ML613253084

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Media notes

Bird 1

Observation details

First bird: Calling from moss-, fern- and vine-covered steep canyon walls on the side of the road with many seeps, about 3.7 miles in from Hwy 39. Calls an emphatic doubled or tripled "jewk-jewk", somewhat like Wilson's Warbler but more emphatic. Seen hidden in the ground cover: a more or less concolorous (underparts slightly paler than upperparts) very dark brown wren with a paler supercilium and short tail typically held cocked up. Second bird: Calling from dense rose ground cover about 1.5 miles in from Hwy 39, downstream of the second bridge. Same description of calls as the first bird. Recorded. Not seen. Almost certainly a third bird also heard around the 3 mile mark, but this bird was on the opposite side of the river and I'm a little gun-shy after a Wilson's Warbler experience (see below). There is a huge amount of good habitat this year, especially with dense ground cover taking over the edges of the stream where hundreds of alders etc have been destroyed by the Bobcat fire. There also seem to be a good number of Pacific wrens in Southern California this winter. If anything, the surprise may be that I only detected 2-3 birds and not more. But these birds are extremely hard to detect unless they are calling. All the birds I found were silent and undetected on the way up and only found on the way back closer to sunset. Interesting side note: I had been thinking to myself on my walk back after seeing the first bird that these calls are subtly different from Wilson's Warbler, and I can probably tell them apart. Then I came upon a second "Pacific Wren" calling from low ground cover by the side of the road/creek in perfect habitat. The calls weren't doubled, which I assumed was because the bird was not as agitated. I started recording it, and out came a bright yellow bird. So much for me being able to tell them apart. I'm sure the spectrograms will show subtle differences.

Technical information

Model

NIKON D5600

ISO

12800

Focal length

500 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire

f-stop

f/7.1

Shutter speed

1/200 sec

Dimensions

2363 pixels x 1568 pixels

Original file size

880.52 KB