Here are the pair of Barn Swallows, perched on a dry stick just above the wet grass.  The rain is falling, their feathers are wet.  Yet they’re making forays for insects sturdy enough to fly through the air along Bear Creek.  Air that’s as much liquid as gaseous.  On the right is the female on a diffferent perch.  It must be harder to propel themselves through the air weighted down with all that water.  Just winging in the rain.

This morning, with steady if not heavy rain, we held our quarterly walk around the Jefferson Nature Center, led by Dennis Niebuhr of Rogue Valley Audubon.  Similar walks date back years, giving a rich set of data for this stretch of the Bear Creek Greenway in south Medford.  Also on our walk was Barbara Massey who co-authored the book, GUIDE TO BIRDS OF THE ROGUE VALLEY.  Due to the rain there was little birdsong for the first hour, and not a lot of birds.  We did spot this Flicker, hanging out.  Hanging out to stay dry, in fact.  She was on the underside of a heavy trunk that tilted slightly, affording her a dry spot out of the rain.   Note the tint on her wing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later we saw Flickers moving about, after the rain let up.  And the Orioles came out of hiding. Grosbeaks began singing.  A pasttime they seem driven to pursue in this season.  “Singing grosbeak” is now a redundancy. Through all the rain there were various Peewees calling, unseen in the foliage.  A Black Phoebe had been fly-catching right above Bear Creek, the water a rich brown with granite granules and mud from the Siskiyous upstream. 

Not a day conducive to good birding spotting.  We heard a single warbler, a Wilson’s. The several Bewick’s Wren seemed jundajungted by the wet, claiming the territory just as they do on sunnier days.  We were pleased to see a pair of nesting Red-tailed Hawks, a pair of Kestrel and a handful of California Quail.  Both Barn and Cliff Swallows are nesting beneath a street bridge over Bear Creek that was completed after last year’s nesting season.  The cement supports have wonderful shelves just built for perching swallows.  Joining the Tree Swallows in their high flights were a few Vaux’s Swifts.

Location:     Jefferson Nature Center
Observation date:     5/28/08
Notes:     Access to area north of the drainage right-of-way denied by
construction.  Rainy, dank, but the group was great!
Number of species:     37

California Quail     5
Great Blue Heron     1
Green Heron     1
Red-tailed Hawk     2
American Kestrel     2
Killdeer     5
Rock Pigeon     1
Mourning Dove     23
Vaux’s Swift     5
Anna’s Hummingbird     2
Acorn Woodpecker     1
Northern Flicker     7
Western Wood-Pewee     5
Black Phoebe     3
Western Kingbird     1
Western Scrub-Jay     5
American Crow     1
Common Raven     10
Tree Swallow     17
Cliff Swallow     7
Barn Swallow     5
Black-capped Chickadee     2
Bewick’s Wren     6
American Robin     3
Wrentit     1
European Starling     40
Cedar Waxwing     49
Orange-crowned Warbler     2
Wilson’s Warbler     1
Spotted Towhee     7
Song Sparrow     3
Black-headed Grosbeak     6
Brewer’s Blackbird     23
Brown-headed Cowbird     4
Bullock’s Oriole     3
House Finch     3
Lesser Goldfinch     8

This report was generated automatically by eBird v2(http://ebird.org)