I didn’t stop at Nojoqui Falls County Park this morning to see turkeys; I was mainly there to see Purple Martins. The park is one of the few known breeding locations for them in Santa Barbara County, and they’d been reported from there a few times in eBird lately, so I knew they were back.
I haven’t seen Purple Martins since I was 12 and visiting my grandparents in Florida. They’re super impressive birds: Big, beautiful swallows, basically.
Nojoqui Park was officially closed when I arrived so I parked a ways down the road and walked back. But where were the martins? I circled the park, seeing lots of great birds, but no Purple Martins. Then I realized with a start that I was out of time; it was 7:30 and I needed to get on the road to make the check-in time for the tour at Sedgwick. I was a little disappointed, but I had seen those Wild Turkeys, so I wasn’t too disappointed.
I hustled back to the car, and there, in a big sycamore right above where I’d parked, I found them. Still big, still beautiful. Yeah!
I love seeing birds after I’ve given up. It feels like the universe is rewarding me for being mature enough to stop. “Good little birder. You have successfully controlled the obsession once again. Here you go.”
I’d made a couple of trips down Alisal Road and Paradise Road over the past month looking for Wild Turkeys; I know they’ve been doing their springtime displays and have been more visible (usually they’re famously shy and hard to find; that whole “getting shot at” thing). Today I was driving up early to take the birding tour at the University of California’s Sedgwick Reserve, but I wasn’t due there until 8 so I stopped off at sunrise at Nojoqui County Park and boom! Three turkeys were in the entrance driveway; two toms looking like this as they tried to impress the one hen.
She did not appear noticeably impressed. I was though! 😀
One of the coolest things about birdwatching is the surprise factor. I experience surprises every single time I go out. A male Lazuli Bunting singing on the dog path by Santa Monica Creek was today’s big surprise, at the end of my morning walk with Rory when I assumed I’d already found everything I was going to find and was just putting my bins on a bird that had flown into the top of a little scrub oak; just me acting out of habit more than anything else; “bird every bird” and all that; probably another White-crowned or a House Sparrow, and those birds are legit, and cool, and deserve to be looked at too, of course; I have a whole list of reasons why it makes sense to check out all the birds, even the common ones, even the ones I’ve already ID’d by ear, but there’s a level on which I was just kind of going through the motions, at the end of my walk, ready to get home and get to work, so I dutifully raised the binoculars and… wow. Lazuli Bunting.
Finally! I was pretty sure I’d had glimpses of these in the flowering eucalyptus opposite the Cape Honeysuckle lately, but I’d never had a long enough look to be sure, what with the Rufous Hummingbirds constantly chasing away all the less-aggressive hummingbirds. I’ve probably spent a total of 4 hours under that tree in the past week, craning my head to sift through hummingbirds. The people who live on the other side of the creek probably think I’m a little… odd.
But today after work I tried one more time, and Black-chinned magic happened: Nice long looks at an adult male. 😃
The song of a Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) was clearly audible today at a Hickory Hills Park grassland. Its reluctance to leave the area is a good indication that it may be nesting.
The population of these sparrows has declined dramatically over the last fifty years. The foremost cause for this decline is a loss of habitat, as well as the fragmenting and degrading of grasslands.
#235
Brad Hacker (local geology professor and impressively obsessive birder) reported one of these at Ellwood Mesa in Santa Barbara yesterday. I’d never seen one before (not just this year; ever). Brad included specific coordinates where the bird was singing, so I stopped by on my way back from seeing the Fulvous Whistling-Duck to see if he would still be there.
And he was! I got a recording of him singing (along with a House Finch; it’s hard to make a bird recording anywhere in the U.S. without including a House Finch), and a crappy digiscoped photo:
He gets an asterisk because this one is a super-rarity that needs to be reviewed and approved by the California Bird Records Committee. Not that I saw the bird; no one cares about that except me. But whether or not the bird is countable.
The way it works with a rare bird is, the bird is countable if it got where you saw it without human help. So, if the Fulvous Whistling-Duck that showed up in Santa Barbara yesterday is an escaped captive (possible; people like to keep exotic ducks as pets, and sometimes they get away), he doesn’t count. He has to be a wild duck that got there under his own power.
The CBRC can take months to reach a conclusion on that question. In the meantime, people who care about their list rush out to see the bird just in case. That’s what I did, this morning before dawn, trekking out to Lake Los Carneros where people were seeing the duck all day yesterday, excitedly filling up the mailing list and posting to eBird about it, and all the while there was nothing I could do because it was my once-every-two-weeks day when I commute to L.A. to schmooze with the rest of the team.
Fortunately he stuck around. I was camped out on the edge of the lake before sunrise this morning, and I’m pretty sure I actually saw the bird circling overhead with a group of mallards before the sun came up. It was pretty dark and I could only see the silhouette, but it looked good, with the long neck and slender wings, and the bird vocalized several times with the whistle that (at least according to my Sibley app) is what the male duck sounds like. I lost sight of him when he dropped back down onto the lake, but a short while later when it was light out another birder found him and pointed him out to me.
Yay! (Assuming he counts.) But he’s a super-cool bird either way.
I didn’t see the second “target species” I was looking for when I hiked the Franklin Trail today; that species is Lawrence’s Goldfinch, which I think I probably heard a couple of times during the hike but never got a look at, and I don’t know the bird well enough to list it based on what I heard.
Not to worry. I got a second completely unexpected county year bird instead: Vaux’s Swift. I love how birdwatching is like that. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been doing it or whether I’m going for an 8-hour hike or just a stroll up the dog path with Rory; there are always surprises.
Fun fact: The name “Vaux’s” rhymes with “boxes”. I learned not long ago that I’d been not only wrong but probably pretentious by pronouncing it to rhyme with “rose” all these years. 😜
I went for a long hike today up the Franklin Trail behind Carp, partly to see how things are coming since the fire, partly because awesome birder Peter Gaede was up there a few days ago and saw two species I need for my county year list. One of them was this dapper flycatcher, and it was right where he said it would be, about 4 miles from the trailhead in Sutton Canyon. I saw the bird down the hill from the trail as I was climbing up the far side of the canyon; a slim little Myiarchus flycatcher sitting upright on the burned sticks that are the closest thing to trees in the canyon these days.
I knew they were back because people were reporting them on eBird, but hadn’t seen one yet. But this morning I took my usual walk to the Cape Honeysuckle hedge where the male Orchard Oriole has been hanging out (he’s still there! saw him today!) and I saw six.
One of these was in Goleta last fall, but I was all into scouting the Carp Christmas Count circle at the time and never got around to seeing it. Another one was reported a few days ago at the Andree Clark Bird Refuge, and I stopped by to look for it on my way home from my crack-of-dawn La Cumbre Peak trip yesterday. No luck. (Turns out I was looking in the wrong place.)
Then, late yesterday afternoon, word went out that a local birder had refound the bird, and with her help several of us converged on the scene and eventually managed some quick looks. Such a cool bird! My first waterthrush ever. 🙂
So, I’m out in Oregon in the H.J Andrews Experimental Forest for the summer to do bird point counts and to band birds. Today was our first day of netting and we came up with this HEWA!
#229
I was finishing up at La Cumbre Peak, feeling pretty happy about adding two birds to the list, when two Hermit Warblers appeared. Yay!
December 13, 2017 – Rufous-crowned Sparrow (Aimophila ruficeps)
Found in a spotty range across the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico, these sparrows spend most of their time on or near the ground. During the summer they mostly eat insects, switching mainly to stems, shoots, and seeds during the winter. Females build nests on the ground from dried grasses, rootlets, twigs, bark, and hair. Both parents feed the chicks. They may perform broken wing displays to draw predators away from the nest.
#228
If I had a “nemesis bird” in my attempt to run up my county year list this year it would probably be Rufous-crowned Sparrow. I found a cool place to see them not far from home last year and then… it burned. So far this year every time I’ve gone somewhere to try to see them I’ve failed. I described my plight to a helpful birder a few weeks ago, and he instructed me to go to xeno-canto and get familiar with their songs.
Good advice! This morning while I was walking around at La Cumbre Peak listening to Mountain Quails I caught a faint song from the chaparral hillside above me, and a few seconds later I was looking at no-longer-a-nemesis county year bird #228. I didn’t get a particularly good look; it was pretty far away and I’d been lazy by not bringing the spotting scope with me, but I could see the plain breast and the rufous crown, and that plus the song was good enough for me.
Mountain Quail Gouache on 10×14” hot press Olivia Warnecke / 2012
#227
I’d tried for Mountain Quail twice, driving up to Figueroa Mountain and walking appropriate roads listening. But it was too windy, or I was there too late, or hunters shot out the covey eBirders had reported too widely (!). And Figueroa Mountain is kind of a haul from where I live, so I was only able to get there if I was willing to use a full day for antisocial birding activity.
But now that Spring has sprung and the male Mountain Quails are crowing at the crack of dawn they’re easier to find, and local eBirders have been reporting them pretty reliably from La Cumbre Peak above Santa Barbara. So I set my alarm for 4:30 and hauled myself up to La Cumbre Peak just as it was starting to get light. And… yup. We’ve got quails. (The super-cool sound of them calling, at least. Which is good enough to count them, given how distinctive their voices are.) 😀
The Costa’s Hummingbird (Calypte costae) is native to the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts of Arizona and California.
#226. This one showed up when I totally wasn’t expecting him. I was brushing my teeth after lunch today and glanced out the bathroom window at the apple tree in our backyard. It’s a hotbed of hummingbird activity, because the bare limbs make a good perch with ready access to the various flowers and feeders. And there he was: Perched 10 feet away. Even naked-eye I could see the extended gorget and the prominent white patch on the side of the neck behind it. I watched him for a few seconds, then went to grab my binoculars for a better look, but one of the local Rufous Hummers chased him away.
No matter. He was back several times over the course of the afternoon. Such a cool little dude. 😀
#225. This is the time of year when long skeins of Brants start flying up the coast on their way to their breeding grounds in the far northern tundra. So I went down the neighborhood bluffs at Calle Ocho yesterday afternoon with my spotting scope and hung out for 45 minutes. There were lots of cool birds to look at, but no new ones for the county year list.
Then, just as I was getting ready to leave, I took one last look, and there they were: A long, wavering line of specks just above the water, down past Rincon, moving west. I checked them with the binoculars, then got them in the spotting scope and followed them all the way past Carp. At closest approach I could see them clearly: outstretched black necks with white chevrons, but it didn’t really matter; the flight pattern and shape of the flock was enough to ID them. I did a quick count by 10s: 70 (roughly). They disappeared into the glow of the setting sun, and I gave them my blessing: Safe journey.
Besides Prairie Falcon (which I ended up not seeing on this trip), Mountain Bluebird was the other species I was really hoping to see in the Cuyama Valley. It’s hard to find them anywhere else in the county, but small numbers of them winter there. Paul Lehman’s essential book Birds of Santa Barbara County says they have “mostly departed by mid-March”, but a user in eBird had reported a number of them on Wasioja Road a few days before, so I was hopeful.
I pulled onto the road in mid-morning, found a spot with bluebirds and started checking them out, but they were all Westerns. Nothing wrong with that, though; I’ll watch Western Bluebirds any chance I get. So I watched them, and the Horned Larks that were around (they were everywhere), and a few early migrant swallows that were swooping overhead, when I heard a bluebird calling from a nearby fence post, and there it was: my fifth and final county year bird of the day: Mountain Bluebird.
After working so hard to try to turn the Western Bluebirds into one it was exciting to see a bird with all the distinguishing features: pale blue and gray without a hint of red, narrower beak, and an overall longer, thinner profile with longer tail and wings.
#223. Mine weren’t this easy; they were mixed in with the Red-winged Blackbirds and Brewer’s Blackbirds at a couple of my Cuyama Valley stops. But eventually I managed to pick out a few “trikes”. A nice lady came out from her house along State Highway 33 to ask if I needed anything after I’d spent about 20 minutes walking up and down the road in front of her house looking at the blackbirds in her trees and in the fields on either side. She didn’t mind me birdwatching, but apparently I was making her Jack Russell’s bark constantly, so I moved further away from the house.
#222. A juvenile bird was perched in a distant cottonwood, and I spent a long time trying to make it be a Prairie Falcon (which is one of the species I really wanted to see on my Cuyama trip). The bird had relatively long wings and tail; not falcon-long, maybe, but longer than the buteos I’m used to.
Fortunately it eventually flew off, letting me see it soaring as it headed north and allowing even my sketchy raptor-identification skills to kick in. Swainson’s Hawks are rare in Santa Barbara County; it felt special to see it.
#221. I was excited to see a Sage Thrasher on my Cuyama trip; they’re easier to find up there than in the south county, but they’re not necessarily easy.
#220. I got tired of trying and failing to see Horned Larks in the Santa Ynez Valley, so I said screw it; I’m going to Cuyama, the wide-expanses cattle-grazing valley in the northeast corner of Santa Barbara County. Set the alarm for 4 a.m., got to Cottonwood Canyon Road just as it was getting light, and boom! First birds I saw were a pair of Horned Larks that flitted up to check me out (as some curious cows were already).
