After five days of illness (two of them spent in bed), I'm ready to start the last stretch of our three-week, six-state, migratory-bird-story road trip. We have reached San Francisco, our latest Pacific Flyway stopover, and will stay here until Tuesday morning. Then we will migrate on to the San Jose area and the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
We're staying in the city's self-proclaimed greenest hotel, the Orchard Garden, which is only the fourth hotel in the world to be given LEED (Leadership in Energy and Design) certification for its building design. The concrete used in the hotel's construction was made from a byproduct of coal. The insulation and electrical systems reduce energy use. All the fabrics are recycled materials. The toilets and faucets are low-flow. And so on. Another green plus: The cost of our three nights here will be less than the cost of one night at a similarly de luxe hotel in New York at this time of year.
The Sacramento refuge is the wintering home for millions of migratory waterfowl. We made three visits to the refuge and were newly amazed each time. Around dusk the sky would almost blacken with incoming geese, ducks and swans.
At Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, we looked down from a cliff onto these brown pelicans gliding across the powerful breakers and making their way back toward Mexico. The waves provide updrafts on which the birds ride.
At the Point Reyes Bird Observatory field station, we watched staffers carefully remove specimen birds such as this spotted towhee from netting. The birds are examined, measured, banded and set free. The Point Reyes Bird Observatory is one of the world's most important and respected avian research groups.
Baseball has been the talk of the state, of course. Dressed by coincidence in black and orange, Pamelia and I were presumed to be big Giants fans by the people we saw in Calistoga. Even policemen complimented us on the street for proudly wearing SF colors.
I love these birds, called black-necked stilts. They have, proportionately, the longest legs of any North American birds. We saw this group at the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Refuge, an urban oasis on the fringe of the city of Sacrament
As you can see from the sign, I'm not the only one who likes black-necked stilts.
Though we were looking for birds (and saw some beauties, including the bright-yellow-breasted Western meadowlark), Pamelia and I saw even more elk on a six-mile hike through the Tule Elk Reserve at Tomales Point, north of San Francisco. Tule (pronounced TOO-lee) is a type of plant—a bulrush—found in wetlands.
While in San Francisco, we're hoping to visit the California Academy of Sciences, which in recent years has been expanded and updated. It has a 2.5-acre living roof, made up of plants. As always, we'll be looking for good ideas for The Naturalist's Notebook, though I think we're happy with our old-fashioned roof for now.
Among our other animal adventures, we met a pair of zebra finches kept as pets by an innkeeper (they were bred, not captured in the wild). They were the sweetest, cutest pet birds I've ever seen, with songs that sounded like laser-gun sound effects from a Star Wars movie. Look them up to see how cool-looking they are.
A shopkeeper we met told us about her fat cat, whom she had named Bengie Molina after the stocky catcher who played for the woman's beloved Giants. Unfortunately, Bengie the player was traded to the Texas Rangers this season. During the Giants-Rangers World Series, the shopkeeper and her husband kept yelling, "Sit down, Bengie!" when the now-enemy player made an out. Confused the cat.