Glen Canyon Park Mystery Bird July 2009
OK - so, to anyone who read the last two birding posts and wanted to know what happened on my third solo outing (without the family), it kind of didn't happen. I went out, but was flagged down by a bunch of cyclists as one had been in a bad accident and was asked to do the good Samaritan thing. That said, I still had Monday as a holiday, but was re-united with 50% of my entourage for the trip out. I needed to go into San Francisco, so decided to take a look at Glen Canyon Park as had read about sightings of rose-breasted grosbeak “behind the day care center.” Only one problem with that information - no idea where the day care center was. I had seen something called “Christopher Playground” on the map and thought that looked like a good place to start. Wrong! Only thing there was a park filled with people playing with their dogs next to the “dogs must be kept on a leash” signs. One such animal actual ran at me growling which was rather interesting as I kind of instinctively put myself between it and William and shouted at it. Obviously it wasn't a vicious dog as it just cowered into a ball on the floor until its master came running over rather upset that his dog had run off. In fact he was so upset he had to skip back to his boyfriend to be consoled about the whole event. Back to the birding and something a long way from the minds of the dog owners, I got a couple of decent shots of a bushtit, but that's about it. I let William play for a bit, then decided to move off and go in search of “the day care center.”
I actually think I found the right place on attempt 2 and there were certainly a lot of birds around. Didn't see the grosbeak that I was looking for, but did see something interesting at the end. Now, I haven't been able to identify this bird as the quality of the photograph is so poor it's not true. (I was using my old camera as didn't want to take the new one out and leave it in the car whilst in San Francisco). There is also another bird that I think is a juvenile American goldfinch, but I could be wrong about that - I had thoughts about a juvenile house finch or possibly a western tanager, but as I've noted before, I'm not much of an expert.
The one thing this little trip did allow me was the opportunity to enhance my xml parsing program to accommodate multiple track segments. The birds I have are:
- American Goldfinch
- Bushtit
- Dark-Eyed Junko
- House Finch
- House Sparrow
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