Sunday, April 27, 2008

Kitchen Creek Road

This last weekend Libby and I went camping! We left Friday night and drove down to Cibbets Flat Campground in the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego. The goal, of course, was to see some birds. We hoped, especially, to see Black-chinned Sparrows and Gray Vireos. Other birds that lived in the area we'd never seen before included Mountain Quail and Western Screech-Owl. We tentatively planned a trip to a park in Oceanside on the way home to see if we could see Red Crossbills. We ended up missing out on all but the two priority species. If you want to skip the reading and go straight to the pictures, I've put up a small set on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/rowleypics/sets/72157604814391344/.

We left our house around 6:00 pm and got to the campground around 8:30. It was already dark, and we'd planned on that, so we didn't even bring a tent. We did a little futile owling until around 9:30 and went to bed. Libby slept alright (and got one mosquito bite), but I didn't sleep very well at all. It was occasionally very windy, and it felt funny on the parts of my face sticking out of my mummy bag. I got to hear Common Poorwill calling in the hills around the camp, though. We've seen a Poorwill before but never heard one, so that was cool. It called the most and for the last time right as the first diurnal birds were just barely starting their dawn song.


We were back in the car before 6:00 am to get a jump on the morning birding. We started out by walking a short distance of the Pacific Crest Trail where it crosses Kitchen Creek Road until a little after the sun hit it. This was definitely the birdiest part of the day. California Quail were everywhere - we kept hoping they'd be Mountain Quail. We had a pretty pair of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers harassing a Scrub Jay, our first Lazuli Buntings of the spring, a Brewer's Sparrow - pretty much the plainest looking North American sparrow, but actually kind of rare in the Laguna Mountains as far as I can tell, a male Calliope Hummingbird among the many Costa's Hummingbirds, a Hermit Warbler atop a big clump of scrub, and our first ever Black-chinned Sparrow just a little below the trail right by Kitchen Creek. We were pretty far away, but we could see the Black-chinned Sparrow was a gray bird with a black chin and brown wings. Our first lifer since our trip to Sacramento in February!

After getting back to our car and applying some sunscreen - chamise chaparral doesn't offer much shade - we started looking for Gray Vireo. We had a couple of spots to check pulled from the San Diego County birding listserve, but the first one came up empty - except for a couple of Rock Wrens. So, we decided to head on to the next likely spot. We parked a little above mile marker three to walk the creek up to mile marker four, which was one of the landmarks where they'd been seen. As we walked and watched for interesting birds along the creek and hillsides, some birders from Ohio pulled up next to us and asked how we were, etc. They were looking for Gray Vireos, too, so, I passed on what I'd read about mile marker four. A few minutes later the car came zipping back down. They'd found a singing Gray Vireo right across the creek from the mile marker, and wondered if we wanted a lift. Sure thing! So, we got a lift from a nice guy from Ohio who then pointed out where they were seeing the bird. And that's how we saw our very first Gray Vireo. It was a little far away to see very well, though we could hear it quite clearly, and the sun was in our eyes. We came back later and found it right in the same place, but it wouldn't perch for us to use our spotting scope on it. Oh well, not the looks I wanted to get, but not terrible, either. It seemed larger and heavier bodied than I had expected, but it was overall gray, and lighter below, flipping its tail from side to side as it hopped about in the bushes.

The Gray Vireo is a scarce bird in California. It used to be fairly common in appropriate habitat - miserably hot dry chaparral and juniper-pinyon woodlands - so it was relatively common around placed like Cajon Pass, the east side of the San Bernadino Mtns, the dry parts of the Santa Rosas and San Jacinto Mtns, and even Joshua Tree NP, but it's mostly disappeared from those places now. There are probably fewer than 100 breeding pairs in California every year, and the densest concentration (maybe a dozen pairs or so) is in the Kitchen Creek Road area. So this isn't a common bird by a long shot, and we were happy to see it. Gray Vireos are still quite common in the heart of their range, fortunately, and you can find them in out of the way parts of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

We kept birding after our Gray Vireo, of course, and after walking back to our car, we did some birding in creekside habitat. Between a couple of stops and a short walk, we found a few fun birds like Lesser Goldfinches, House Wrens, Steller's Jays and Oak Titmice, more Western Tanagers (one of the more common birds of the day), Wilson's Warblers, a Townsend's Warbler, and an uncooperative MacGillivray's Warbler. By the time we were done, we were ready to eat lunch and make for home.

We decided we had time to bird Buddy Todd Park in Oceanside because it was only around noon when we left. We missed the Red Crossbills there, but we still saw some neat birds and padded our trip list a little. Highlights were more Western Tanagers, a Mountain Chickadee - in a very urban park - and a bunch of Hermit Warblers. Hermit Warblers are just about my favorite warbler. They're beautiful, and they're a West Coast specialty. You can only find them in the wetter forests of the western mountains - from the Pacific Northwest south through the Sierras. They migrate through every spring, but I'd never before see more than one at a time, and usually only once or twice a year. So three in one spot was great, and they were fairly cooperative, so I got a few pictures. See below:


Finally, here's the trip list for posterity:

Kitchen Creek Road Birding Trip
April 24th/25th Bird List:

Drive:

1. Black Skimmer (off the 5)
2. Rock Pigeon

Kitchen Creek:

3. Mallard
4. Turkey Vulture
5. Red-tailed Hawk
6. California Quail
7. Mourning Dove
8. Costa's Hummingbird
9. Anna's Hummingbird
10. Calliope Hummingbird (a single migrating male)
11. Acorn Woodpecker
12. Downy Woodpecker -
This is a little mysterious because it appears to be out of range. It seemed awfully small to be a Hairy Woodpecker, and that would also be out of range (though geographically much closer). Libby's pretty sure it was a Downy, and she got a better look than I.

13. Pacific-slope Flycatcher
14. Dusky or Hammond's Flycatcher
I don't know which is more likely, and we weren't really close to the bird. It was a drab, mostly brown non-tail flicking Empid. It didn't look like a Pacific-slope and it didn't act like a Gray Flycatcher, but we don't enjoy Empidonax flycatchers very much. Maybe one day.

15. Ash-throated Flycatcher
16. Western Kingbird
17. Gray Vireo (Lifer)
18. Warbling Vireo
19. Steller's Jay
20. Western Scrub Jay
21. Common Raven
22. Cliff Swallow
23. Northern Rough-winged Swallow
24. Wrentit
25. Oak Titmouse
26. House Wren
27. Rock Wren
28. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
29. Townsend's Warbler
30. Hermit Warbler (FOS)
31. MacGillivray's Warbler (FOS)
32. Wilson's Warbler
33. Western Tanager
34. California Towhee
35. Spotted Towhee
36. Brewer's Sparrow
37. Black-chinned Sparrow (Lifer)
38. Black-headed Grosbeak
39. Lazuli Bunting
40. Bullock's Oriole
41. House Finch
42. Lesser Goldfinch

Buddy Todd Park:

43. Black Phoebe
44. Cassin's Kingbird
45. American Crow
46. Mountain Chickadee
47. Bushtit
48. Western Bluebird
49. Northern Mockingbird
50. European Starling
51. Yellow-rumped Warbler
52. House Sparrow

Selasphorous female

Heard only (all but Waxwings at Kitchen Creek):

Mountain Quail
(this would have been a lifer if we'd seen it) calling along Kitchen Creek Road between MM 3 and 4.
Common Poorwill
Nuttall's Woodpecker
Cedar Waxwing
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