Go Team!

Three cheers for the red...

white...

and blue!

Have a burger, re-read the Constitution, and remember, don't poke lit sparklers in people's faces.

Happy Independence Day!

A Day at the Beach

A Forster's Tern enjoying a little snack.

Spring migration gave me a serious case of bird greed. I was desperate to catch every warbler and flycatcher I could before the summer lull set in. Thus, I've been spending nearly every waking weekend hour for the past six weeks or so out in the field with my bins and high hopes...

Until the weekend before last, when I didn't get to bird at all: instead, I was stuck indoors at a conference my department was sponsoring. Yes, it was a prestigious international conference, and the talks were all original and interesting...but there really ought to be a law against scheduling these things during spring migration.

Then a few days later, the report from Orange County Rare Bird Alerts officially declared the summer doldrums in session. And I had spent the last precious moments of migration season eating cold bagels and sitting through PowerPoint presentations.

So on Saturday, we decided to check out the Least Terns at the reserve at Huntington State Beach instead of looking for (now-non-existent) migrants. They were there in large numbers, and had already started nesting and incubating their eggs.


We also birded the Talbert Marsh and Banning Ranch areas just up the Santa Ana River. In the palm trees in the industrial complex just inland from Talbert Marsh, we found a colony of nesting Great Blue Herons: there were about half a dozen nesting pairs setting up house in the treetops.


Beautiful as they are, these master hunters can definitely cause some trouble for the nearby nesting Least Terns.

In the marsh itself, we saw several pairs of Elegant Terns mating (a process that seems to go on forever—the male Elegant Tern is the Ron Jeremy of birds). On the other side of the river, in the Banning Ranch area, we got a brief glimpse of a Clapper Rail. In the river was a late-lingering male Bufflehead: we found out the next day that it had been captured and taken to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center. I suspect that this was because he had ended up on the beach, and not just because he was too dim to migrate. Poor little dude!

We ended up spending the entire day at the beach: we got there about 9, and left about 6. And even then, we only left because it was starting to get seriously cold.

Spring might be over, but summer is off to a good start.

What I Should Have Said

              Me and my big mouth...

"So, tell me about birding—I really don't know anything about it."

We were at my sister's place in San Diego yesterday, after a thoroughly unrewarding day of poking around the Tijuana Estuary. Apart from a few Clapper Rails, an Osprey, a Northern Harrier, a Cooper's Hawk, several Brown Pelicans, Killdeer, and Forster's Terns, the day's birding had been a wash. Nothing new for our life lists, and not even any sightings of any local birds that don't usually make it all the way up to Orange County (such as the Gull-Billed Terns or Little Blue Herons.) And now we were sipping wine in the kitchen with one of their neighbors, who was asking very nicely exactly what birding entailed, and what its appeal was.

And being sleep-deprived, sunburned, and dizzy from wine drunk on an empty stomach, I gave him a totally incoherent answer. I nattered on about Big Days and life lists, and left the poor dude with the impression that birding is something like paintball for nature lovers with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Here's what I should have said instead:

I like birding for the same reasons I like Harry Potter novels—both allow an escape into a rich alternate world filled with both great beauty and incredible tension and danger. But birding is even more rewarding than great fantasy fiction: unlike Hogwarts and Diagon Alley, the magical parallel universe opened to birders is real—and all you need is a pair of binoculars and some patience to get in.

During the spring, I spent a lot of time in ordinary suburban parks filled with playground equipment and picnic tables. None of the minivan moms and kids yelling about how bored they were had any idea what was going on right over their heads. Did any of them have any clue that the trees were filled with gorgeous wild creatures with colors and patterns even brighter than those of domestic parrots? And that many of these would only be here a few weeks, before slipping off again to some distant locale?

If I were to tell one of the kids that I was looking for a bright yellow bird with a traffic-cone orange head, or a tiny songbird of blazing metallic aquamarine, most would think I was joking. After all, everybody knows that birds in southern California are all brown or black or grey. But Western Tanagers and Lazuli Buntings are unambiguously real—and with a bit of effort and some luck, I can find them.

And when I do, I know I've slipped into that parallel universe—but even better, I know it's not really a parallel universe, but the same one in which I live, work and fight off freeway traffic, only in exquisite detail. Because I bird, I can see parts of the physical world that most people miss. I can find incredible beauty and dramatic life-or-death struggles in seemingly mundane environments.

The search for different birds can become competitive, and the competition can be fun—it's rewarding to be able to quantify how much of the veiled physical world one has mastered, and to match one's skills against those of other birders. But the real pleasure of birding for me is just being a part of this hidden world: watching raptors pursue their prey, and fledgling terns learning to fly and hunt, is satisfaction enough.

I can see all of this, and most people can't or won't. Strangely, this makes me feel powerful.

And this is a kind of power nobody can take away.