CALIFORNIA BIRDS

A "superstar" - and didn't it just know it...

“I wish they all could be Cal-if-orn-ia…”

Ah, no...! I haven’t suddenly been possessed by the spirit of a young lad in a seventies sitcom, and if you popped into these pages looking for something else then, well I’d better just apologise now for wasting your time.

Sorry about that.

A California Blue Jay on another day...

Anyway, during my latest trip to the Golden State, I became very aware of the variety of birdlife that was living there. Right from the moment when a Blue Jay flittered down to land right in front of me as we made our almost inevitable stop at the Golden Gate bridge “Vista Point” about half an hour after we’d picked up the hire car, it became pretty obvious that taking pictures of the local birds was likely to account for rather a high number of the photographs that I would be taking.

On all of my previous trips to the United States, I’ve never really been aware of the birds at all. They were kind of off my personal radar because I wasn’t really interested in them, focusing my attentions more onto the spectacular landscapes and iconic locations that I’d only previously seen in the movies and on television. The birds were there, of course, and their twittering and cheeping did rather add to the general ambience as you stood there gawping at the timeless majesty of whatever piece of scenery had taken your breath away that time.

I do remember taking some snaps of some sparrows feeding off the leftovers in a café in Boston a few years ago, but that could hardly be described as showing much of an interest, really. I was just intrigued at the proximity of them and their seeming lack of fear of humanity.

Anyway, since the last of those trips was over half a decade ago, things change and, because of a desire to attract more birds into the garden, and then starting to watch them as they fed upon the many nibbles that I put inside the feeders, those delightful feathery creatures started to fascinate me in a way that probably convinces you that I really am getting old.

Nevertheless, bird-watching has become something of an interest and whilst I don’t think that I’m ever likely to become the most rabid of avid twitchers, possibly because my eyesight and equipment budget is unlikely to prove adequate, I do enjoy sitting in the occasional “hide” overlooking some quiet moorland or estuary and watching nature’s drama unfolding, and my various holidays since discovering this fascinating new world have always involved us making an opportunity to do a little bird-watching if we can, even though I remain utterly useless at the process of identifying the various species.

Even at home, every year I find myself having to trawl about in my memory hovel to remember what a chaffinch is called…

Not really Rick Wakeman.
However...

Now, I know that bird-watching isn’t everyone else’s particular “bag”, so I’m not going to go on about it or bore you with days and days of tales of feathery spotterings, but suffice it to say that enjoying looking at them has become one of those almost indescribable little pleasures in my life. I’ve already told you about the humming-bird which I saw in San Luis Obispo in another posting (Hmmm… maybe I am starting to go on about it…), and the crow pictured at the top of this piece, taken on that snowy day in Yosemite Park I mentioned recently, sat there for so long that I became utterly convinced that the birds of America, much like their human fellow inhabitants, are so “media-savvy” that they seem to be trained from birth to know exactly where the cameras are and to have a snappy sound-bite ready. Okay, maybe not the sound-bite, but in a culture so devoted to performance in all of its dubious varieties, that really wouldn’t surprise me at all, and might explain why this Snowy Egret made me think of Rick Wakeman in his “Yes” years…

I so enjoyed photographing what I could of the birds of California that I even watched the rather fun bird-watching movie “The Big Year” starring Jack Black, Owen Wilson and Steve Martin, on the flight home, a film that had made such a slight impact upon the box office that I wasn’t even aware that it had been made. However, I thought that it was rather a lot of fun and is well-worth a look if you’re in the mood for a “feel good” movie featuring lots of images of some rather spectacular birds.

Stop sniggering at the back there…