March 4 --- A Day Trip To Henderson and the Bird Viewing Preserve

It was Errand Day, but if I got an early start I could visit the birds there first, so I hit the Northshore Road running along the (logically enough) north shore of Lake Mead at 6:30am and arrived at the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve around 8am. Its hours are 6am-2pm March thru May; I will definitely go there as soon as it opens next time as it's a fantastic place, an oasis in the desert for birds. The signs from the Boulder Highway, the main route through Henderson, are well marked -- thank goodness as it is a bit of a circuitous route to get there. Here's the entrance --

It's located at a water reclamation facility and has nearly 100 acres of basins, lagoons and ponds.  There are plenty of benches, viewing areas, and even vertical "blinds" with holes to see through. And plenty of informative displays scattered throughout the preserve --

I met with Jim Hulsey, a staffer at the Preserve, and he gave me a tour of the area in an electric golf cart -- it acted as a blind as we wound silently along the paths. There used to be 17,000 acres of springs and wetland areas in Henderson, almost all of which has been destroyed by development, so the Preserve is a precious wildlife resource here. The skyline of Las Vegas can be seen throughout, the Spring Mountains (they'd just had 10 inches of snow from last week's storm) beyond that --

Jim gave a fascinating talk about the history of the Preserve, and told of even some of the questionable things I saw, such as the Osprey platforms --

They're questionable in that, except for some sunfish, there are no fish here, so nothing really to attract Osprey to build nests. And when some workers placed branches on one of the platforms, hoping to entice them that way, the branches they used were too big for the Osprey to use. But about 4 platforms nests are there, unused...But this is a great place to see birds up-close without having them fly away. Jim showed me this female Costa's hummingbird, sitting on a nest in a palo verde tree on the front garden of the preserve --

And he also pointed out another Costa's nest, sitting on TOP of a pine cone in a pine tree, a very unique spot for a nest. You can get good closeups of, say, male Northern Shovelers among the reeds --

And even "rafts" of Shovelers feeding --

The male Ruddy Ducks here are starting to show their breeding plumage --

And Jim pointed out Gambel's Quail up in a tree, knocking seeds down to the ground so the Gambels there can eat them -- 

I saw Long-billed Dowitchers on an island in the middle of a large pond --

What a fantastic place this is, and I want to thank Jim for giving me this tour. I'll definitely be returning to the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve before I leave the SE Nevada area on March 22. 

After visiting the Preserve in the morning, I did a few errands that needed to be done in a "big city", such a picking up a can of "PermaSeal", a rubberized, waterproof coating that I'm going to try on the area near Discovery's rock guard in front that has some water damage. I drove home back on the Northshore road, and got some panoramas of the Bowl of Fire --

And Redstone Dunes --

This area just north of Lake Mead literally BEGS for panos, as it's really the only way to get a feel for the panoramic splendor and vastness of the landscape. What a day it was...