Huntington Gardens was awesome!

Leaving aside that they’re amazingly gorgeous gardens, the birds were cool! I didn’t see the parakeets, but I saw something equally cool–a Red Whiskered Bulbul. They’re an import from Asia that’s established a breeding population in a very few places in Southern CA, one of which is Huntington. (They’re a neat bird, sort of like a blue jay wearing harlequin paint.) This is actually the first bird that I got to ID that was so local that it didn’t have the little “range” map in the Sibley guide.  (Sibley guides contain a little map of the US, with colors marking the distribution of birds. Some birds, however, have no range map–birds that get blow over occasionally from Siberia, for example, or feral parakeets that only live in Miami, or whatever. My first obscure bird! I am proud.)

Okay, I’m pretty sure we can’t exceed Wikipedia’s bandwidth…

Also saw a lot of black pheobes, what I think was a Nutall’s woodpecker, (like a downy woodpecker with a busier back–held itself different from a downy, but don’t ask me to articulate how…*grin*) and more hummingbirds of all descriptions than you could shake a stick at.

I am sunburnt and have a blister the size of a fifty cent piece, but I regret nothing!