We found a wonderful spot to land Birdie our travel trailer for a week. The Skyline Wilderness Park in Napa, California is a wonderful location to stay or visit if you are in the Napa Valley. We like wine but I certainly wouldn’t say are huge wine drinkers, and while we’ve visited some wonderful PNW wine areas like Walla Walla or the Columbia River Gorge we’d never visited the bay area wine country.
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Nothing wrong with the cherries of course, in fact feel free to purchase some chocolate cherries here. But this was our first encounter of the Chukar in Eastern Washington, something between a pheasant and a quail the Chukar are a bit of a rare site.
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It’s been too long since we’ve posted, and this will be short one but I wanted to give some attention to our friendly local Golden-crowned Kinglets. These little birds I always assume were called Golden-crowned because of their little yellow heads. But much like the Ruby-crowned Kinglet flashes it’s ruby mohawk when excited, the Golden-Crowned Kinglet flashes an orange mohawk! Maybe you already knew this but this was my first time noticing any orange color on the Golden-crowned Kinglet.
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Yes another article not based in the PNW! But in our defense Alaska Airlines now flies direct to Nassau, and since we collect Alaska points it seemed like a wonderful spot for a winter vacation while the weather here in Washington was not so pleasant, and we could do some Bahamas Birding. Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas on the island of New Providence, not the largest of the Bahamas islands but the most accessible.
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An old friend once told me San Luis Obispo was his favorite place in California. He would check for SLO jobs weekly in case there was something to apply to that would get him back to his favorite city. Because of this I’ve always wanted to visit, it is a bit of it’s own destination as it’s not too close to either the Bay Area or Los Angeles but located somewhere in between. With an Elephant Seal rookery just north in San Simeon, nearby Hearst Castle, and the Channel Islands an hour to the south there was a lot to see and do on this trip.
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Well if you already knew we had flying squirrels in the Pacific Northwest then I’m impressed. But have you ever seen one? Much like the elusive Mountain Beaver I would probably have had to look it up if you asked me if flying squirrels lived here in Washington. It turns out we have two species, the recently discovered Humboldt Flying Squirrel, and the Northern Flying Squirrel.
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The Channel Islands just off the California coast near Ventura has been a bucket list destination for us for some time. Santa Cruz Island is home to the only endemic island bird in North America, the Island Scrub Jay. It is also home to another endemic species, the Island Fox.
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A short post here to kick off the new year. Early this fall we were quite busy and didn’t have much time for birding or travel (which of course would involve birding!). And besides enjoying our backyard bird feeder visitors, we had a couple of unexpected birding opportunities.
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Our end of summer trip took us up north of the border to Banff, Alberta. Yes it is a popular place, yes it is full of tourists, and yes you should still take the time to visit!
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This summer I took my son on our first overnight backpacking trip. He is nine years old so I searched for hikes that were shorter so that the focus could be on the camping and not the hiking. While I had originally booked a permit to camp by the ocean in Olympic National park, a day before our planned hike a weather pattern brought a ton of rain to the coast right on the historically driest day of the year in Western Washington.
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