Hi,
Yesterday I tried to go to Barrett Stoddard because I wanted to look for
Pinyon Jays (and normal fall migrants) there and it was already so
incredibly crowded at 8:15 in the morning (a huge number of cars were
parked illegally in spots that have large, easy to see No Parking signs. I
wonder how many parking tickets were issued yesterday?) that I gave up and
drove further uphill to a spot that does not have a useful or sexy name but
it’s a great spot to park and walk uphill through a couple miles of
chaparral until you get into a bend in the forest, where remarkably a small
stand of pine forest survived the fire. The pines in this area are Sugar
Pines, not Jeffries, and I didn’t think about that when I started walking
to that spot but I think that may have had some negative influence, but I’m
not sure. While I was still walking uphill in the open chaparral, however I
had a small number of Pinyon Jays flying over me and calling. Remarkably
when I first got out of my car I had a Clark’s Nutcracker flying overhead
and calling. A first for me at that location.
So I think that the Pinyon Jays and the Nutcracker flew past that open
chaparral where I had them and flew further south to an area that has a
mixed species group of pines which was probably better habitat albeit
inaccessible to hikers like me.
Because eBird doesn’t like it if you keep running the same checklist when
you walk back towards your car, I stopped that list, thinking, “Well, you
can’t top that” and only started a new one on the way downhill When I had a
mixed flock of three species of swift, floating directly overhead causing
me to ruin my dumb decision to not haul my camera with me. I had recording
equipment because I figured I need to record the Jays. Little did I think
that I would wind up with Black Swifts cooperatively, posing, and demanding
that I take their picture. Sigh.
There were quite a number of vaguely finch sized songbirds flying around
that I didn’t get good enough looks at while walking uphill in the
chaparral. By the way, when it is foggy and dark in the coastal cities or
even in Claremont, when you drive up here, you’re above the cloud layer in
blue skies.
Another reason I wish I had had my camera with me was that there were quite
a number of interesting and cool insects, including Pale Swallowtails,
California Sisters, 4 dragonfly species (including Red Rock Skimmer)
and some kind of bizarre, small moth that looked like a combination of a
very small skipper with a moth whose posterior wings were all black— along
with four species of lizard, including a Coast Horned Lizard.
https://ebird.org/atlascalifornia/checklist/S394734181 and
https://ebird.org/atlascalifornia/checklist/S394735073?continue
