Notice anything different???

This post officially puts all Pacific Loons, Sprague's Pipits, Brown Pelicans, LeConte's Sparrows and anything else on notice that they can no longer slip through Tiscornia Beach trusting the alpha-error phobia of committees/compilers/they-saw-what???-general-birding-public to not be written up or else in the rejected bin sans photos.

I finally caved and bought a used Canon 40D off E-Bay. Tim let me borrow his lens and I blasted a little under a thousand images, 95% of which are already in the delete bin.

Just imagine what this pic will look like when a Thayer's or Kumlien's flies by:

The lake was glass calm making for some nicely reflected composures:

Here the scaup flared right over the pier...

I was finally able to take advantage of a scoter right on top of the pier, but we'll stick with the novelty of flight shots for this post...

About once an hour we would hear a clamorous sound which I can only describe as combining a flock of geese and a distant freight train. Long skeins of Long-tailed ducks would stream north in groups of 1000-2000 birds. The flocks would stretch across about half to 2/3 of the horizon when they would go by in numbers way out over the lake.