By The Sea

Greed is good: A fledgling Least Tern at the Least Tern Reserve at Huntington State Beach.

My summer trip home is drawing to a close; I return to Florida next week (just in time for hurricane season! Whoopee!). The good news is that Glenn will be coming with me. The bad news is that means the end of 10 years in our nearly-seaside aerie in Costa Mesa. We'll be back in Los Angeles fairly frequently to visit my family, but no longer will we have our own little space just minutes from beach.

So we've been doing a farewell tour of all our favorite beach spots. Our first beach stop was the Least Tern Reserve at Huntington State Beach, which we visited on Thursday morning. The reserve itself is a fenced-off area on a pretty beach justifiably popular with surfers.

We volunteered there as docents two summers ago; it was great fun watching mating and nesting behavior of the terns, and seeing how much the chicks grew every week. (Less fun were the occasional run-ins with belligerent people who couldn't understand WHY tossing frisbees at nesting birds is not a good thing.)

This year's crop of babies is now in fledgling stage: most of them can (sort of) fly, but are still depending on their parents for handouts.

Just up the mouth of the Santa Ana River was a pair of Red-breasted Mergansers. Both looked rather scruffy. A friend who was with us thought one of them might have been oiled. (This photo is a bit backlit and washed-out, but it will do for documentary purposes.)

In Talbert Marsh, just inland from the reserve, we heard what we thought were Nuttall's Woodpeckers, Hooded Orioles, Bullock's Orioles, and European Starlings calling and drumming loudly from somewhere nearby. It turned out to be a very vocal Northern Mockingbird in full-on mimic mode.

(In Florida, the Mockingbirds near my place imitate Carolina Chickadees, Northern Cardinals, and even Sandhill Cranes. At first they sounded like completely different birds to me. Then I realized that Mockingbird songs, like wines, are very much dependent their terroir for their flavor.)

On the way out of the reserve, we saw a mysterious—and sad—sight: a dead (but still fresh) Clapper Rail on the bike path leading from the parking lot to the beach:

It hadn't been there when we arrived, so it must have died within the last three hours—how, we have no clue. I have a huge soft spot for Clapper Rails and was hoping to see one before I left—but not like this. It's always a tragedy to know that an endangered bird has died. We reported it to the local birding gurus, and it is now headed for an educational taxidermy collection. It will now spend the rest of eternity being ogled at by busloads of schoolchildren on field trips. I suppose eternity could be a lot worse. (It could be a lot better, too.)

It was a perfect day at the beach, with postcard-blue skies and huge cobalt waves curling over the heads of surfers too busy and happy to mess with the terns. But I couldn't help feeling depressed about that poor Clapper Rail. I just hope it met its end quickly and painlessly, and enjoyed its preceding years foraging with its companions in the nearby marshes, with the sound of the waves crashing in the distance.

Stuff White Birds Like

1. Routine

Every time I've gone running in Fairview Park in Costa Mesa over the past three weeks, this albino Rock Pigeon has been perched within the same 15-foot radius. He/she is not at all afraid of people—perhaps an escapee?



2. A good meal

This Snowy Egret was chowing on the banks of the lower Santa Ana River, just inland of the Huntington State Beach Least Tern Reserve last weekend. I like how so many parks and nature preserves use herons and egrets in their promotional literature to show how tranquil and gentle the natural world is—ignoring the fact that these birds are, in fact, gluttonous killers!



3. Their kids

This juvenile Least Tern was wandering around one of the front ponds at San Joaquin marsh yesterday, along with a couple of other fledglings and several adults. It is mature enough to fly ( Least Terns don't nest at San Joaquin), so must have been strong enough to make its way from its nesting grounds—I'm guessing Huntington State Beach or Bolsa Chica—to the marsh. But he or she is still not up to hunting independently. Here, he or she is waiting for a parental handout.


4. Friends of color

This leucistic California Towhee was foraging at Huntington Central Park today with a couple of normal California Towhees. They seemed to get along just fine—unlike the squabbling groups of Common Yellowthroats and House Wrens chasing each other through the bushes in the same area.

There's probably a lesson in there, somewhere!

Hanging With My Peeps

Yes, I should have put a picture of a Least Sandpiper here. But this one turned out better.

This week, it occurred to me that it has been months since I've been to Bolsa Chica. I had been too busy to go when the Little Blue Heron was spotted there last month, and since spring started, I've been more in a mood to look for songbirds. It was definitely time for a shorebird fix.

I wasn't expecting to find much (next to nothing has been posted on Orange County Birding or Orange County Rare Bird Alerts in recent weeks), and I wasn't disappointed. The Little Blue Heron was long gone, and I saw nothing but the usual suspects. Still, it was like visiting old friends: I had forgotten how pleasant it is to spend time with them.

On the footbridge were the usual assortment of photographers and children being dragged out by their parents for an "educational" experience. The birds by the bridge are used to people, and it's easy to get close to them. The Forster's Tern above let me stand only 4 feet from him, and the Savannah Sparrows were singing only a couple of yards from me:



In the fenced-off area behind the footbridge were nesting Least Terns and Snowy Plovers. Fuzzy little babies of both species were running across the sand like tiny wind-up toys. A nesting Killdeer just off the path did her broken wing display as I walked past her. Black-bellied Plovers were everywhere, and one of them was coming into (or moving out of?) its breeding plumage:


Black Skimmers were also numerous, and seemed to be feeding on every possible body of water. I never tire of watching them.


It had been too long since I'd seen all these birds together. I realized that I even missed that weird Bolsa Chica smell--that odd mix of seawater, rotting vegetation, lighter fluid, and grilling hot dogs from the beach across the street—that always makes me think of sunsets on Sunday afternoon (the time when Glenn and I usually ended up going there). It's good to see old friends again, even if they don't have a whole lot going on.

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.

Aawww...!

One of the few things cuter than a Snowy Plover is a baby Snowy Plover. We spotted several of them at Bolsa Chica (in the fenced-off area just across the footbridge from the parking lot) during a short pre-work birding fix today.

Almost as endearing was a pair of courting Least Terns nearby: one (I assume the male) was desperately proffering fish to an uppity female, who'd then walk in snooty little circles around him for several minutes before deigning to accept his gift.

Less cute was the large dead seal lying belly-up by the water's edge, and the presence of hungry-looking American Crows nearby. We had originally come to find the equally non-cute Gull-billed Terms (which are known predators of Least Tern eggs), but only got passing glimpses of random odd-looking Terns that might have been them. I should have brought my spotting scope.

But... if that little baby Snowy isn't the cutest thing ever, I don't know what is!

The More I Bird, The Dumber I Get

"Every time I learn the name of a student, I forget the name of a fish."
—David Starr Jordon (ichthyologist and first president of Stanford University)

Right now, I'm suffering the opposite problem of the late Dr. Jordan: Every time I remember the name of a bird, I forget the name of a student. Or something I'm supposed to be teaching that student.

Maybe it only feels that way. Before I got into birding, I thought of it the same way most non-birders do: as an amiably mindless activity for children and people in the twilight of their lives. Once I got into it, I thought birding would be a skill like long-distance running or learning a second language: it would get easier with time and experience.

Instead, it just kept getting harder. The more I learned, the more I realized what I didn't know and should know. And every time I mastered some new and useful habit of bird observation ( the beak! the beak! Quick! Get the shape and length of the beak!), I learned of a dozen other things I was supposed to have noticed in the three-second period when a new bird comes into view.

This weekend presented a wealth of opportunities for me to face my ignorance. It started (as usual) with docent duty at the Least Tern reserve at Huntington State Beach. The breeding season is winding down: a few young chicks are still present, but most of this season's hatchlings have fledged and are in full undergraduate mode (flying and hunting imperfectly yet independently, and still happy to take handouts from Mom and Dad).



A pair of birders came by to check out the chicks. We started chatting, and I realized I was totally blanking on most the their questions: How many chicks hatched this year? (I had gotten an e-mail on this very topic earlier in the week, but had completely forgotten the numbers.) How long has that fence been there? (Beats the hell out of me.)

After our shift ended, Glenn and I dropped by Huntington Central Park. High in one of the trees between "the island" and the pond behind the library was a bright yellow warbler. I knew it was a warbler because of its fine bill and inability to stop moving—but what kind? Bright yellow with olive wings around here= either a Yellow Warbler or a Wilson's Warbler. But I couldn't see any of the Yellow Warbler's red streaks on its breast, and it was too high up for me to tell if it had the telltale black cap of a Wilson's Warbler.

There are no doubt ways of distinguishing the two birds apart from these obvious fieldmarks, but I have no idea what they are.

Saturday night was the Sea and Sage Audubon Summer Barbeque. The invited speaker gave a terrific presentation on the pelagic birds of Southern California—all fascinating, and none familiar to me. Many had migration and breeding patterns that reminded me of back-cover blurbs on fat historical romances ("An epic tale of sex and danger spanning four continents—Buller's Shearwater!") The speaker explained with great care and passion the tiny distinguishing features between the dozens of jaegers and petrels. They were easy to see on his well-focused slides, but would I be able to catch these on a flying bird while on the deck of a rocking boat?

Probably not. At least not yet.

Yet more stuff I now know that I don't know. Oh joy!