Vacation to Truckee

    From the 26th of December to January 1st, I visited the town of Truckee with my sister and some friends. Along the way, we stopped by the Woodbridge Ecological Reserve, a hotspot of migratory waterfowl in the central valley near Lodi. We arrived in the late afternoon while the sun was getting low on the horizon. The area had hundreds of overwintering GREATER SANDHILL CRANEs, GREATER WHITE-FRONTED GEESE and TUNDRA SWANs while several large flocks of CACKLING GEESE flew overhead. Additionally, a few meadowlarks sang their cheerful, bubbling songs and a loggerhead shrike perched on a pole, scanning the area for prey with plenty of barbed wire around to use for its larder. The highlight of the stop was a large flock with hundreds of SNOW GEESE flying in to spend the night in marshland.

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One of many sandhill crane groups

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Snow goose flock

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More of that flock. Nature is amazing.

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A "flock" (more like a swirling group) of gnats

    On the 28th, we hiked the Donner Pass Transcontinental Railway Trail, a path through abandoned railroad tunnels. In the cold of winter, water that normally ran in the tunnels froze to form beautiful but also sometimes annoyingly slippery ice falls. In a clearing between two tunnels, I scanned the surrounding forest and found 4 CASSIN'S FINCHes and several MOUNTAIN CHICKADEEs, both fairly common to this mountainous region.

Pinus contorta ssp. murrayana - Only in this subspecies of lodgepole pine do the prickly cones open at maturity

A view of Donner Lake

A rock covered in a colorful diversity of lichens

                                                 
    On our next hiking trip on the 30th, we hiked a short section of the Tahoe Rim Trail towards Brockway Summit. The beginning of the trail was very quiet, except for a few ravens calling from far in the distance. The first seen bird was a mountain chickadee, followed by an unexpected brown creeper in a ponderosa pine. I never knew that those diminutive birds could survive such cold winter temperatures, but after consulting an ebird range map, it seems like this sighting was not too unusual. My only life bird from this stop appeared a few minutes later in a section of dead tree, a WHITE-HEADED WOODPECKER doing what woodpeckers do best: pecking at wood.

Lake Tahoe through the trees

Arctostaphylos patula - the greenleaf manzanita

Trails left in the wood by pine beetles, probably what the woodpecker was after

These almost florescent green wolf lichens (Letharia vulpina) covered almost every tree. They are named "wolf" lichens as the vulpinic acid that gives them their color was traditionally used as a poison for wolves and foxes.

    On the 31st, I took a walk around the neighborhood in the late afternoon. At a feeder, I saw a pair of Eurasian collared-doves with several juncos, house finches, and chickadees, the largest concentration of birds I saw in the area. One should never underestimate the value of a feeder, especially during winter. I later walked to sagebrush scrub area. Two red-tailed hawks scanned the area from the tips of hilltop trees while two ravens flew overhead. I later found several pygmy nuthatches with chickadees in a large Jeffrey pine. As the sun set, several chattering flocks of Brewer's blackbirds flew south towards a few pines in the neighborhood.

A frozen pond by the sagebrush

    While 2013 ended and 2014 started, I started the day by taking another walk to the sagebrush area. This year, I will be attempting to keep a list of every species I see that is "wild" (native or naturalized and up to my final judgment). The first plants on my list were Jeffrey and ponderosa pines (identified with the old saying "gentle Jeffrey, prickly ponderosa" for cones), the ubiquitous sagebrush Artemesia tridentata, a few scattered mulleins, and a Sierra juniper Juniperus occidentalis ssp. australis. Birds were sparse and I only got a few, starting the year with a dark-eyed junco. As we got on the road, I enjoyed identifying the trees from glimpses and watching as the forests changed with elevation. My favorite sight was a lone, magnificent sugar pine with its giant cones weighing down branch tips. Birds were sparse at high elevations but got much more common as we descended from the mountains. The strangest site was a belted kingfisher flying from a stand of pines at a relatively high elevation, with no bodies of water in sight (perhaps they were behind the trees?). In the sunset, we again visited the Woodbridge Ecological Reserve. This time however, I did not see any geese but cranes were still abundant and it was nice to add them to my year list on the first day. At the end of the day, I got 33 bird species, a slow start but that number will surely go up. A toast to the new year!

Juniper bark with what I believe to be sapsucker holes. The only sapsucker that regularly occurs in the area is the Williamson's, which unfortunately I did not get to see. 

A young sagebrush

 Morning view of the scrubland

*photos taken by my friend Tyler C.