The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

January 6, 2025

The newest bird of the New Year slips from the bare chokecherry to the fountain. After all the juncos and jays, towhees and titmice, a single, gorgeous cedar waxwing pays a visit. It must be the ripening pyracantha berries in the front yard, a favorite of the thrushes and mockingbirds and, now, the waxwings. At least in some years. Many winters, I don’t always find these silky northern nomadic birds with the Zorro mask and stylish pompadour.

Only one cedar waxwing in 2023. Nothing in 2024.

The fall of 2022 was a better season for cedar waxwings. In November I counted nine.

I’m reading Amy Tan’s wonderful, illustrated book about watching birds in her Bay Area yard: The Backyard Bird Chronicles. With exquisite color pencil drawings, she journals about the antics of scrub jays and juncos and chickadees at her seed feeders.

But her book isn’t all passive birdwatching in her PJs—okay, maybe no PJs...

She writes about how hanging a fake crow upside down at her patio to dissuade the corvid invaders from taking over her yard became a crime scene, a “murder of crow.” How night-stalking rats come to her feeders after dark despite her rat-trap creations and chile-pepper-dusted suet. How wielding her garden hose makes the rogue neighborhood cats think twice before leaving lovely bouquets of loose feathers on her lawn.

Yes, birdwatchers have their obsessions.

Cats being one of them.

I, too, have cats.

After my morning birdwatch with the waxwing, I hike up the south drainage past the hand-dug well and its solar pump to a pair of wildlife cameras mounted to two juniper trees so the cameras face each other. I pull the memory cards and change the batteries. I now have a record of everything that moved along the trail over the past months—though the dates are wrong because I forgot to reset the time stamp last time.

Back home, I scroll through hundreds of images. Cottontail rabbits with glowing eyes in the darkness. Ringtails and hooded skunks on patrol, snouts to the ground. Scrub jays and turkeys. Hunting gray foxes and single-filing javelina and white-tailed deer on parade. Lots of deer.

And cats.

A bobcat pauses on the trail in front of Camera #2 where it has picked up the scent of something…

Perhaps this mountain lion? Which also is on a scent mark at the same location…

I rarely see more than one mountain lion. This looks like a female followed by a subadult offspring at Camera #1. We do have plenty of birds (turkeys) and deer.

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