"Why don't you come up sometime..." *

..and see Chickadees?”

Six thousand feet up in the San Gabriel Mountains, my wife and I spent the last day of January, enjoying the fresh air, the smell of fir trees and hearing the roar of speeding motorcycles. And trying to add some more species to my yearlist.

There weren’t much variety of birds to be observed here, yet in the course of about three hours, we counted six more for the month of January (including a White-headed Woodpecker, a gorgeous Red-naped Sapsucker and of course, Mountain Chickadees). The three others were Oak Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch and its tiny cousin, the Pygmy Nuthatch. These brought my tally to 153 species seen since the new year. One of the most notable birds that I missed was the Osprey! Oh well, maybe in February.

* She Done Him Wrong, 1933