Stuff From Other Blogs

There's a gal from the San Francisco area that often posts a birding diary on Daily Kos on Saturday mornings. This morning's diary was about birds returning to burned out areas after a wildfire such as we had in Southern California. The first returnees are

For a little while, the only avian visitors to the fire zone (and mostly the fringes, at that) will be the scavengers... vultures, some hawks, some corvids... In the hottest zones, there won’t be enough for even those guys to get by. But at the edges of the fire, there will be animals who were overcome by smoke or heat, but did not burn. The scavengers – avian, insect and mammalian – will feast. Soon thereafter, the animals that managed to survive in the fire zone will emerge, but they’ll have no cover and will make an easy meal for the predators moving back in. (Watch an agricultural burn someday – the fields are fringed with hawks waiting to pounce on the suddenly exposed rodents.)

The entire process is interesting and is well worth a read.

Another interesting tidbit was that a birdbander captured a Eurasian Kestral in Marin County (north of San Francisco) this week. It was the first recorded naturally occuring Eurasian Kestrel in California His pictures of the Kestrel are here.

Way down in the comments one of the commenters noted the wildfire damage to the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. Hopper Mountain is the home of the California Condor recovery program.