Halloween

I realized today that the only part of the Halloween festivities for which I have any inclination is the mass consumption of candy.

I do like candy!

Saturday Birding

This Saturday was Libby's last day of class, and rather than sit around and twiddle my thumbs awaiting her return, I decided to drop by Bolsa Chica and see what was up. I decided to check Harriet M. Weider Park, an area on the west side of Bolsa Chica I'd not been to before. I was handsomely rewarded, and will definitely be adding this park to the general Bolsa Chica experience.

As I drove along Bolsa Chica on PCH on my way over to the park, I noticed that the tide was higher than I have ever seen before. There was no exposed mud, and much of the vegetation was covered by the water. I'd heard that Sunday was supposed to be a dramatically low tide, so maybe that was linked somehow. Anyway, I figured I wouldn't have much luck with shore birds. That wasn't quite the case, though, as there were many shorebirds (thousands) viewable from the park, and I stayed until the tide was quickly going out.

Anyway, at the park I saw hundreds of American Pipits (FOS), hundreds of White-crowned Sparrows, a FOS Northern Flicker in the trees, and a dozen Meadowlarks. I also had my FOS Hermit Thrush. Walking out along the oil pipelines in the area would thrush giant flocks of all of these species, and as I got down closer to the water, the sparrow flocks became more heavily Savannah Sparrows, though the White-crowns continued. At the furthest point I reached, I set up the scope and scanned the oil fields. I found a sitting Peregrine Falcon on a distant post, and a closer Say's Phoebe, which was another first for the season. Among the ducks in this area were also my first of season American Wigeons, Northern Pintails, but there were also Gadwalls, Green-winged Teals, and Mallards mixed in with the flocks. There was also a gorgeous White-tailed Kite hunting there the whole time. It was pretty exciting, to tell the truth!

The giant shorebird flocks were mostly Western Sandpiper and Black-bellied Plovers. There were also some Dowitchers and Godwits around, though.

After that, I jumped in the car and drove over to the Boardwalk. There I was treated to some Eared Grebes, and my FOS Surf Scoters, Lesser Scaups, and Red-breasted Mergansers. I believe I haven't ever seen a Greater Scaup. At least, I don't think so. I walked down to the tide gates, hoping to find my FOS Buffleheads. I was pleasantly rewarded by two or three beautiful little males mixed in with the bobbing Ruddy Ducks. At the tide gates, the churning water attracted a flock of Brown Pelicans, Forster's Terns, and two Bonaparte Gulls, which I don't see very often. They're so small, I didn't notice them at first. They blended in with the Terns!

Anyway, it is beginning to look a lot like winter, now. It looked like there were a few Elegant Terns left, which surprised me (and I might be wrong about it, anyway), but otherwise the avifauna is basically wintry now. There aren't the numbers there will be later, but most of the species have returned. Here's my list for the day:

Pied-billed Grebe
Eared Grebe
Western Grebe
American White Pelican
Brown Pelican
Double-crested Cormorant
Great Blue Heron
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Black-crowned Night Heron
Turkey Vulture
Gadwall
American Wigeon
Mallard
Northern Shoveler
Northern Pintail
Green-winged Teal
Lesser Scaup
Surf Scoter
Bufflehead
Red-breasted Merganser
Ruddy Duck
White-tailed Kite
Cooper's Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
American Kestrel
Peregrine Falcon
American Coot
Black-bellied Plover
Killdeer
Black-necked Stilt
American Avocet
Greater Yellowlegs
Willet
Long-billed Curlew
Marbled Godwit
Dowitcher Sp. ( who knows?)
Bonaparte's Gull
Ring-billed Gull
Western Gull
Royal Tern
Elegant Tern
Forster's Tern
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Anna's Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Northern Flicker
Black Phoebe
Say's Phoebe
Cassin's Kingbird
Tree Swallow
American Crow
House Wren
Western Bluebird
Hermit Thrush
Northern Mockingbird
American Pipit
European Starling
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
California Towhee
Savannah Sparrow
Song Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Western Meadowlark
House Finch

67 Species is a pretty good day!

Bird Books

I'm pretty excited about a couple of new bird books that I've gotten in the last couple of weeks.

First came Birds of the Salton Sea, by Michael A. Patten, Guy McCaskie and Philip Unitt - an exhaustive resource to that region.

It has five chapters: A History of the Salton Sink, Conservation and Management Issues, Biogeography of the Salton Sea, A Checklist of the Birds of the Salton Sea, and The Species Accounts. The last chapter, The Species Accounts, takes up 264 of the 365 pages in the book. It's an exhaustive list of all the species of birds ever found, or likely to be found someday, in the Salton Sink. It provides information on the seasons they're present there, whether or not they breed, what kind of numbers they're present in, what habitats they frequent, taxonomic information (which subspecies is present, for example), and what kind of trends their populations may be undergoing (increasing, decreasing, staying the same).

Anyway, it's really fun bedtime reading. And it will help a lot if we can make it out to the Salton Sea this winter. It should assist in finding species we missed last time, and having the kind of background knowledge it provides will help put everything into context. It's interesting to know that the Burrowing Owl you're looking at it, for example, is part of the largest, densest and healthiest population of Burrowing Owls in California.

Other really interesting facts:

• Most of North America's Eared Grebes (75%) use the Salton Sea on their migration in Spring and Winter. Estimates range all the way up to 2.5-3 million of them in January 1988 (pg. 75).
• A third of the world's population of Mountain Plovers winters in agricultural fields surrounding the Sea.
• One-third to one-half of the world population of American White Pelicans winters on the Sea. That would explain the large flock (about 100) that we saw heading South last Saturday over the hills around Oak Glen. Kind of a strange site at the time, a bunch of giant white sea birds in a kettle above the mountains.
• The Salton Sea is the only place in the United States that has a population of Yellow-footed Gulls. They are regularly disperse into the Sea after breeding in the Gulf of California, where they often number in the hundreds. Very few over-winter there.
• The Fulvous Whistling-Duck is nearing extirpation in California (perhaps already is). It once bred very commonly throughout the central valley and along the coast. In the second half of the twentieth century it could only be found breeding in small numbers at the southern end of the Salton Sea and in the Imperial Valley.
  

I also really like some of the tables they've included. Some illustrate the "approximate mean numbers of" different families of birds. So, they have a chart with waterfowl. It's nice to get a general idea of how many of each kind of bird winters there: 20,000 Snow Geese, for example, or 25,000 Northern Shovelers, and it's all in one quick glance. This helps understand how rare some birds are, too. We saw a blue morph Snow Goose while we were at the Sunny Bono NWR, for example. On average, there are 4-5 a year, out of 20,000 white Snow Geese!

They have similar charts for gulls and shorebirds, which is great since some of those are either difficult to identify or a member of a species pair that's hard to differentiate.

Overall, I'm very happy with this purchase. It was a great deal, and it's a fascinating snap shot of a troubled Sea. In ten years, who knows what the Sea will be like? Now is the time to go, and this book will be helpful in understanding what you see when you do go.

Second came my new Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, by David Sibley. Texas and New York, here we come! There's actually not much in it that's not in my Western Guide, but it gives ranges for all the Eastern Warblers, and the Eastern birds that never wander out west aren't in my Western Guide. It's interesting to read about the Western birds from an Eastern perspective, too. For example, the Blue Jay is treated as the standard by which other Jays are compared (darker than a Blue Jay, larger than a Blue Jay). He also excludes the Pacific form of the Western Scrub Jay completely (understandably!).

The colors are a little different between the guides, which is interesting. I think there were probably some printing problems in producing my Eastern Guide, as there are some minor differences in the color shades used to code the range maps on facing pages. I don't think it will be a big problem - field guides aren't supposed to be completely accurate, and we always have Libby's National Geographic Guide to use in comparison.

Autumn In Southern California

You can be completely certain that Autumn has arrived in Southern California when you step out of your door onto a layer of brown ash. The hills of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernadino, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange Counties are all burning today, and it smells pretty bad in La Mirada.

Libby's back to work again today. She's feeling pretty good - just has a little congestion and a persistent cough. I had a little bout with some sort of stomach complaint, but it didn't last very long, and I'm definitely grateful!

Update!

Well, this is how the course of Libby's illness is progressing. After staying home Tuesday, she felt much better that evening and was happy to go back to work on Wednesday. This she did, courageously, but unfortunately came home with a fever again (but a lower one, 100). She also lost her voice that morning. She whispered her way through most of the day, and we could only converse in whispers last night. She went to bed at 8:00 feeling quite tired.

This morning the fever is gone, so she's going back to work with a bit of her voice recaptured. She's also coughing, now, and still has nasal congestion. It's a sad state for my favorite person to be in!

Uh oh!

Well, Saturday was nice, but the next day wasn't quite so nice. Libby woke up with quite a cold. She's been struggling through it, ever since, and actually took a sick day today. I think this is her first day of missed work because of being sick. Yesterday she did go to work, but came home with a fever of a 102!

Thankfully, her temperature is back to normal today. A day of rest should help her out a lot, so keep her in your prayers.

A Good Day

Today was a really wonderful day. It rained almost all morning, though only very lightly, and it had rained half of the night. I opened the windows this morning to that glorious fresh rain-smell, and Libby and I had soup and hot chocolate for lunch (a little optimistic, perhaps). We got our little apartment cleaned, and so that's alright.

The afternoon we'd planned to go birding. We wanted to go back to the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary I had visited last week, but, then, someone posted about seeing a couple of interesting warblers at Huntington Central Park, so we decided to visit both places. As they're both near the 405, that turned out to be very feasible.

Huntington Central Park was very wet, and quite birdy. There were big flocks of Yellow-rumped Warblers everywhere. There were also a large number of Townsend's Warblers, which are really quite beautiful. I'll put a full list at the bottom. We only found one of the two Eastern warblers reported: a single beautiful male American Redstart. This was the second time we've seen one, the other time was at the Salton Sea, but it was the first time Libby got a really good look at one (a satisfying view), and I was very happy to see one again, also.

As we were walking around trying for better views of the Redstart, I noticed a Kingbird, and decided to check it out, on the principle that any Kingbird in coastal California in the Fall may, very rarely, be a Tropical Kingbird heading dreadfully off course. This was one of those very rare situations! Libby and I had seen Tropical Kingbirds before in Arizona, and we worked together on each field mark indicating its species. It had a large, long bill, a dark mask, the yellow on the chest came up to the white throat patch, without the intermediate gray line of a Cassin's or Western Kingbird, and the tail was notched (though not so deeply as the ones we saw in Arizona - I'm not sure what that means, maybe it's a hybrid, but it's tail was quite worn, so that might also explain it). It finally called, and it had a perfect Tropical Kingbird voice. Awesome! This was the first time Libby and I had found a previously unreported rare bird together on one of our trips.

We soon headed over to San Joaquin, where we found both the Pectoral Sandpiper and Sora that I had seen the week before. These were both lifers for Libby, and so that helped keep our lists on par with each other. Other highlights were: a couple of White-faced Ibis. Oh, and three Bobcats that were quite tame and allowed us to admire them for a long time. I'll post a list for that location, too.

Huntington Central Park:

American Crow
Red-tailed Hawk
Common Yellowthroat
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Townsend's Warbler
American Redstart!
Orange-crowned Warbler
House Wren
Song Sparrow
House Finch
Lesser Goldfinch
Mallard
Mourning Dove
American Robin
Bushtit
Wrentit
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Hutton's Vireo
Western Wood Pewee
Black Phoebe
Downey Woodpecker
Tropical Kingbird!

23

San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary:

Clark's Grebe
Eared Grebe
Pied-billed Grebe
Double-crested Cormorant
American White Pelican
Pectoral Sandpiper (a lifer for Libby)
Long-billed Dowitcher
Black-necked Stilt
American Avocet
Kildeer
Black-bellied Plover
White-faced Ibis
Great Blue Heron
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Black-crowned Night Heron
American Coot
Common Moorhen
Sora (a lifer for Libby)
Green-winged Teal
Cinnamon Teal
Mallard
Gadwall
Northern Shoveler
Ruddy Duck
Forster's Tern
Turkey Vulture
Osprey
Northern Harrier
Red-tailed Hawk
American Kestrel
American Crow
Marsh Wren
Common Yellowthroat
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Yellow-breasted Chat
Song Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow

38

Birdin' San Joaquin

I went birding yesterday at the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary. I went by myself because Libby was at school. I had a better time than I anticipated (oops!), so it wasn't a perfect trip. I was also going to try and take some pictures, but our digital camera's gone wonky. It won't stay on for more than 30 seconds (despite fiddling with the auto-off settings), so I couldn't digiscope any birds.

I got there in the early afternoon, and the weather was perfect. It was sunny and cool, in the seventies, I guess, with a bit of a warm inland breeze that carried the gentle scent of sage.

Bird-wise, there wasn't a whole lot going on, but there were some birds that were my first of the season (FOS) and two lifers. That puts my life list at 301, as I was at 299 before the trip. There was a Pectoral Sandpiper in one of the ponds there, which had been reported ahead of time. This is a fairly rare bird for Southern California. I also had a Sora, and then, later, two Sora, feeding in the same pond. Soras are fairly common, but you hardly ever see them because they spend most of their lives in the reeds. So, that was a great bird, much anticipated, and interesting. It's a pleasantly unique bird.

It was feeding with a much larger Common Moorhen, which is always a fun bird. This Moorhen lacked the red facial shield, which is a very interesting feature.

Oh, and as I was preparing to go, I saw a Bobcat moving in and out of the reeds, followed by an agitated flock of small birds.

Anyway, here's the list in no particular order:

Eared Grebe (FOS)
Pied-billed Grebe
Double-crested Cormorant
Great Blue Heron
Great Egregt
Snowy Egret
Black-crowned Night Heron
Sora (Lifer)
Common Moorhen
American Coot
Ruddy Duck
Gadwall (a very pretty male)
Green-winged Teal (molting into breeding plumage) (FOS)
Blue-winged Teal (a female or two)
Cinnamon Teal (mostly drab, but there was one very vivid Drake)
Northern Shoveler
Ring-necked Duck (quite a lot of these, in the deeper ponds) (FOS)
Mallard (of course)
Long-billed Dowitcher
Pectoral Sandpiper (lifer)
Least Sandpiper
American Avocet
Black-necked Stilt
Kildeer
American White Pelican (FOS)
Turkey Vulture
Osprey (FOS), there were at least two
Red-tailed Hawk
Northern Harrier
American Kestrel
American Crow
California Gull
Forster's Tern
Belted Kingfisher
Mourning Dove
Anna's Hummingbird
Cassin's Kingbird
Black Phoebe
Common Yellowthroat (tons and tons)
Song Sparrow (also tons and tons)
White-crowned Sparrow (FOS)
Red-winged Blackbird

There was a very small flock of swallows that stayed far enough away that I couldn't identify any of them. I think that's 42, which isn't too bad. Two lifers in the same day is pretty awesome, though.

A Note on the Backpacking

A couple of things relating to my trip (now more than a week past).

1) I saw my first Bobcat on the way home. This should be recorded for posterity. It was wandering unconcernedly along a fence on the outskirts of Lone Pine. I was driving at the time, looked right, double-taked (double-took?) and said, "Bobcat," pointing. We zipped by at high speed, and I admired the drolly strolling stocky spotted feline from the corner of my eye.

2) I uploaded some pictures to Facebook, but you can see them without having an account. Merely go here: Bishop Pass Backpack Album

I'll have you know I typed that URL. It wouldn't let me copy-paste.