Author: Loren

Finally, an American Avocet

Although it was fun to see the deep pond that you can’t visit most of the year, my favorite part of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge is still the winter auto tour, even after thousands of geese have left the refuge. The first few times I visited the refuge, I thought that the main ponds were lakes, but over the years seeing the ponds when they’re drained reveal that they’re more like a wetlands than a lake.  That makes them good habitat for long-legged wading birds, and those are some of my favorite birds.

Through the camera lens, White-faced Ibis appear to be large birds with really long legs and the water they’re wading in seems deeper than it really is,


but when you see an Ibis next to a duck, though, you realize that they’re legs really aren’t that long and that’s why the frequent wetlands.


  Wetlands are also an ideal place to see Egrets, like this Great Egret

even if it is not actually wading.

Most of all, though, American Avocets also favor these wetlands, and Avocets are my favorite long-legged wading birds.


So, even though we only saw four Avocets the whole day, seeing our first Avocets of the season still made my day.

Where Did We Leave Off


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.  

If You’re Here

you are at the new home of my site, lorenwebster.net/ “In_a_Dark_Time.”

It hasn’t been easy getting here, at least not for me. I’ve been fighting technical problems on my site for the last two weeks. I first noticed something had gone wrong when Jetpack wouldn’t link to my site, no matter how many times I tried re-setting it.

I spent days following tutorials Jetpack posted on how to resolve problems with linking your site to Jetpack. Finally, I gave up trying to solve the problem myself and asked for help from Jetpack technicians. They had me try most of the things I had already tried with the same result. Jetpack wouldn’t connect to In a Dark Time. They told me the problem was with my hosting site.

When I asked my host to help resolve the problem they said everything was operating the way it should. When I followed the links Jetpack suggested, it certainly looked like it should work. But it didn’t.

Finally, I decided that I would switch hosting sites to WordPress, even though I had just paid my annual fee to my former host. My time was worth more than the time I had to devote to solving a problem that I couldn’t understand.

My migration to WordPress went fairly smoothly, or at least it appeared that way until I noticed that there were strange symbols (that I don’t even know how to reproduce) appearing in blog posts. I thought they must have occurred during the migration, but it turns out they appeared on my original site. They had somehow appeared after articles had been posted and proofread.

WordPress “Happiness Engineers” spent several days trying to get rid of them but couldn’t do so. After they were unable to get rid of them on their end, they suggested some plugins that might help. They didn’t. In the end I will have to go back through each blog entry and manually correct them

Ironically, after I had paid to move my site to WordPress, my site froze and my former host moved it to a. new server. Right after that, it linked to Jetpack, at least for a short time.