I recently got shots of two “new” birds. I say that because I have probably seen them before, but just never taken the the time to ID them. There are lots of little grayish-brown birds that reside in this group. But as I try to learn more of the birds around Point Lobos, I find that I need to spend some extra time to get these IDs.
So I present the Pacific-slope Flycatcher, a bird that I list as heard more than seen. And true to that listing, I hear them all the time in the Reserve, but have only seen them twice. Fortunately a pair has been nesting near the Reserve entrance and allowed me to get this shot.
The second bird was a bit harder to ID because it was flitting about in the top of a big sycamore tree. It was showing obvious flycatcher behavior, so managed to stay at the limits of my auto-focus and move every time the focus got close. I took over 50 shots and and spent 20 minutes on this one bird.
And after all of that, I still didn’t have a no-doubt-about-it shot. So I went through all of my shots, what I could remember of the call, the likely suspects and came up with a Western Wood-Pewee.