A visit to the McNabney Marsh (Shell Marsh) (Waterbird Regional Preserve), Martinez, California to see the Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus).

10 May 2004

 

Background:

I must admit to be a rather lethargic bird-watcher in the last couple of years. After a couple of decades of being confined to apartment living, I inherited a house with an actual backyard. I became very spoiled with gardening and bird-watching within the confines of this little bit of real estate. Several hanging bird feeders attracted the locals; English Sparrows, House Finches, Chestnut-sided Chickadees and more infrequently, Mourning Doves, Plain Titmice and Scrub Jays. The back garden was and is basically quite overgrown. The Bushtits and the Chickadees love that old Fuchsia shrub next to the house, which seems to be chock full of tasty protein-filled (low carbs!) bugs.

Information of Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus) breeding in coastal California:

Since I rejoined the National Audubon Society (mostly to get their "free" CD of bird calls and songs) this year, I was given a subscription to the local Contra Costa chapter of the national organization. I happened to read that some Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) were nesting in the McNabney Marsh near the town of Martinez. I wasn't even sure where this marsh was, but a quick search of the Internet gave me some directions to it.

It is located just east of the 680 freeway and a large oil refinery (birds will put up with a lot of noise, evidently). There is a short road to the Waterbird Preserve that runs southeast from Waterfront Road, which is a the last freeway exit going north before the Carquinez Strait toll bridge.

The human constructions set on a bluff with a view of the Preserve are suitably low-keyed: a parking lot, a small picnic pavilion, a privy and a couple of descriptive panels. Only one other visitor was there when I arrived about 11 AM on Sunday. There was a constant dull roar from the traffic on the 680 freeway, and the refinery loomed large in the background, but the Marsh was quite lively with many species of water birds including White Pelicans, Canadian Geese, Avocets and Mallards. But I had come to see the Great-tailed Grackle, which I had not seen since I had visited San Antonio, Texas, on an AMTRAK trip over twenty-five years ago. In that city, there were great numbers of Great-tailed Grackles that were loud and proud, strutting around the town and were very impressive in a sort of Dr. Seuss comical way with their out-sized tails. I had always assumed after that that they were a bird of Texas and the southwest, and thus couldn't be seen in the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California.

I scanned the Marsh with a pair of old 6X binoculars, which I kept in the car and which were as strong as my new digital camera, in terms of magnification or"digital zoom". Finally, I spotted my object of my search, a black bird with an absurdly large, long tail. It was flying low over the water and landed near some reeds at the northern end of the marsh. I left the official overview and drove back to the intersection of "Waterbird Way" with Waterfront Road. It was lower here than on the bluff, and thus was much quieter. I finally got another glimpse of the Great-tailed Grackle and tried to get a picture of it with the digital camera, at the no-zoom setting, its default value. No time to crank up the zoom feature as that Great-tailed Grackle was flying away.

When I was a little kid, I used to take my bird photographs with a Brownie camera, and they always came out as a tiny speck in a picture of vast sky. My bird photographs in elementary school and junior high school became sort of a family joke, "Find the bird in the photograph." When I could finally afford a telephoto lens for my 35mm camera, I had lost interest in taking pictures of birds. I realized that professional bird photographers (Hal Harrison and others) had already done a brilliant job in that area of human endeavor. And now, decades later, I can get digital photographs with tiny bird images on a broad background of sky. This is progress?

Anyway, I am happy to know that the Great-tailed Grackles have made it out to coastal California and are enjoying the benign Mediterranean climate along with the rest of us.

 

 

 

 

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This web page was recently created by James Sayre.

Contact author James K. Sayre at sayresayre@yahoo.com. Author's Email: sayresayre@yahoo.com

Copyright 2003 by Bottlebrush Press. All Rights Reserved.

Web page last updated on 10 May 2004.