The Long March

Spring flowers at Fairview Park

We dedicated our first official spring outing to my favorite walk—one that combines my fondness for both endurance sports and birds: a six-mile, moderately hilly, and very birdy stroll from Fairview Park in Costa Mesa, down through neighboring Talbert Nature Reserve, south down the Santa Ana River to Huntington State Beach, then back up the river trail and inland to Canyon Park in Costa Mesa's westside--then back up the river, through Talbert to Fairview, where my car was parked.

It was a gorgeous day for a hike—wildflowers were blooming like crazy, and the birds were vocal and active for the almost the whole time we were out. In Talbert, a very noisy and aggressive House Wren darted about in the trees only a few feet away from us, and at one point, dive-bombed Glenn and momentarily landed on his foot!

A little ankle-biter ready to attack.

As of late, we've encountered a variety of random small creatures with an interest in stepping on Glenn's feet: our almost-2-year-old nephew, our brother-in-law's cat, and now this...

In the reserve, we also saw and heard White-Crowned and Song Sparrows, American and Lesser Goldfinches, tons of Yellow-rumped Warblers and Common Yellowthroats. We also got short glimpses of what may have been a Yellow Warbler--it looked to me to be too bright and too long and skinny to be an Orange-crowned, and it didn't have an eye ring or any other kind of markings on its face.

We also got both California and Blue-grey Gnatcatchers: the male California Gnatcatchers were in their black-capped breeding plumage, and vocalizing quite loudly.



Down on the river and in the marshy areas of Banning Ranch, Buffleheads, Lesser Scaups, and other winter ducks were still chilling out, not quite ready to leave for points north. Last year, we had spotted a Clapper Rail in the area, and lusting for another good photo opportunity, wondered if any were still in the area. Not really expecting anything to happen, Glenn busted out his iPod and played a Clapper Rail call--and only a few seconds into it, we heard a loud, ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK from the bushes only a few feet away from us!

They were there!

We skulked about by the bushes along the bike trail, listening and watching for their movements. Glenn got a look at one of them peeking out of a bush, but was unable to get any photos. We played the call a few more times, and got a lot of agonizingly close ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK calls from the still-invisible birds, then decided it would be best to stop pestering them.

Towards the beach, we spotted more Lesser Scaups and Buffleheads, as well as a number of Red-breasted Mergansers. We walked back up the river, stopping at Canyon Park, which was filled with flowers—I'd never seen it this pretty. We watched Yellow-rumped Warblers and Bushtits flit about as we ate a thoroughly unremarkable picnic lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and carrot sticks.

On the way back, we spotted another male California Gnatcatcher flitting about in the bushes in Talbert Nature Reserve.

We had clearly hit the birding sweet spot: all the cool winter birds were still around, the neat spring migrants were starting the show up, and all the regulars were in their more-active-than -normal breeding season mode.

Thank goodness this all corresponds with spring break and a temporary break from my teaching—I'll definitely be out for more!

Just Another Day in Paradise

Ho hum. Whatever.

Last week, Orange County birders got an early Christmas/Hannukah/Festivus gift: a young Roseate Spoonbill who kept everyone staring obsessively up and down the banks of the Santa Ana River for a week before it decamped for the 909. (Or not—intriguingly, I got an e-mail from another birder who had Spoonbill sightings both in Orange and upstream in Riverside County, and feels they are different individuals.)

In any case, I haven't heard of any more Spoonbill sightings down here in the last few days. And even more conspicuously, no sightings of anything else have been reported to our local boards either. I'm sure this is not for the lack of great birds in the area: It's just that after last week's Spoonbill Fest, almost anything else would seem anticlimactic. (Yet another Light-footed Clapper Rail! Yawn.)

So this weekend felt a bit like the days right after Christmas: kind of a bittersweet return to normalcy.

Still, normal is good. Today, we decided to go back to Peters Canyon Regional Park, which we haven't visited since summer. Almost immediately, we spotted the Hooded Merganser reported by Neil Gilbert a few weeks ago—it was too far away for us to photograph, but its poofy black-and-white crest and brown flanks were conspicuous.

We also spotted several very noisy California Gnatcatchers, and our fun bird of the day: a rather bold Greater Roadrunner on the hill by the dam. We watched as it casually strolled across the path in front of us and ducked into the roped-off area overlooking the reservoir.

No bragging rights go with any of these birds. But the more I bird, the more I realize how lucky I am to live in an area where sightings of birds like these are almost routine. Flashy rarities sometimes make me lose touch with the richness and complexity of our local birding environment, and sometimes it takes a really boring weekend to bring things back into focus.

Normal is good.

Better Birding Through Technology

It's never too late to fulfill your New Year's resolutions. Mine was inspired by Kimball Garrett's presentation at the Sea and Sage Audubon pancake breakfast last fall: he encouraged birders to log in their sightings on eBird, a great site hosted by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. The awesomeness of eBird comes in two flavors. First, it gives individual users an electronic record of all their sightings (which can be sorted and analyzed in a number of ways). Second, and more importantly, the collective input from users forms a huge database on bird distribution and population patterns. For obvious reasons, this information is of great interest to ornithologists.

I won't go into why it's taken me 10 months to get around to setting up an eBird account (it's free), but I finally did. The site is easy and fun to use; you just indicate where and when you birded, check off what you saw, and the program adds up the numbers for you. Very cool.

I faithfully submitted lists for all four of my weekend forays (to the Least Tern Reserve at Huntington State Beach, Bolsa Chica, Talbert Nature Reserve, and San Joaquin) and came up with a total of 59 birds. Not a Big Weekend by any stretch of the imagination, but respectable for a couple of lazy summer days out. Four outings sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't very intense—we still managed to fit in a showing of the latest Harry Potter movie followed by dinner and microbrews at a nearby brewpub. Yum.

And over dinner, we realized that we hadn't done the dinner-and-a-movie thing in a couple of years, since our weekend afternoons and evenings as of late had been dedicated to (1) birding, (2) recovering from birding and/or downloading Glenn's new bird photos, or (3) going to bed early in preparation for the next day's birding excursion.

But while wandering the wilds of South Coast Plaza before the film, we noticed some fledgling House Sparrrows being fed muffin crumbs by their parents outside Starbucks. No, I didn't log this sighting on eBird.

My favorite sightings of the weekend:

—Black-bellied Plovers in full breeding plumage at Huntington and Bolsa Chica,

— A banded juvenile Peregrine Falcon at Bolsa Chica,

There's no such thing as too many Peregrine Falcon shots

—Blue-gray and California Gnatcatchers only a few steps away from each other at Talbert. Both were pretty bold, and let me get close enough to see the white undersides of their tails: black for the California, and white for the Blue-gray. And the male California Gnatcatchers still had their telltale black caps.

—A Sora and what I'm pretty sure was a Least Bittern at San Joaquin (another birder nearby also thought it was a bittern, which reduces the chance that I was hallucinating).

Oh yeah—the owls in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" looked really fake.