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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jos Stratford" data-source="post: 1285093" data-attributes="member: 12449">Day Three - 24 AugustIf we go by landscapes, day three just took the biscuit - Yosemite sure is pretty beautiful! Anyhow, much as I should have liked to join the gawping tourists and crawled along through the main Yosemite Valley in a RV, I thought better of it and decided a touch of birding was in order. All started well enough - being dark, I hadn't realised where I had camped out, but with dawn it turned out to be by the Merced River and right there, bobbing across the rocks, were two American Dippers! Hmm, nice. Into the car and into Yosemite proper - planned a couple of days here, hoping for a bear naturally, but decided day one should be up towards Glacier Point. Not a bad road up - vistas to die for (quite literaly if you took a step too far) and birds not bad too. Early success with a covey of Mountain Quail scurrying across the road, pausing just long enough for me to get a picture or two in the shoddy pre-sunrise light. Then a whole bunch of more leasurely stops as I climbed ever higher. A strange absence of warbers, just a couple of Orange-crowned Warblers, but plenty else of attraction - yummy Green-tailed Towhee, what a corker, plus the first White-headed Woodpeckers, ever-present and vocal Northern Flickers. Mountain Chickadees and Red-breasted Nuthatches falling out of the trees, Golden-crowned Kinglets being right gits to get good views of! Upward and upward, the scenery just got better, but as the heat also went up, birding slowed a tad ...but not before the star of the day, a little buzz of something went zooming past. Then it buzzed back again and alighted upon a twig, a little midget was sitting there. Oo, these hummingbirds could be a problem to identify I had thought, but not this one - it was the number one hummingbird that I had at the top of my hit list - Calliope Hummingbird, the United States's smallest bird. Not a bad little thing too, then buzz and it was gone!Up at Glacier Point, the heat and tourists had beaten me - so I sat and gawped too, perched atop a 900 metre overhang, the domes and pinnacles across the valley standing sentinal. Lots of Lodgepole Chipmunks and California Ground Squirrels, a few Western Grey Squirrels too, plus, on route down both Chickaree Squirrel and Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel ....five new squirrel species in just the morning, two more to come before Yosemite was over!Then it was coffee time...</blockquote>

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