Spotted!

Home for a little bit! The clocks were still on Daylight Savings Time. I decided to get rid of some of the old Jeopardys. They went back to mid-June on my DVR! Lots of delete, are you sure? yes, delete!

Saturday, December 2nd, we decided to go after some local yokels. We wandered around West LA, our old stomping grounds (in 1965), looking for the Veteran's Garden. The Virginia's Warbler, John has looked for it in 7 states this year, has returned there for another winter. We spent a couple of hours and didn't see the little darling.

Then we drove to Huntington Park for a bird that used to be common in Southern California. We found the park, walked around a bit, then John spotted the Spotted Dove! Yea! 680 for his big year. We found only four of them. I wonder what happened to them? Now we have the Eurasian Collared-Dove expanding exponentially. I just looked up its name in a 1983 Golden Guide, not even in there.

Sunday morning, I persuaded John to try again for the warbler. This time when we got to the VA there was a holiday party for veterans, lots of traffic, but we got back to the Veteran's Garden finally. A lady birder was already there, good sign? She said the warbler had been seen yesterday at 3. Yesterday? We were there yesterday! Today we brought chairs. The big sit. About noon, a photographer who has 822 photos in the ABA showed up. He just needed a better picture of the warbler than he has to date. Misty and cloudy ain't great for photos. About 1 PM, John walked over to say goodbye to the other people. I saw movement in the ivy and heard the chip. John! I have a bird! They got over to me, I saw the bird's head sticking out with a white eye ring, it dove back into the ivy, chipped along the fence, maybe popped up on the other side of the pittosporum, where the photographer just missed a shot, and was gone. Nobody else saw it. The mist was getting heavier and we were getting hungrier. We left about 2. Home to a wood fire in the fireplace.