Category Archives: Birds

One of the things I want to do and have been looking forward to in the Victor Valley area (Hesperia, Oak Hills, Apple Valley, Victorville, aka the high desert) is getting out to hike and explore. I haven’t done much of that yet due to time pressures and most of my spare time (even now) going to the ongoing tasks of moving in and getting organized. Yes, it’s been 8.5 months, which is a far longer time than I ever thought it would be, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint. I can do marathons – a sprint would kill me, and that wouldn’t be any fun at all.

But I’ve been looking at the maps, and I knew that a nearby major street ended just a few miles away when it ran into the edge of “the Mesa.” We’re near the south end of the valley floor here, with the ground dropping off into the Cajon Pass where the I-15 Freeway heads “down the hill” toward San Bernardino, Riverside, Rancho Cucamonga, and then intercepts the east-west freeways which will go west toward Pasadena, Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and Ventura, while a left turn to the east will take you to Palm Springs, the low desert, and Arizona. Up here, away from the I-15 and the Cajon Pass, the ground just drops away at “the Mesa” down into the canyons which lead down to San Bernardino and the Coachella Valley.

Where the Mesa drops off, we also have the BNSF train tracks coming up through the Cajon Pass (look on YouTube for “Cajon Pass live railcam”) so I went looking for the dirt roads and hiking trails along the edge of the Mesa. I found them, I found the train tracks, and I’ll be sharing those pictures and adventures over the next few days. Today, let’s look at the new birds I found.

The north-south road that I was following ended the paved segment about a mile south of the east-south main road that our house is off of. There’s a huge electrical substation there, a couple of really isolated homesteads, and then the road continues another quarter mile or so as a dirt access road for emergency crews and the power company that services the multiple high-tension power lines running to Los Angeles and SoCal from Hoover Dam and all of the solar and wind farms out in the desert. I parked the car at the end of the pavement and walked on the dirt road – no need to risk getting the ancient Volvo convertible stuck out in the boonies!

While walking on the dirt road, I suddenly flushed a small group of birds out of the tumbleweeds next to the road and I was pretty sure what they were. When I was a kid, pre-teens, I went hunting with my dad in South Dakota and recognized these birds as being similar. When I got back to the car later, I saw a group of five or six crossing the road, then one popped up on a sign to stand guard for the others.

I couldn’t get too close without spooking them again and this “adventure” was sort of spontaneous and spur of the moment, so I didn’t have my good camera and telephoto lens with me, just my cell phone, and it was getting dark shortly after sunset, so the couple of photos I got were marginal. But… That’s a California Quail, not much doubt about it.

Not expected, a pleasant surprise to see, but not unreasonable to see now that I think about it.

Cool! Next time maybe I’ll plan ahead a bit more and bring the big gear!

Pigeons. “Sky rats.” They’re ubiquitous, commonplace, omnipresent in almost every urban environment.

Yet while I’ve always seen them everywhere around shopping centers, office buildings, restaurants, and so on, I don’t recall EVER in 40+ years seeing them in our yard or in the residential neighborhoods in West Hills. Perhaps I was just blind to them because they’re “background,” but that didn’t stop me from seeing the finches, wrens, crows, and other common birds.

Ever since we moved up to Hesperia and the Forever Home, I see them every day. But rarely, until about a week ago, in our yard or on our house. It almost seemed as if there were a flock of 15-20 of them that were nesting or roosting at a house down the block, to the point where I was seriously wondering if they were being raised there and kept in a coop in the back yard. Almost all of the other houses have anti-pigeon spikes on the rooflines and gutters. Our house only has it in a few places, like around the interior courtyard gutters and out on the back porch, but some of our neighbors have it all over the place, along all of the gutters and rooflines and near the solar panels.

Then, just after we got back from our Arizona trip, I started being woken up in the morning by the cooing of pigeons and scratching of their claws on the metal flashing of the chimney for the fireplace in our bedroom. If they’re sitting up there, the sound gets carried down the chimney and amplified. Then I started seeing them down on the ground underneath the bird seed feeders, up to four or five at a time, picking through the seed dropped by the finches and wrens at the feeders. The pigeons and squirrels seem to hang out together nicely when they’re scrounging through the astroturf for fallen seeds.

Most of the pigeons are the usual dark grey, with a bit of that purple iridescence around the head and neck when the sun hits it just right. However, this particular pigeon seems to be the largest of the bunch and has much different markings and colors:

I shall refer to it as Emperor Pigeon! I have decided that this one and the small group that have started hanging about and waking me up at sunrise every day (UGH!!!!) are a breakaway flock from the one down the street, establishing their own gang of rebel pigeons in our yard.

In other quick bird news from the yard:

There was a hummingbird at the feeder this afternoon. I think the ones here are more migratory than the ones from West Hills. Those were hanging about year ’round, but here, while there were dozens a day during the summer and fall, I haven’t seen one at all in probably four months. But there was one back today, which brought me joy!

The pair of HUGE ravens that hang out have discovered the grapes I’ve been dumping out in the front yard and where previously they would eat them in a few days to a week, my offerings to the Corvid Gods are now disappearing daily. I’m waiting to see if they start to bring me trinket gifts in return – I’ve heard that they often will.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these posts. That’s one thing about being out here in the desert. The variety of birds seen is half or less of what we had in West Hills, and most of what we have are a subset of the West Hills common birds. Sparrows, finches, an owl (not two or three varieties), red-tailed hawks (not three or four species), crows and ravens, pigeons, and I’ve heard mockingbirds, but haven’t seen it yet.

But yesterday…

I had walked down to the corner to the community mailbox and on the way back, this little lady strutted out in front of me and headed across the street. Knowing what I know now, it’s probably that behavior where she was trying to act like a decoy to lead me away from her nest.

I was surprised to see her – she looks like a shorebird of some kind, and in fact is part of the plover family and related to terns, sandpipers, and willets. I have no idea what she’s doing here – we’re a LONG way from the beach!

But the (wonderful!) Merlin Bird ID app positively identifies her as a killdeer. Which immediately made sense, since the birdsong routine in Merlin had ID’d an unusual song that I heard ten days ago as a killdeer, so I knew there was at least one around. Well, now we can put two and two together and confirm its presence, for whatever reason.

Finally, when I can find time or make time to go exploring in some of the local wilderness parks and hiking trails, I may find some more new birds there. Someone in a local FaceBook group recently had a bunch of fantastic bird pictures, including bald eagles. I know that the Friends of Big Bear eagles are just about 15 miles away, but they’re also up a couple thousand feet more in elevation, in the pine forest. But we’ll see when we see!

We have a decent number of crows and ravens around, including at least two pairs that are “neighborhood” crows.

I don’t really have a focused plan to recruit a personal air force of corvid minions, but I do recognize that they’re smart, they recognize and remember people, and they like food.

Once or twice a week I’ll drop a handful of grapes out on the turf. (Doesn’t it look nice now that we got a gardener to clean up the weeds?) It might take a day or two but they’ll vanish. And when we first moved in the crows always sat on the roof of the neighbors across the street – now I see them more often on our roof or on the house next to us but on the side overlooking our driveway and yard.

I’m an Odin in training! As are they!