Birding the same patch over a long span of time is always rewarding. I have walked part of the Wildhorse Ag Buffer regularly for the last several years. I like it because a few minutes on foot gets me out of urban Davis onto the edge of farmland and a golf course, with their open-space bird life and a full view of the sky and its many fly-overs.
Besides offering birds that I rarely or never find in the city, this patch provides insights into the lives of local birds that one can only catch through repeated observation. For example, several species that are generally thought to be non-migratory in Yolo County have popped up in spring or fall, including downy woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch and Bewick’s wren, and spotted towhee is regular in winter. When acorn woodpeckers wandered widely through the region in fall 2019, some visited the Ag Buffer. As far as I know, the nearest year-round home for these birds is Putah Creek, five or six miles away. So they are dispersing at least that far. Twice I have seen juvenile juncos in mid-summer, presumably hatched in Napa County, or even further away. And once in late September I was startled to see a fly-over western kingbird headed due north.
Some species come and go. American kestrel, Eurasian collared dove and hooded oriole have nested in some years and not others. A breeding record of Say’s phoebe in 2018 was the first in a surge of such records that year in the Central Valley. The species now resides year-round in the Ag Buffer and nests nearby in the southeast edge of Woodland, having made a big switch from its historic winter-only occurrence. On the other hand, burrowing owl used to nest at the edge of the golf course, but I have found it only in winter recently, and then but a single bird.
Finally, there are down-home puzzles to discover and solve. Twice over the years I found single California towhees on my block, and wondered whether they came from so far away as Putah Creek. Then I found them nesting in the Ag Buffer, making it a more likely source of the errant birds. Meanwhile, in late spring I see adult green herons fly back and forth between the golf course and my neighborhood, suggesting that they nest nearby. But I haven’t found a nest yet, so I had better keep birding my patch.
The location is at maps.cityofdavis.org/openspace/. In the box in the upper left of the screen, scroll down to Wildhorse Ag Buffer. The site is also an eBird Hotspot in Yolo County called Wildhorse Golf Course—ag buffer.
Michael Perrone, YAS Conservation Chair