February 24 - Brad Stovall and Dawn Garcia were looking for Burrowing Owls in the Oroville area. Unfortunately they didn’t see any but did spot a Sage Thrasher. According to the annotated list for Butte County birds it is rare in the valley and more commonly seen during fall migration. If anyone cares to search out the bird, it was on the PAR 4 WAY road. This is off OroDam Blvd. - east of Wilbur. Dawn saw the bird running toward the plastic water trough on the right side of the road (going south) and got photos of it.

March 7 - John Oswald saw four Wild Turkeys on Cohasset Road and the junction of Keefer. They were on the right side if you are heading north and just before you reach the junction. Ann and John have seen them in this same general area over the last couple of years and assume they are resident in the area.

March 13 – Anne-Lise Feenstra had a first-of-the-year Rufous Hummingbird sighting in her yard in Orland.

March 15 - A male Orange-crowned Warbler was “fighting” with his reflection in the side view mirror of Anne-Lisa Feenstra’s son’s car in Orland.

March 15 – Jackson Shedd saw a Roadrunner in Glenn County on the side of Road 306 between the towns of Newville and Chrome, west of Black Butte Lake. He also spotted two Swainson's Hawks flying together over a field along Route 162 just west of Willows. Finally, Jackson says that if anyone has ever wanted to watch the Aechmophorus Grebes doing their crazy courtship thing, they're doing it now on Clear Lake.

March 18 - Pam Hansen and Skip Augur saw a Winter Wren in Bidwell Park east of the restrooms along South Park Drive road near the creek.

March 18 – Dawn Garcia and Mike Fisher captured an already banded Orange-crowned Warbler at their debut of the Butte Creek Ecological Reserve (BCEP) migration monitoring banding site. They discovered it was previously banded at the Sierra Nevada Field Campus approximately 70 miles east of Chico on July 19, 2002.

March 20 – Andy Tomaselli spotted a partial albino American Robin in the afternoon perching on a walnut tree near the corner of Alder St. and Woodland Ave. in Chico.

March 22 - A first-of-the-year Rufous Hummingbird visited Tim Ruckle’s hummingbird feeder in Chico.

March 22 - Phil Johnson and Andy Tomaselli saw two Great-tailed Grackles at Llano Seco, perched on a cow fence west of the second birding platform. They also viewed Cliff and Violet-Green Swallows, and a Golden Eagle on a carcass. Several Killdeer nest depressions were seen, but no eggs yet.

(If you have any interesting sightings in April, you can send them to the Newsletter Editor at tim.ruckle@sbcglobal.net by April 20 for possible inclusion in the next newsletter.)