Happy Halloween from a small town about 70 miles north of Sacramento, California. Pamelia and I have covered much ground and seen many birds in the last three days. We've hiked around a dried-up lakebed in southeastern Oregon, discovered a great Mexican restaurant in a big old former bank building in Klamath Falls, Ore., nearly driven off the road at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge because we were paying too much attention to the wildlife, watched in awe as tens of thousands of geese took off in unison at Tule Lake, observed black-tailed deer, driven past aroma-rich fields of just-dug-up onions, seen California's Mount Shasta...lots of stuff.
That's Albert Rim, a 2,500-foot high fault-line scarp that overlooks Albert Lake, a half-dried-up inland sea in Oregon.
We were worried that the Fremont-Winema National Forests in Oregon were on fire—the only signs we'd seen more often than forest-fire-warning signs were billboards and posters exhorting people not to use crystal methamphetamine—but it turned out that these were controlled burns of small piles of brush.
This is one of the Western grebes that we saw on Tule Lake. I am attaching a link below to a short video that shows their amazing mating dance.
Here is a link to the grebe mating dance I mentioned in the caption above. You have to watch it:
We're off to some of the refuges that make up the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex. It's a long way from the city of Sacramento—we're in farm country. Lots of rice and olives and other crops. Today we're having a 70-degree sunny day. We'll be in California for the rest of our trip, with many birding stops to see. We may end up driving through Yosemite to get to the bizarre and unique Mono Lake later this week.