Sutter Buttes is a prominent feature at Gray Lodge Wildlife Area. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Snow geese, which are often heard taking off before the fill the sky, are an annual visitor to the greater Sacramento Valley. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

I don’t do birds. Well, I do. I mean, I like hearing them and seeing them. What I don’t do is learn their names or songs.

That’s why it’s always nice to be among “experts” who have learned these things and are eager to dispense their knowledge.

Last month I spent the better part of a day at Gray Lodge Wildlife Area in Butte County looking for and at birds in an OLLI class.

This 9,200-acre site is home to more than 300 species of resident and migratory birds and mammals, including more than 1 million waterfowl every year.

While we only saw a fraction of those numbers, Vickie and Lorraine were great leaders. Lorraine’s scope allowed us to see birds much closer than what my monocular could zoom in on.

Some of the birds we saw were: black crown night heron, cormorant, sandhill cranes, turkey vulture, snow geese, black-necked stilts, green heron, kingfisher, mallards, gadwalls, wigeons, yellow-rumped warblers, dark eyed juncos, red-tailed hawk, pied-billed grebe, golden-crowned sparrow, and flickers.

Various ponds are rich with nutrients for the birds; with views of Lassen Peak to enjoy as well. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

We also saw red eared slider turtles, which are not native, as well as four river otters sun bathing across the water on a platform of sorts.

This wildlife area is essentially located in the middle of the 4,000 mile Pacific Flyway, making it so critically important to the birds. Most of the water is from the Forebay at Lake Oroville as well as drainage from the rice fields.

Gray Lodge was the second wildlife area created in California. This was in 1931. The first was established two years earlier in Los Banos, farther south in the Central Valley.