Old double nickel

For my birthday I wanted to take a trip up the valley to the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge. I'd been reading in the paper (well back in mid December) about the huge number of geese and ducks that had come down to the refuge. So after breakfast and cooking of my birthday pumpkin pie, we headed up 505. It was raining, and I was feeling discouraged about the weather, but the forecast had only been for 20% chance of rain, and sure enough when we got up to Williams the rain had stopped.
We had lunch at Gargenzella's, which was okay. Ted and Frances each got a gelato (of course) and then we headed to the refuge.
What a nice afternoon we had. First we walked around on the hiking trail. In some ways it isn't much of a trail, but we did see birds on that trail that we didn't see on the auto tour, namely the American Pipet and the Cinnamon Teal. We also saw two deer as we walked the trail. Such an interesting pattern on their ears.
After completing our walk we climbed in the car and headed out on the auto tour road. There was a steady trickle of cars heading out on the tour, but we managed to be spread out enough that we didn't interfere with each other.
On the tour road we saw lots of ducks: mallards, coots, widgeons, ring-necked, ruddy, pintails, shovelers, and green winged teals. (I think thats all of them). We also saw greater and lesser snow geese, and white fronted geese (so named for their white faces). There were also numerous hawks, and a few egrets, commorants, and herons.
The funniest thing we saw was an American Bittern. Frances spotted this bird, it had apparently been thinking about crossing the road before we came along, and it was quite out in the open and away from its camouflage. Nonetheless it did its freezing routine, and sure enough, it had more patience than we did. After shooting lots of pictures, we headed on down the road towards home and birthday dinner. My pie celebrated my 55th birthday.