Join Jack for this walk at Novato’s Indian Valley Open Space Preserve. Our group is small, our scheduling is opportune, and our waking time is fairly early – we’re out to hear some spring bird song!
open space preserve
Indian Tree Bird Walk
Join Jack for a small group walk at Indian Tree Open Space Preserve. We’ll explore a small section of the preserve, primarily looking and listening for forest songbirds and their young, including purple finches, Wilson’s warblers, pacific-slope flycatchers, and various woodpecker species. Click through for more details and free registration.
Indian Tree Bird Walk
Join Jack for a small group walk at Indian Tree Open Space Preserve. We’ll look for wintering varied thrushes before they head north while enjoying the sights and sounds of spring – wildflowers and birdsong. Click through for more details and free registration.
Indian Tree Bird Walk
Join Jack for a small group walk at Indian Tree Open Space Preserve. We’ll explore a small section of the preserve, primarily looking and listening for forest songbirds and their young, including purple finches, Wilson’s warblers, pacific-slope flycatchers, and various woodpecker species. Click through for more details and free registration.
Indian Valley Bird Walk
Join Jack for this walk at Novato’s Indian Valley Open Space Preserve. These mostly shaded trails on the north side of Big Rock Ridge provide homes for a wide variety of woodland songbirds. More open areas host ash-throated flycatchers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, and western bluebirds, while the more densely wooded sections contain Wilson’s warblers, pacific-slope flycatchers, and a few pileated woodpeckers.
Loma Alta Fire Road
Loma Alta is one of the higher points in Marin, a nearly 1600’ peer of Mount Burdell. For us north Marin naturalists, the name primarily evokes the fire road that leads north from the summit to Lucas Valley Road, a hotspot for late spring serpentine wildflowers and dry, rocky grasslands ideal for a number of birds that are uncommon in much of the county, such as lazuli buntings, horned larks, meadowlarks, and grasshopper sparrows. The views aren’t too bad either!
Mount Burdell
If any geographical feature has risen above the flat valley of Novato’s civic and commercial life to achieve a visible prominence in the mental landscape of its citizens, that feature is Mount Burdell. It’s a name that vividly conjures up the idea of a place to thousands of Novato citizens, of a sunlit expanse of green hillsides dotted with wildflowers and vast, benignant oaks. And no time is better to visit than spring, when the mountain fills with the songs of newly arrived migratory songbirds.
Indian Valley Open Space Preserve
Indian Valley Open Space Preserve is a modest slice of forested foothills on the north side of Big Rock Ridge. That significant barrier to the south comprises the main topographical influence here, casting its long shadow over Indian Valley’s web of trails and modest hills. The combination of general shadiness, low hills, and intervening creeks creates ideal conditions for broadleaf mixed evergreen forest, whose high level of tree and understory diversity translates into a correspondingly rich community of bird species.
Deer Island Open Space Preserve
Deer Island is not exactly an island, at least not anymore. These days it is a lightly-used open space preserve in eastern Novato, centered around a hill which rises from the surrounding flatlands which were once part of the Petaluma River delta. Compact and flat, but uncrowded and rather pastoral feeling: Deer Island has a modest but very real set of virtues that are not always easy to find in combination so close to town.
Rush Creek
Rush Creek Open Space Preserve on the northern border of Novato offers several hundred acres of public wetlands and woodlands, but is set alongside several thousand more acres of protected land together comprising the largest natural tidal brackish marsh in California,