Birding the Skyline Wilderness Park in Napa

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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. If you’re eve in the area for a wine country trip and you want to get outside for a good hike, Skyline Wilderness Park is your spot. There are multiple trails and views all the way out to the bay. It is right in the town of Napa, only an hour from San Francisco.

The camping area where the trailheads are located also has the Martha Walker Native Habitat Garden. This is a very nice area and you can start your birding here or even just visit here if you don’t have time for a longer hike. The longer trails climb into the hills and you can even hike to a small lake. We did a shorter loop that took us up to the top of the first hill which had incredible views out towards Napa and the north end of the bay. We had an incredible rare sighting as well – a sneaky Bobcat was just lying in the low grass near the trail only maybe a hundred yards in!

But there were many birds to see as well, Wild Turkey moved in and out of the area, and loud Cooper’s Hawks sat above and called their distinctive call. As mentioned in a previous post – these hawks are not friends of the rest of the birds. They hunt smaller birds, stealthily flying through the tree’s to find their meals. We saw quite a few Cooper’s Hawks at the park. But the bird we saw most was the ubiquitous Acorn Woodpecker, they were all over the place, loading their acorns into trees, utility polls, wherever they could!

Take a visit to the Skyline Wilderness Park, enjoy some good food and expensive wine. Add a trip into the city while you’re there and do some birding on the bay or at the coast!

Useful Links and Info:

Read our last post about Chukar.
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Most of these shots were taken with the Sony a7 along with the Sony FE 200-600mm lens.
Always bring bug spray and sun screen when birding!