October Recap
In case you missed it you can find last month's newsletter here: october newsletter
Bingo Winner
During October we held a birding bingo competition and it took our winner Adam less than two weeks to complete a bingo!
Adam wrote a pretty sweet script to analyze all potential bingos using iNaturalist data on species sightings to generate heat maps for each one.
I'll figure out a way to share the code and output but here are a couple sample heatmaps he generated for two of the possible bingos using Livermore as the center coordinates.
Adam will be recieving a framed certificate and
a place of recognition on the website.
p.s. if you're a fan of herpetology check out Adam's herping related instagram
Rare Bird Sighting
Myself and another birder from this group went on the October edition of the monthly Salesforce Park birding walks and spotted a yellow-breasted chat!! I'm not sure how rare of a sighting it is but our guide was pretty shocked and told us it was a lifer for him in his multiple decades of birding! Some people started to pop up in the park just because they heard the bird was in the area so it must have gotten some attention in the birding circles. I tried doing a bit of googling to learn about the rarity and I didn't see much but I did see an article from 2021 from the SF Bay Bird Observatory remarking that the capture of one of these birds was rare and that the breeding bird they captured was the first of its kind in the county
Member Submissions
Thank you to everyone who sent me photos of the birds they saw!
Sandy spotted an acorn woodpecker on a morning walk in Pleasanton and while in Hawaii with fellow member Rick they spotted some yellow-billed cardinals and common mynas
Shah sent in a bunch of cool pictures while in the Galapagos with his wife Susan. Most of these were videos that I screenshotted until I can figure out a better way to host videos on here:)
Janet saw some cool birds on her European vacation including some Paris airport sparrows, monk parakeets in Barcelona, and a majestic pigeon also in Barcelona
Aarshdeep saw some bushtits and a raptor eating what looks like a rodent
George saw a western meadowlark in fort mason in san francisco
And lastly I'm sending this out while in Cancun for my friends Nick (also a member of the bird club) and Andrea's wedding. I spotted some cool birds including plenty of magnificent frigatebirds like the one pictured below
Spotlight Bird: Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)
For no other reason besides the fact that we celebrate Thanksgiving this month I chose the wild turkey as our spotlight bird. Turkeys can be pretty cool and I like hearing the gobble gobble but honestly they are not my favorite bird. They are pretty easy to spot while on hikes around the bay area or in many suburban areas or on golf courses. I actually see them at my office park in Pleasanton quite frequently.
Fun Turkey Facts:
- The turkeys we eat aren't the wild turkey they're actually a different kind of turkey; those ones are white
- The wild turkeys we see in California aren't really from California they have been more recently introduced for hunting purposes
- There was a subspecies of California turkeys but they are long extinct. You can see some remains in the La Brea tar pits
- Wild turkeys are kind of annoying sometimes and can be a nuissance. They blocked a bunch of cars one time when my family and I were leaving church because they wanted to peck at peoples tires.
- Turkeys can fly a little bit and can also swim
- They fly up to trees at night to snooze
- I ran out of turkey facts I'm going to choose a better bird for December
November Bird Book Club
While last month we had a friendly birding competition this month we will be doing a little book club! For the month of November we will be reading The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. The book came out earlier this year and I don't know much about it except Amy lives in Sausalito or somewhere in the North Bay and she decided to journal about her backyard birds and draw pictures of them using the John Muir Laws. Stay tuned for the December update because there may or may not be a friendly bird drawing competition inspired by this book ;)
Closeout
That's all; happy birding