Not a House Finch

We are walking through the UC Botanical Garden, checking out what is in bloom, and looking for birds. It's early March, so the really exciting change-over to spring birds hasn't begun yet. We're expecting the usual winter crew: ruby-crowned kinglets, white-crowned sparrows and fox sparrows, maybe a woodpecker if we're lucky.

Crossing from the California section to the the cactus section, we spot a few house finches, males with red heads and chests, females all streaky brown. One female is hopping near a small pool of water. Something about the bird catches my eye. It doesn't look quite right for a house finch. It's doesn't quite have the right heft, seems a little delicate. I look through binoculars and get just a brief look before it hops deep into a bush. The bill doesn't seem right for a house finch either—too narrow.  I take a few not-quite-in-focus pictures, and I'm still not sure what it is. Did I just get a funny look at a regular house finch?

When I look at the pictures later, I see it is definitely not a house finch. The thin bill is a clue, as is the patch of yellow on the wing. It's a pine siskin, the first I've ever seen!

Pine siskins are occasional visitors to the bay area during winter. They live in nomadic flocks that range widely and unpredictably looking for seeds, particularly conifer seeds. They are much more common further north and higher in the mountains, which is also where they nest in summer.

It kind of amazes me that i am still seeing species I've never seen before here after 19 years living in the area. Part of this just points to the complexity of the patterns of what creatures are where, when. These birds are not really rare here, but when they appear depends on the ebbs and flows of seed production in the Sierras, the Northwest, or even Canada. 

Another aspect of this is my increased attention to identifying species, and increased skill at noticing when a glimpse doesn't match the common bird I'm expecting. I've read that birders use the same parts of our brains (the fusiform face area!) for bird identification as what people use for facial recognition. Our brains have evolved to recognize individual people quickly, immediately understand our relationship to our human community. I like that we can harness that power to recognize members of the wider community of our ecosystem.

Links:

Pine siskin information from the Cornell Lab

UC Berkeley Botanical Garden

Blog post about the fusiform face area and birding from ornithology.com

Bobcat!

We walk through the displays in the Point Reyes National Seashore visitors center, checking out the dioramas and taxidermy.  "Come take a look," says a ranger, "a bobcat." We rush to the window and there it is in the distance, slinking through a field. Its fur blends with the grey, dead grass from last year. Fresh green growth carpets below. The bobcat moves slowly, sliding into hunting poses like a house cat.

A couple of times it seems near pouncing, but eventually it settles low in the grass. Once it is low and still it is very hard to see. After a few minutes, we head out on a walk in the mossy douglas fir forest that borders the field.

After the walk, heading to the car on the other side of the visitors center, we see the bobcat again. This time it strides across a field right in front of us, maybe 30 feet away. My heart quickens. I feel myself holding my eyes as wide as I can trying to take in this sight. The bobcat sits, glances our way unconcerned, then crosses into the woods.

This bobcat seemed to be about the size of a house cat and a half. Bobcats live through most of North America, and vary quite a bit in size. They range from one to two feet tall at the shoulder and from about 15 to 40 pounds. Their colors also very quite a bit. I had never noticed the splashes of white on a bobcat's ears before this encounter.

The bobcat is a creature of edges. It prefers places  where many types of habitats meet, such as the area around the Point Reyes visitor center where fields meet forests, with riparian stream areas and rocky outcrops interspersed. We saw ours in mid afternoon, but bobcats are primarily crepuscular—active at dawn and dusk. Spatial and temporal edges are rich in life: think of the abundance of creatures in tidal habitats, the way a break in the forest is often the place where the flurry of birdlife appears, the migrating creatures that come at the boundaries between winter and spring or summer and fall.

A bobcat eat mostly squirrels, ground squirrels and rabbits, but will also eat mice, amphibians, and even insects and fruit. This is similar to the diet of a coyote, and apparently the two species are often in competition. Coyotes have increased in Point Reyes in recent decades, but this has not caused a decline in the bobcat population. Perhaps the two have settled into slightly different niches here. On our way out of the park a couple of days later we saw this hunter too.

Bobcats evolved 1.8 million years ago, not so long in evolutionary terms. They have faced threats from habitat destruction and from fur hunting, but their populations are now stable in most parts of their range. Just a couple of months ago, bobcat hunting was banned across California.

LINKS:
Point Reyes National Seashore information about bobcats
Smithsonian Nation Zoo information about bobcats
Point Reyes National Seashore