Field Trip Leader: Mackenzie Hollender, sacaudubonyoungbirders@gmail.com
Supervisor: Kevin Hollender 

This is a Young Birders Club field trip. Participation is limited to members of the Sacramento Valley Young Birders Club. Register via Slack to join the Sacramento Valley Young Birders Club on this trip. Please go to www.sacramentoaudubon.org/young-birders-club to become a member. 

Join us as we explore one of the Capay Valley's best birding sites! The Capay Open Space Park is a small recreation area beside  Cache Creek, just before the rolling blue oak hills at the start of the coastal range. The area features riverside chaparral with scattered oaks and cottonwoods. This spot is one of the only reliable sites for viewing Lesser Nighthawks in the central valley. As dusk falls, the nighthawks rise into the sky, and flit around on thin, pointed wings, hunting for insects, and flashing their vibrant white wing bars and white throats as they do. This makes the one of a kind Lesser Nighthawks very fun to observe. These birds will be our main target species of the trip. Sometimes there is a Bank Swallow colony along the river which we will visit too. Some years also have American Barn Owls nesting in nest boxes. We will also keep a lookout for California Thrasher, Bullock's Oriole, California Quail, egrets and herons, and maybe, a Great Horned Owl.

Lesser Nighthawk © Daniel Lee Brown