Hello Everybody,              27 March 2006

I'm writing this from California's great Central Valley (San Joaquin
Valley), 50 miles wide by 300 miles long, of intensively farmed flatness
between the coastal mountains and the Sierra Nevada   with
many major bird refuges along the rivers and associated wetlands.
Since leaving the Bosque del Apache in New Mexico 6 weeks ago,
I've visited 16 birding 'hotspots', some of them 'duds' but some
really great. Last year, feeling the itch to get to Alaska again, I
rushed a little, but this year has been very leisurely. I don't take my
birding 'Life List' seriously, but it is fun to watch it grow: I started the
year around 130 and am over 180 now.  Pretty puny compared to
'Big Year' enthusiasts who try to get the entire list of more than 700 in
one calendar year. And I'm surprising myself by quickly recognizing
a fair number of birds, but I'm still baffled how some experts can get
a glimpse of a bird 2-300 yards away and instantly say "Oh, a
Swainson's Hawk". I cheat, and try to get a picture of it and then sit
down in the evening with the laptop and bird books. Yesterday I was
lucky to be with some experts who told me that the amazingly weird
noise coming from a reedy marsh was an American Bittern   it
sounded like a huge toilet plunger working in a hollow pipe, nothing
you would think of as a bird noise. The bird books describe it as a
'distinctive oonk-a-lunk' or 'deep, gulping, pounding bloonk-
adoonk'. They are so secretive they are hard to photograph, but I
got a glimpse of it flying, enough to 'claim' it. 

After getting all the expensive new pieces put back into my truck's
front axle in Yuma, I crossed into California just north of the Mexican
border, to spend several days at the Salton Sea NWR   this was a
bonanza! Lots of birds to photograph right around the visitor center,
and many shorebirds along the marshes and shoreline of the Salton
Sea. The Sea was formed 70-80 years ago when the Colorado River
broke through some dikes and started filling up what had been a
mostly dry basin around 250 feet below sea level. Today it's a large
inland sea, around 10 by 40 miles overall, and although it's extremely
salty and full of runoff chemicals from agriculture, the birds seem to
thrive. I had a nice place to camp in a county 'park' (sand and
rocks, not grass) for just a few dollars, all by myself at the tip of a
peninsula jutting into the lake. Then I got more adventurous and tried
to drive down to the beach to camp in another area   it didn't
LOOK very slippery and I wasn't careful to scout ahead on foot, and
soon found that the mixture of thick salt crust, pulverized shell sand,
and water from recent rains was even worse than Colorado/Utah
'gumbo' mud for getting stuck in. For the first time in 4 years I hauled
out my demountable 9000 pound electric winch which plugs into
the rear trailer-hitch receiver socket, and in 5 hours of energetic
activity with headlamp under a full moon, finally made it back to
solid land. Everything, winching gear, truck, and me, coated with
salty crust, which took many quarters at a carwash to get rid of. I
don't seem to get smarter as I get older, maybe even stupider.

As I left the Salton Sea, the truck air conditioner quit cooling for the
third time in 4 months; since I was only a few hours from my favorite
shop in Yuma which had rebuilt it, back I went. It was a minor
electrical connection problem easy to fix, and they also found a tiny
leak, so I was soon away.

My birding books recommended the Anza-Borrego state park in the
Southern California desert; I had a great time there 2 years ago
exploring 4WD canyons (prior to my interest in photographing birds),
and even though I did not find it productive for birds, I enjoyed
revisiting some of the places I remembered and exploring new ones. 

Nearby Big Morongo Canyon Wildlife Reserve turned out to be
excellent, however, mostly because the reserve 'host' has many
feeders which attract hummingbirds, songbirds, and woodpeckers.
(It seems amazing how the hummingbird's brilliant iridescent colors
appear black when viewed away from the sun   until I realized
what was happening, it made identification difficult.)  The hosts
have been there for 10 years; they said they pulled their big 5thwheel RV home around for 4 years and always kept coming back to
Big Morongo as the place they liked best, so just settled there as
permanent hosts.

Last year in the rainy March which was exceptional for flowers in
Arizona and California, I spent a couple of very enjoyable days in
the hilly grasslands of the Tremblor mountains along the San Andreas
fault in Southern California. Birding books recommended the road
down in the valley just a few miles away from my pervious route, so I
was glad to head back to an area I remembered so fondly. This year
on exactly the same dates, the flowers were around 5% of last
year's, but it was still beautiful and with plenty of birds to make it
interesting. I think since last year, the entire area has been made into
the Carrizo Plain National Monument, which will give it protection to
keep it in its present primitive state.

Where I am now there are three major wildlife refuges clustered
together along the San Joaquin River: Merced, San Luis, and Los
Banos, and it's fortunate that these have taken several days to
explore, because I have needed to wait several days for parts to
arrive to fix the air conditioner yet again   tomorrow a local 'NAPA
Care Center' is to replace the compressor and accumulator (which
were replaced in November) under warranty; it has not been hot
weather, and it's not out of my pocket this time, so failure #4 does
not seem too painful. Let's hope this one sticks! Once the truck is
finished, I'll spend some time visiting my old IBM friend Joey Tuttle
near Santa Cruz, and can use his DSL link to send this eMail and
upload the slideshow.

After a year I'm still learning how to use my big telephoto lens and
camera more effectively, and Photoshop on the laptop, and still
having a lot of fun with it. It also helps meeting people! Both camera
buffs, and birders and tourists who are intrigued. I found a new
website with many superb bird and nature pictures, many taken with
exactly my setup, and from this I've learned how to use effectively
'sharpening' in Photoshop to add a little more crispness to images  
sometimes it's not very noticeable but often it makes quite an
improvement. <  http://www.pbase.com/gaocus/root  > All the
experts say how important this is, but I found that Photoshop's
'sharpen filter' was extremely clumsy to use and I never seemed to
get good results from it, so I sort of forgot about it. On this website I
saw mention of a $25 program 'Intellisharpen II' which seemed
worth a try, and it works really great and is easy to use. It seems to
make more of a difference on the images from my 8Mpx DSLR
camera than on my 4 Mpx 'point and shoot' camera, although it is
not clear why this should be so. I get a bit of a kick out of all this, as
the technique used is essentially 'unsharp masking' and I wrote
about this in a technical paper back in 1962; then it was considered
a rather esoteric optical technique, now everybody can have it on
their PC. Of course back then Photoshop would have been
considered a miracle, not to mention the cameras, laptops, and all
the other electronic gadgets we take for granted today. 

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshow:

http://www.firestardesign.com/johna 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to
be just 'john')

The new slideshow is < 06MarSoCalif.exe >

Most of you will be using Internet Explorer: you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to
have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I have used my
updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free, and in this case
you can safely ignore Windows's warning about dangerous '.exe'
files. 

Right-Click or Right-Arrow will advance to the next picture
Left-Click or Left-Arrow will return to the previous picture
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show seems stuck

If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files   please let me know, as it is very easy
for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the
individual images, just let me know. I have limited space on
firestardesign.com, so must sometimes remove older slideshows to
put up new ones; let me know if you want me to send you a CD of
any of the 'back issues', or all of them along with their
accompanying eMails, on CD. And if you don't want to get any
more eMails like this one in the future, just let me know.

Regards, John Armitage