Toad in the Hole

Joe heard there were a couple of recent tricolored blackbird colonies and a pair of Cassin’s kingbirds out by Corral Hollow Road and Patterson Pass. Nice coolish Sunday morning, off we went.

First golden eagle was a youngster above Corral Hollow Road, wheeling in a leisurely fashion and visible from a handy pull-out. Good thing, because there was lots of traffic, mostly guys in pickups with dirtbikes loaded up, in a tearing hurry to get to the State Vehicular Recreation Area. And me all unarmed, dammit.

The kingbirds were supposed to be on the Alameda-San Joaquin county line, which is right in the middle of the wReck area. On the other side is a LawrenceLivermoreNL-US-Something’r'other explosives test area, quite an extensive piece of ground. I’m thinking it would be an efficient use of land to combine the two, myself. Hey, they want thrills, right? And I’d pay to watch.

If the birds are still in residence, the great annoying buzz of weekend Good Clean Fun was keeping them out of sight, which is unusual for kingbirds. Maybe we’ll try again on a weekday.

East to the freeway, north just a bit to the Patterson Pass Road exit, and down that familiar road. Usually we do that on a loop with Altamont Pass in winter, for fancy hawks. This time we took a left onto a road I’d been wondering about for years; turns out to be a dead end to a mysterious enough gated commercial building—manufacturing? Remote offices? Hard to tell, and no clue in the signage. Along that road is a little cattail pond where the blackbirds were supposed to be. We saw two females who, on studying the guides, seem to have been trikes, but we neither saw nor heard any males, which is weird indeed for blackbirds. We’d got a late start; maybe they were having a midday siesta.

The second blackbird location was dry in both senses: a creekbed with no visible water and no visible blackbirds. On the way there, though, we did see lots of western kingbirds, several shrikes (always heartening, and these are likely residents), two more golden eagles and one eagle, very distant, that just might have been a juvie bald, lots of white over tail. Several redtail pairs, three or four kestrels, and of course lots of turkey vultures.

Just a few magpies, but I think that’s just because of the route we took. Lark sparrows, meadowlarks, lesser goldfinch, whitecrowns and goldencrowns, savanna sparrow; and Pacific chorus frog by ear. Ravens and crows harassing each other; crows harassing vultures. Ah, sweet Spring!

Lots more of the usual, and flowers scattered about: blue tritelia, several lupines (blue, purple, white; bush and herbaceous), blue dicks, fiddleneck, owl clover, paintbrush, butter-n-eggs, the usual posies in a handsome show. The grass is still green, but starting to ripen and get gold on the east side of the hills by I-580. Quite advanced in the season compared even to just two weeks ago when we went through there to Death Valley. 

And butterflies. The painted ladies continue to stream through in serious numbers, more than one a second in some spots. Near that cattail pond, I scanned a drift of blooming mustard and found it speckled liberally with painted ladies, and there were more in a patch of milk thistle at one of the stops on Patterson. So they do stop to nectar in the middle of the day. I’m not surprised at their unfussy eating habits, as they’re apparently about the most widely-distributed butterflies in the world—pace the Chron’s science writer, including in Australia.