On another matter: if unlike me, you happen to have space on your bookshelves, floor or the top of your toilet tank for more bird books, Princeton University Press is having a 50% off sale until May 31.
Not widely advertised, so I thought it worth mentioning.
press.princeton.edu <http://press.princeton.edu/> A wonky site but you can limit your search to birds and thereby exclude some of their excellent monographs on nineteenth-century German philosophers, etc.
They are a major press for bird guides and monographs, with several hundred titles, including the new Gulls of North America guide and dozens of guides to North America, to foreign countries, on avian paleontology and on various bird families.
I did have a small role 45 years ago or so in suggesting to my Princeton Press rep [they published my first book] that there was a market for better bird guides than were available at the time. We talked about what Yale was starting to publish, and then we skipped out of the anthropology convention and went birding for the afternoon. She loved it. That was the extent of my input: everything else that got Princeton started in bird books came from their staff.
In short, I have no commercial interest in your buying any books from them, but this a great opportunity to get some superb books at a substantial discount.
[They do charge tax and shipping.]
Stan Walens, San Diego
May 17, 2025; 7:50 pm
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