Although we had stopped at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge on our way to Arizona a week and a half before, I didn’t want to drive by without seeing if there were any new birds there, particularly American Avocets. It didn’t take long to see animals we hadn’t seen on earlier visits. We had just started the tour when Leslie captured this shot of a rabbit on her side of the car
while I was taking this shot on the other side of the car.
On our previous visit we only saw small flocks of Snow Geese and assumed that they had started migrating North, but we saw hundreds of geese fly overhead on this visit.
A large section of the refuge that had been flooded the week before had been drained, and visitors were diverted to a large pond that had been gated in previous visits. We were thrilled to see Clark’s Grebes performing mating dances, even if they were too far away to get good pictures.
We were also excited by our first sighting of the year of a male Ruddy Duck in breeding colors.
I love that bright blue bill and upright tail.
Although there were several birds we hadn’t seen our recent trip, there were also lots of birds that we have seen on recent visits, like this pair of Northern Shovelers.
Part of the joy of places like the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge is that you never know exactly what you will see on a particular visit. When we’ve circled the reservation twice in a row in the past, we were often surprised by not seeing birds we had seen an hour before as well as by seeing birds we hadn’t seen on the previous round.