Hot and Cold

It was hot. Temperatures were soaring. All the heat adjectives becoming reality - sweltering, blistering, searing, stifling...and more. The moment I stepped out of our air-conditioned room, it was as if a giant python suddenly constricted my body and I felt gasping for air. Sweat poured from my body in torrents. 


There was no other choice but to return to our room, lie still on our bed and remain there until summer's over.


But of course, that was only wishful thinking. There were chores to do, errands to run, a life to live. Which necessitated the passage from blazing sun to cool building interiors for quite a number of times. At the end of the day as Cynthia and I prepared for bed, plans were even made to go birding early the following day - a Saturday.


Except that we did not wake up early. Not only that, to even make it worse, I woke up with a cold. Clogged nasal passage, itchy-throated kind of cold. I thought getting a cold happens only on those icy wintry days or on those getting-soaked-in-endless-rain moments. Yet, I silently asked myself, why did I get this ailment on one of the hottest days of the year?


Several cold tablets later and after confining myself to bed (in our air-conditioned room, of course) plus Cynthia's TLC, I am now feeling much better.


By the way, TLC does not mean Tomatoes, Lettuce and Cheese.

When it Rains It's Poor

We always suspected that TV weathermen (they call themselves "Meteorologists") are so much like Astrologists...they make predictions based on what they see from the sky. Most of the time these are just wild conjectures purported as "science".

Friday night when the "meterologists" said that Saturday will begin as cloudy but will become sunny by midday, we planned our birding trip accordingly. We did our errands early Saturday morning, took a leisurely lunch, and then proceeded to San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary in Irvine to search for the Tropical Kingbird. It would be a lifer for us.
It was a little after twelve and the skies were still overcast. Nevertheless, we went to the area between Ponds 1 and 2 where the rare Kingbird was seen as recently as 9 o'clock that morning. When we saw a kingbird-like silhoutte hawking insects, I thought we found our quarry. But then a closer view only revealed a very active Say's Phoebe. As if adding insult to disappointment, it drizzled a bit.

Undaunted, we trekked the trails surrounding the other ponds to see if we would find some other interesting species. Unfortunately, only the usual suspects - Song Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers - were there and even then because of the poor light, photographing them was next to impossible.
Having gone full circle, we decided to give to kingbird locale one more try. We saw a couple taking photographs in that particular spot. Encouraged, we hurried over and discovered that the couple was Glenn and Felicia, bird photographer and birder/blogger respectively. We have met this lovely and friendly couple several times before in our Orange County forays. It turned out that Glenn was photographing an American Kestrel and no, they haven't seen the Tropical Kingbird either.

Tired and cold, we drove home vowing not to take weathermen's forecasts seriously ever again.