Birding Calaveras County, California - Big Trees State Park

April 30, 2007 on 12:16 am | In Birding Afar Report |

April 25, 2007
Angel’s Camp, California

I’m writing this blog post from the resort where we’re staying in Calaveras County, all the way across the state of California from our beloved Sonoma County. This is one of the rare, priceless opportunities we have once in a great while to go on a little exploration, birding farther afield, and our first day here has proven to be one of the greatest events in our birding career.

Today’s destination: Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

We had a funny combination of weather conditions this morning, with snow left on the ground at the sides of the road from last weekend, but a warm, sunny sky overhead. As you head east along Hwy. 4 through the towns of Murphys and Arnold, the conifers get thicker and thicker. The air smells incredibly good, and just a couple of miles past Arnold, you arrive at the main entrance to the state park. We headed first to the North Grove near the visitor center and you quickly understand why this place is the pride of the county and a major tourist destination. In addition to the ponderosa pines, sugar pines, incense cedars and white fir, the giant sequoias reach heights of up to 325 ft. and can be up to 33 ft. in diameter. There is something so special about this forest.

It has a completely different feeling than the coast redwood forests we know in Sonoma County. The whole atmosphere seems brighter, airier, more open and ventilated here in Big Trees, and appropriately, the first inhabitant of the woodland you meet is the creature John Muir credited as the cause of the forest - the Douglas Squirrel.

I have to say, with the possible exception of the Alpine Chipmunk, you will never meet a more darling furry animal than the Douglas Squirrel, also called the Chickaree. John Muir did an excellent and entertaining study of them over a century ago and explained how the pinecone-storing seed-scattering habits of the Chickaree have conjured up and maintained the vast forest of the Sierras. He is both far smaller and quicker than the familiar California Grey Squirrel we know at home and he ricochets from trunk to trunk in the forest like a pinball. The forest floor can suddenly come alive with half a dozen of them, speeding over the ground and suddenly stopping to make their bird-like trills, their little dog-like barks and a host of other unexpected sounds. They play lead in the musical arrangement of Big Trees.

We were a little disgruntled that our arrival in the woods corresponded with some park rangers cutting down one of the trees. The ugly sound of chainsaws hardly created a feeling of repose, and my husband and I nearly jumped out of our shoes when the tree hit the ground, shaking the entire forest with a boom that hurt my ears. I don’t know if the tree was sick, perhaps in danger of falling over, but I was sad about its demise. It is believed that some of the giant sequoias in the park are more than 2000 years old.

Eventually the rangers left, and the forest made that odd shift that forests do when loud people leave. It seemed to become quiet, but really, it’s more like a top level of distraction disappears so that all of the lower levels of sounds can begin to be heard.

We were incredibly hungry and began our picnic at one of the tables. In moments, I could see we were being watched, and a falling potato chip brought in a Stellar’s Jay…then 2…then a dozen or more. They were gorgeous-looking individuals with deep blue coloring and very clear blue stripes on their foreheads. I have never seen such strong markings on the Stellar’s Jays at home. They were accompanied by a brave and noisy group of Brewer’s Blackbirds. Big Trees is a beautifully clean, litter-free place. Now I know the compliments for this should go to the jays and blackbirds…not the forest rangers!

We were having a pretty jolly time with these guests perching everywhere except inside our cooler when a flash of approaching movement caught our eyes. A pair of birds had swooped into range, disappearing somewhere in the treetops.

“It’s…it’s the White-headed Woodpecker”, I gasped under my breath, hardly able to believe it.

I will now publicly call my husband to task for doubting my word and suggesting it was probably tried-and-true Acorn Woodpeckers.

“No,” I was adamant, and we leapt up in the middle of our picnic and stole as soundlessly as we could toward where I felt the birds had landed.

In just seconds, we found ourselves face to face with a bird we didn’t know whether we would ever get to see. You could have knocked us over with a White-headed Woodpecker feather!

That snow-white head, accented with red toward the back, the black body with a streak of white on the shoulder, and the smart black eyes fixed on us. 15 yards away, his wife had found her own tree, but first we just stood by the male, scarcely able to believe this dream was coming true for us.

My husband wants me to make sure to take the Audubon Society publicly to task as well here, because the western bird guide clearly states that this is an uncommon bird that is difficult to see because it is so silent. No so! It may be that the writer of that entry observed these birds at a different time of year or in a habitat where humans aren’t quite so common, but not only did these birds continue to appear everywhere we walked today in the park, in plain view, they flew within inches of our faces and made quite a lot of noise. Squeak-a-squeak-a-squeak-a-squeak mated pairs greeted each other after foraging separately, fanning out their wings as they would alight on the same trunk. They seemed so joyous! And we also heard the staccato bud-up call that sounds identical to the very beginning of Nuttall’s Woodpecker’s bud-up…budda-budda-budda-budda.

The White-headed Woodpecker, Picoides albolarvatus, measures some 9″-10″ from tip to tail and is a year-round resident of Calaveras County. The female lacks the red cap of the male, and the birds excavate a nesting hole in a pine where they lay 3-5 white eggs. Their facial markings call to my mind the White-breasted Nuthatch, with that striking division of black and white.

It was, simply put, a defining moment in our lives as birders to spend the afternoon in the presence of these unique woodpeckers, rare or not. They do not live in our own neck of the woods, and if you ever possibly can manage it, a visit to their home in Big Trees State Park will be well worth the effort. I am including here our absolutely pitiful photo of the White-headed Woodpecker as a record of our sighting. One day, we will own a real, zooming, digital camera that is meant for photographing birds. If any generous-minded benefactors are reading this and have a spare in their arsenal, we’d love receiving a donation of such a camera, to better document our birding explorations. Until then, it’s photos that look like we’re trying to pull off a woodpecker hoax, and my trusty paintbrush and palette.

You’d think adding this one, new, magnificent bird to our lifelist would be more than enough of a thrill for a single day. Yet, just down the path from where we first saw the White-headed Woodpecker, we came upon a wonderful pair of Red-breasted Nuthatches. I was so excited about this, as it is the White-breasted Nuthatch which seems much more common at home. I have to say, I don’t think the photo in my Audubon guide quite captures the charm of the Red-breasted Nuthatch, and even the talented David Allen Sibley falls a little short somehow. The living bird has such a bright spirit, such an active nature and we so enjoyed watching this pair scaling the trunk of a tree, picking at the bark, making industrious little pik remarks to one another as they worked. And, all day long, we heard the more prominent, monotonous mah mah mah mah mah of this species drifting through the woods.

It’s interesting to mention here that this is the bird whose call skeptics have suggested that searchers are mistaking for that of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I agree that there is a similar nasal quality in the sound I listened to all day today, but the individual notes and the overall pattern of notes are nothing like the recordings I’ve heard of Ivory-bills from the 1930’s.

The Red-breasted Nuthatch Sitta canadensis measures some 4 1/2″ in total and is a year-round resident of both Calaveras County and Sonoma County. They lay 4-6 brown-spotted eggs in an excavated tree cavity.

We were just absorbing the happiness of the active, sylvan nuthatches when we flushed
tree-clinging-bird #3 up from a fallen log on the ground. There was something about the glimpse we got as the bird took off that made us feel it wasn’t anyone we knew. After just a moment of searching, we relocated it perched above us on a tree trunk, but our brains were kind of scrambling at this point because of the overload of amazing woodpeckers. Then we saw the back, and that big, fluffy white spot and we knew we were at last looking at the Hairy Woodpecker with our own eyes.

We have often worried about how we would distinguish the Downy Woodpecker from the Hairy Woodpecker. Most bird guides depict two, nearly-identical looking birds with those distinct marshmallow-like spots on their backs and leave you to base identification between the two birds on size alone.

We’ve become very good friends with Downy Woodpeckers in our neighborhood over the past year or so, and because the are so tiny (only about 6″-7″) we became confident in identifying them as Downy and not Hairy, despite the confusing resemblance.

Well, our doubts about our identification skills really were allayed today as we spent time with a pair of Hairy Woodpeckers in Big Trees State Park. For one thing, their red crests were not at all red. I really want to research this better, because the birds we saw had peachy-coral crests of a most unusual tone. Were they young birds? We don’t know, but this was such a distinctive feature. They also simply looked ‘bigger’ in every way than our friends the Downy Woodpeckers. They were comparable in size to the 9″-10″ range of the White-headed Woodpeckers we saw…perhaps just a little bit bigger, in fact, and we watched with awe as one of them took an enormous piece of bark off a tree and let it fall.

Like the White-headed Woodpeckers, this mated pair greeted each other with a burst of loud, rapid notes. Like most woodpeckers, they nest in excavated holes and lay 3-5 white eggs. The Hairy Woodpecker, Picoides villosus lives both here and at home in Sonoma County year round, but this was our first ever sighting of one and only made our day all the more incredible.

In addition to the above birds, I saw the biggest, most robust looking Brown Creeper I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if our Pacific coast birds are by nature smaller or more, well, sleepy-looking, but the bird I saw today looked so alert, well-plumed and busy. His feathers were lovely, with a very visible rusty tinge around the base of the tail. I must devote a full post to this unique little bird one day, and I was very glad to see he has a place in what had come to seem like Woodpecker heaven to us.

Not surprisingly, Audubon’s Yellow-Rumped Warblers were on hand. They love to follow woodpeckers around to glean from their excavated leavings as we learned this winter by observing their interaction with our resident Red-breasted Sapsucker. There were also numerous American Robins in the forest.

It was hard to leave the North Grove, and I confess, we were almost in a state of listlessness after spending hours swimming in a sea of tree-clinging birds, but we eventually got back in the car and headed up the Beaver Creek trail toward the South Grove.

The forest was further brightened by the big green and white blossoms of Pacific Dogwoods - a lovely sight. This road crosses the Stanislaus River and we got out for a look at the rushing, loud water. Over the din came the sound that Sibley so accurately describes as a cascading series of clear whistles, falling and slowing, ending with nasal hissing notes. Thanks to my birding binoculars, I found myself catching sight of the Canyon Wren, down on the rocky bank below the bridge. I love wrens, but never dared to dream I’d be lucky enough to see this one. They do not live in Sonoma County, but are year-round residents here and their beautiful white throat, grey head and speckled russet body are unmistakable. I wish we’d had a longer look before the bird flew away under the bridge, but I was really thrilled by even a brief glimpse.

The Canyon Wren Catherpes mexicanus measures about 5 3/4″ and has a very long bill. They are considered an uncommon bird and their preferred habitat is sheer cliffs and rocky places, often near water. They build their small nests in the crevices of rocks and lay 4-6 white eggs.

We also spotted a Hermit Thrush making a bird bath of an indentation in a rock by the river, and two amusing ground squirrels having a tremendous battle. We continued on up the road to see the scenic overlook where snow is still cresting the distant Sierras. This looked like excellent habitat for raptors, but we didn’t see anything. It was so quiet up there on the mountain, apart from the eternal call of a Red-breasted Nuthatch counting off the alpine seconds from the branches of an evergreen.

I am falling asleep as I write this. I’ve gotten more oxygen and exercise in one day here than I normally do in a week back home, and I can hardly imagine what we’ll see tomorrow. In my heart, I have a little list of special birds I would love to see in this unique corner of California, but I won’t write them down due to some sense of superstition. If the birds want me to see them, they will let me know.

Read Part 2 of our Calaveras County Bird Trip Report.