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.

Lazuli Blue

It's not a Lazuli Bunting. But it will do.

The first time I saw a Lazuli Bunting, I couldn't believe it was real.

Glenn and I were walking up a brush-lined path in Talbert Nature Reserve in Costa Mesa, looking for hummingbirds, when he said he saw "something blue" in the bushes. A Western Scrub-Jay? No, too small. A Western Bluebird? No, not that shade of blue. It was REALLY blue. And it had red and white on it too.

Then I saw it for a brief moment. It was blue. REALLY blue. An amazing, iridescent eyeball-searing aquamarine kind of blue. The only things I'd ever seen in that color were foil balloons and particularly swank East Los Angeles low-riders.

And now this color was on a tiny little bird in the wild mustard off the side of a local bike path. No effing way!

From that moment on, I lusted after Lazuli Buntings—and have been rewarded by perhaps one or two brief but wonderful sightings a year. And shortly after returning from Florida, a friend mentioned seeing "lots" of them on the Santiago Truck Trail near Modjeska Canyon. Lazulis don't occur in Florida, so they topped my list of Western birds to bag before returning to Florida in the fall—so I dragged Glenn up there and after an hour of dodging mountain bikers, saw not a one.

But they just had to be out there, somewhere. After all, Hamilton and Willick's canonical text on the birds of Orange County lists them as regular summer birds. And at nearby Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary, where we have been spending lots of time as of late, one of the staffers told us that Lazulis had been seen regularly along the trail leading up the hillside. So we hiked up to the top, and got great looks at Phainopeplas, Ash-throated Flycatchers, and California Quail—but no Lazuli Buntings.

No matter—even though we didn't get the Lazulis, this was the closest and best look we ever had of Phainopeplas, and we saw several of them to boot. Very cool birds! As for the Lazulis, we'd just come back another day.

We did, and once on the top of the trail, it started raining. And still no Lazulis.

Back in the main part of the reserve, Glenn camped out by a set of feeders to photograph the Black-headed Grosbeaks and California Thrashers lingering in the area, while I wandered off in search of other more exotic creatures, including Lazulis. I came back half an hour later to find that he had seen and photographed a juvenile Lazuli Bunting—a sighting that surprised the staff, who had only seen the birds away from the main part of the reserve, up on the hillside!

And I had missed it.

There have to be more Lazuli Buntings out there somewhere. I don't want to go back to Florida without seeing one. So yesterday afternoon, I went back to Talbert, where I'd had most of my previous sightings. I just knew they were in there, and that I'd find them—how could anyone NOT see something that color?

But after three hours of watching singing Yellow-breasted Chats, and dive-bombing Caspian Terns, still no Lazulis. The closest I got were a number of singing Blue Grosbeaks. I also had an unexpected sighting of a male Red-breasted Merganser sitting on a sandbar in the Santa Ana River—I thought they only occurred here in the winter.

This was cool but it wasn't a Lazuli Bunting.

I didn't get one this week. Nor last week. Have no idea if I'll get one next week. But I want one. Bad.

Ducking Out

The diet starts tomorrow.

I love Christmas, and this Christmas—despite Santa's frugality—has been one of the best of all. Never have I valued time with my family, or the uneventful pleasures of life in Southern California, as much as I have this year. I've filled up on REAL Mexican, Thai, and Chinese food (and plan to fit in a Little Saigon lunch tomorrow before flying back East), and have gotten my fill of California birds.

Much as I've thrilled at all the new Florida birds I've seen in the past five months, I've missed the experience of birding in Orange County. One thing I've missed deeply are ducks: when I first started birding—as a distraction tactic while training for the Orange County Half Marathon a few years ago—the first birds I noticed, and learned to identify from an ancient copy of the National Geographic guide, were ducks. As I ran my weekly 12-mile training run along the Santa Ana River trail, I distracted myself from thirst, fatigue, and growing realization that I'm a pathologically sucky runner, by watching the ducks bobbing around in the river and nearby ponds. I memorized their markings, and learned their names.

And I ultimately finished the half-marathon in respectable time, and came out with something even better than a finisher's medal and a bagful of free energy gels: the first half-dozen or so birds on my official life list. Ducks are cool.

And as I now know, not that easy to find in Florida, despite the preponderance of ponds and rivers there. The waters nurture alligators, mosquitos, and various herons and egrets, but very few ducks. Life with no ducks sucks.

So it was a thrill to be back in OC, where ducks are a dime a dozen, and often only feet away. Like the Mallards that have taken over the swimming pool in our (now Glenn's, I guess) apartment complex. And the so-ugly-they're cure Surf Scoters (like the one above) at Bolsa Chica: when we were there a few days ago, they were happily chowing down on large razor clams, which they swallowed whole before diving down to search for more. And the ubiquitous Ruddy Ducks, which don't occur at all in Gainesville, as far as I know. I've missed these common little buggers:

This morning, Glenn and I went on my favorite long bird walk, basically following part of my half-marathon training range, through Talbert Nature Reserve and down the Santa Ana River bike trail to Huntington State Beach. On the trail, we heard several Clapper Rails (which we unfortunately couldn't see), along with several Red-breasted Mergansers:

We invited along another birding couple, John and Joan Avise, whom we ran into fairly regularly (and always accidentally) in the past. We've been in touch by e-mail, and since I was finally back in town, we actually got together by design for a change. They wanted to go to Talbert and down the trail, since I had mentioned seeing good stuff there in the past, such as the big flock of Canvasbacks that I reported on Orange County Birding last week. To my great relief, the Canvasbacks were still there, just as numerous as ever:

By time we got back to the car, it was almost 3:00. After a break for a late Mexican lunch, we stopped by Tewinkle Park in Costa Mesa, a short drive away, for no particular reason—but we had seen Hooded Mergansers, a Eurasian Wigeon, a Brown Creeper, a Red-breasted Nuthatch, and a Yellow-throated Warbler there in the past (no, not all at the same time), so we thought something good might turn up. And none of us were ready for this amazingly fun day to end quite yet.

And we weren't disappointed: when the got there, we almost immediately spotted a very bright male Eurasian Wigeon among a large flock of American Wigeons. Unfortunately, it was raining when we got there, so none of us took our cameras out.

It was now starting to get dark. But on the the way back to our place, we saw the most amazing sunset—huge beams of sunlight shining though openings in the clouds, coloring the clouds purple and pink and orange against a darkening blue sky. We pulled into one of the Orange Coast College parking lots to stop and watch it unfold. There weren't any good angles for photos, and photos wouldn't have done it justice in any case. You just had to be there.

It's going to be tough leaving all this behind tomorrow.