Earlier this week I took a day off work to join the SLO Beaver Brigade (I did not make that name up!) on a walk along the Salinas River in Atascadero to get a load of the dam these large rodents are making. The trip was a joint venture between Morro Coast Audubon and slobeaver, as there’s a lot of overlap among environmental groups focusing on wildlife and habitat conservation.
Naturally, I brought my camera along, not so much in hopes of getting a beaver shot (they’re nocturnal, at least in rivers and streams), but for the local avifauna. Nothing like getting right out in the thick of things to try to get some good action. Among the birds I saw on the trip there were several green herons perched high in the treetops, several different kinds of swallow (violet-green, tree, and northern rough-winged), and several active pairs of Black Phoebes.
A compliant phoebe even demonstrated its flycatching technique for me. (Black Phoebes are in the family Tyrannidae, the tyrant flycatchers, so it’s no surprise that they’ve mastered the technique.)
On the way out, we saw a young Bald Eagle on its way to brunch:
If I’m to believe this article about plumage variation in Bald Eagles, this one is most likely somewhere between one and two years old. There’s a much more visually appealing blog post on how to age a Bald Eagle here. No telling how old the squirrel it’s got was, but it won’t be getting any older.