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| California Quail, Gilgal Gardens |
Shari & I arrived a couple of days early to Salt Lake City so that we would have some time to go to the Utah Museum of Natural History and do some exploring. A friend of mine and I used to travel around to random cities on the east coast for long weekends on the theory that any city is interesting for 3 days; Salt Lake City disproves that theory because by Sunday, afternoon, we were out of things to do.
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| California Quail chick |
Before breakfast on Saturday I wandered around the parking lot of our hotel which was plunked down, along with many other hotels and the FBI headquarters for SLC, right next to I-80. I got a couple of easy year birds there with
California Gull and
Great-tailed Grackle. We started our touring at Gilgal Gardens (see next entry), a sculpture garden created by a masonry contractor with many references to the bible and his Mormon faith. We like visionary art so when Shari found the reference to it online we decided to make it our first stop. I didn't expect to find birds there but standing atop one of the first sculptures we looked at was a
California Quail. Going around to the rear of the sculpture, under some plantings we found chicks and a female quail. And the soft "coo coo ca" we heard turned out to be a
Eurasian Collared Dove sitting on a pole in the next yard. There were a few other birds but the only one we wouldn't find in our backyard was a
Black-capped Chickadee.
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| Lazuli Bunting, Red Butte Arboretum |
Our next stop was the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, where both the Red Butte Arboretum and the natural history museum are located. I don't find botanical gardens all that interesting but this one at least had one plant that had the best name I ever read: Dragonfly Angel Kiss Piqsqueak. I was so stunned by the name that I didn't even look at the plant. While we wandered the paths (which go off into "wild areas" if you're not careful) we saw 3
Black-chinned Hummingbirds, a
Lesser Goldfinch, a
Black-headed Grosbeak (missed that one in northern NJ this year) and at least five singing
Lazuli Buntings which, in the blazing light showed why they were named after the most precious of the blue pigments.
On Sunday (after I snagged a post-breakfast
Western Kingbird on the fence along the edge of the parking lot) we spent the morning at Liberty Park which has the Tracy Aviary within it. I really don't find aviaries interesting--depressing is more the word, but some of the birds there are at least breeders. Plus, within the aviary itself there were two over-summering
Common Goldeneyes which were worth a look. In the park itself only
Brewer's Blackbird was new.
We got back to the hotel and killed a little time before the official start of the tour with the meeting in the lobby with Scott, Linda and the other 10 participants. Shari & I knew half the group already. After a quick orientation (we're all old hands at this field trip stuff) we piled into the vans to go food shopping for our lunches for the following two days. Scott also made our first stop of the trip at the redolent Lee Kay Ponds. Because no birding vacation is complete without a trip to the local sewage treatment facility. From past experience we were all smart enough to do our birding from within the vehicles. Probably the two most interesting species we saw in the 37 minutes we spent there were the
Clark's Grebe and a trio of
Neotropic Cormorants. And so, the first list of the trip:
24 species
Canada Goose 75
Mallard 100
Western Grebe 1
Clark's Grebe 1
Eurasian Collared-Dove 1
American Coot 1
Black-necked Stilt 6
American Avocet 4
Killdeer 3
Wilson's Phalarope 1
Franklin's Gull 1
Ring-billed Gull 1
California Gull 10
Forster's Tern 2
Neotropic Cormorant 3
Double-crested Cormorant 20
American White Pelican 25
Great Blue Heron 5
Snowy Egret 1
White-faced Ibis 1
Northern Rough-winged Swallow 2
European Starling 10
Yellow-headed Blackbird 1
Red-winged Blackbird 5
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