Janet Fullwood: Flight plans

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CHICO – Go on a field trip with a flock of birding enthusiasts, and the conversation in the vehicle is sure to be interrupted with interjections like this:

"Up there … on the telephone pole … it's a bald immi!"

"I'd sure like to see a Eurasian wigeon …"

"Red-shouldered or red-tailed?"

"Don't think it's a peregrine."

A novice's eyes might be on the road, but those with an affinity for our feathered friends are constantly scanning the skies, the landscape, the horizon. A committed birder's head swivels like an owl's, and the enthusiasm is contagious.

("Bald immi," by the way, is shorthand for immature bald eagle.)

Winter in the Central Valley brings gray skies and frequent rains, but when it comes to recreation, there's more to consider than loading up the skis and schlepping up to Tahoe. The avian action at this time of year is among the most profuse in the country – and all it takes to enjoy it is a car, a field guide and a pair of binoculars.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service claims 47.8 million Americans practice bird-watching as a hobby. So popular is the activity in California that communities all up and down the Central Valley, from Tule Lake in the north to Lodi in the south, have begun staging festivals to celebrate the great migration that brings millions of waterfowl and other birds to our region each winter.

The next major fest, Jan. 25-27 in Chico, takes the snow goose as its symbol and offers, among other activities, more than 40 bird-centric field trips. Some are for neophytes like me who get excited about spotting a bald eagle but wouldn't know a yellow-billed cuckoo if they saw one. Some are for folks like festival coordinator Jennifer Patten, who knows where any given species is likely to roost and can identify an unseen bird by its call.

And some, like an evening "owl prowl" outside the Chico Creek Nature Center in Bidwell Park, are geared to families with small, curious children.

Those kids' eyes are sure to open as wide as those of Oscar, the center's disabled Western screech owl, when they hear a bird in the wild answer the taped call from a boombox.

"The goal of the festival is to introduce people at a level they can appreciate," says Patten. "They come to experience something they haven't experienced before. It's a thrill to see the expression on someone's face when we point out a bird they've never noticed, but that's been there all their lives."

Recently, just to get a hint of what it's all about, I spent a couple of days bird-watching in the vicinity of Chico with Patten, festival publicist Marvey Mueller and various other folks who will contribute their expertise to the event.

The idea was to find out where members of the public can go poking around at leisure on public lands dedicated to wildlife management – and to visit some of the rice farms and other venues open for touring only during the ninth annual Snow Goose Festival of the Pacific Flyway.

Snow goose convention

During the course of our touring, I filled the front and back covers of my notebook with the names of 59 bird species spotted in the two days, and I know a few escaped me. But before we set out, I wanted to know what's so special about the snow goose, a medium-size fowl with black-tipped wings that can span up to 54 inches.

"Their numbers are relatively small, but they're big and showy and gregarious, and a good symbol of Pacific Flyway migration," said Jay Bogiatto, a professor of wildlife biology and orinthology at California State University, Chico, who will lead several festival field trips. "What stands out about the snow goose is its visibility. Being white in this landscape is eye-catching."

About 250,000 snow geese overwinter in the Central Valley, wildlife experts say. That's peanuts compared to the 1.5 million to 2 million pintail ducks and 1 million-plus other waterfowl that share the habitat.

Snow geese congregate in big, noisy flocks, making them particularly easy to find. Like other waterfowl that arrive via the Pacific Flyway – one of the world's busiest avian highways – they hunker down in our region from November through February, attracted to flooded rice fields and wildlife preserves that mimic the all-but- disappeared native landscape.

About the writer:

• Bee travel editor Janet Fullwood can be reached at (916) 321-1148. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/ fullwood. For more travel and outdoor news, check out the blog sacbee.com/goingplaces.

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