Naturalist Notes
A Mono Basin Chronicle
Early June: western tanager sitting in a piñon pine north of Lee Vining … Three Canada geese plying the water near the shoreline … Great Basin spadefoot toad sightings, particularly in sprinkler system valve wells … two great horned owls roosting in a cottonwood on the northwest shore … five Caspian terns overhead at County Park … northern pintails, gadwalls, and three black-crowned night-herons … Great Basin spadefoot toad tadpoles in shallow freshwater lagoons.
Late June: two common nighthawks hovering around Navy Beach … thousands of alkali flies along Mono’s shore … great horned owl looking after late night affairs in Lee Vining … prairie falcon over Sagehen Peak … three hundred Wilson’s phalaropes at Simons Spring, also three black-crowned night-herons, avocets, gadwalls, and many eared grebes … near the lakeshore princes plume (Stanleya spp.) and littleleaf horsebrush (Tetralymia glabrata) blooming … other flowers in bloom: yellow cryptantha (Cryptantha confertiflora), evening primrose (Oenothera spp.), sand verbena (Abronia turbinata), minute blazing star (Mentzelia torreyi) … black-necked stilt gliding through the moonlight, spadefoot toads in chorus along the shore … Sierra sky pilot (Polemonium eximium) just below the summit of Mt. Dana, wolverine tracks on a snowfield … giant blazing star blooming (Mentzelia laevicaulis) … shorebird census … more flowers near town: unidentified purple phlox (Eriastrum spp.), pincushion (Chaenactis spp.), lupine (Lupinus spp.), sego lily or mariposa lily (Calochortus spp.) … possible rare sighting of yellow-billed cuckoo along Lee Vining Creek … Williamson’s sapsucker among the lodgepoles and mountain hemlock near Gibbs Lake.
Early July: out with a Massachusetts Audubon group, sightings included sage thrashers, mountain bluebirds, green-tailed towhees, cliff swallows, common poorwills, rufous-sided towhees, black-chinned hummingbird, warbling vireos, red-breasted sapsuckers … two black-necked stilts in the DeChambeau ponds … down by the lake, a long-billed dowitcher, western sandpiper, savannah sparrows, eared grebes, and those omnipresent California gulls … eight-pound trout above the Lee Vining diversion dam … juvenile California gulls, a long-billed curlew, one lesser yellowlegs … red-tailed hawk flies over Lee Vining Creek trail with a snake in its talons.
Late July: rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus nauseosus) beginning to bloom … more Wilson’s phalarope sightings, flocks in the thousands … five nighthawks swooping over the Lee Vining Creek trail … abundant paintbrush (Castilleja spp.) on the lakeshore, giant blazing star too … hawk diving at blackbirds near Rush Creek … the Rush Creek great blue heron … tremendous thunderstorms, lightening strike fire burning between Parker and Bloody canyons … male and female soras and a Virginia rail at the County Park boardwalk … osprey hunting by the side of the highway.
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