Early on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend this year, I headed out to Santa Margarita Lake to try a trail that I hadn’t yet had the chance to hike. It’s spectacular, and I highly recommend it: Rocky’s Trail. (All the maps call it Rocky Trail, but the signs have the apostrophe s, making me wonder who or what Rocky is, and why the trail is named after him/her/it/them.)
When I say early, I mean early: I actually made it to the lake about twenty minutes before sunrise, which allowed me to take some nice moody pictures of the moon as it was nearing moonset.
The trail begins right at the park entrance, so you can park in the little lot that’s in front of the campground there. (You can also park a little farther in, at the equestrian staging area, but that’s also the parking for a different trail head, the longer Grey Pine loop.) Rocky’s Trail, start to finish only took me about 2-1/2 hours, with plenty of stops for photos; a determined there-and-back trail runner could probably have done it 45 minutes–it’s only 3.75 miles out and back, and I parked farther away than I needed to).
We birders always prefer to be out early in the morning, when the birds are most active. This morning, due to my pre-dawn arrival, I was rewarded with bird song all around for the first hour or so of the hike Among the birds I heard and/or saw were Red-tailed Hawk (1), Dark-eyed Junco (4, a tired adult feeding 3 young ‘uns), House Wrens (many), towhees both California and Spotted, American Crows, a raven, and numerous grebes (Clark’s, Western, and Pied-billed).
The red-tailed hawk had no interest in me being anywhere near; I spotted him at the top of a tree, and before I could even raise my camera to my eyes, he’d already bailed. He landed (I discovered a few minutes later) in another tree farther around the lake. This one didn’t have a very good view of the trail, and I was able to get close to him before two things happened at the same time: I saw him and he saw me and booked it. But, because I had my camera a bit more at the ready, I was able to get a couple of pictures of him as he vamoosed.
Many of the birds are more visible at this time of the year because they’re busy either trying to start a new nest (so singing for a new mate or carrying nesting material for the nest construction) or they’re busy feeding young. Several of the birds I found today had insects in their bills and were stuffing them into their nest holes or their youngster’s mouth holes.
It took about an hour to reach the top, so the morning was fairly well advanced by the time I turned around to head back to the vehicle. Which meant that on the way down the trail after “summiting” (with a very obstructed view of the dam’s spillway), I heard fewer birds. On the other hand, the light was a bit better placed for photographing the ones I did see.
My favorite scene on the way down the trail was a heroic adult Dark-eyed Junco hopping around with food in its bill, feeding three impatient young ones.
Here’s a little gallery of the birds:
And here’s a little gallery/travelogue of the trail.
