A practical guide to bird watching in Sonoma County, California
(Unless otherwise indicated, all phone numbers are in the 707 area code)
Determining county borders
Sometimes it's useful to know where counties begin and end, but this information can be rather difficult to find. The best method I've discovered so far is outlined here.
Maps.huge.info, which appears to be operated by a company called USNaviguides, has an excellent Website for the purpose. County boundaries are among the many information filters the site's maps provide. Once you've navigated to the county boundaries page, enter a zip code (any zip code) in a given county, hit the "Map County" button, which draws the county boundary over a map, a satellite image, or a hybrid map (I recommend choosing the latter because it gives you the satellite image overlaid with road names and other data). You can then zoom in to see exactly where county lines are.
For convenience, below are zip codes that will draw Sonoma County and the surrounding counties on the maps for you (chosen randomly for each county--ANY zip code in a given county will have the same effect on the map). You can even enter two (or more) zip codes successively on the same map and then zoom in to see which county a particular location is in. This appears to work for the entire United States. If you already know a location to be in a given county, you can simply click on that location to draw the county border. For example, in Sonoma County, just click on Santa Rosa, or Petaluma and the Sonoma County boundary will appear.
(Note that the site seems to have some difficulty with the map shading, and redrawing of maps, especially when changing back and forth between different magnifications. You may have to reload the page after centering on the location that interests you to get a clean image.)
Lake County: 95422
Marin County: 94901
Napa County: 94558
Solano County: 94533
Sonoma County: 95401
© Colin Talcroft, 2009, 2010, 2011. All rights reserved.
Unless noted, all photos by the author. If you would like to use one of my images, please ask for permission for non-commercial use with proper credit or commercial use with proper compensation.