Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

I’m still quite new to Southern California. The good part of that is that there are still lots of life birds to see here. The bad part is I often don’t realize exactly where they are, as was proven conclusively last weekend. I’d signed up for a Sea & Sage Audubon trip to Butterbredt Springs & Galileo Hill. It was meeting in Mojave, but exact directions were to be given later. Sea & Sage is the Orange County Audubon chapter so I figured Mojave must be somewhere in the Eastern part of the county.

When I actually pulled up Google Maps and looked at it a few days before we were scheduled to leave, let’s just say I was more than a little shocked. It was north east of Los Angeles, about 100 miles and 2 hours and 15 minutes away, if I didn’t get lost and there wasn’t any traffic. However we were meeting at 6:15 AM in Mojave so probably I didn’t have to worry too much about traffic. On the downside that meant I had to be up by about 3:00 A.M. to make the meeting. I don’t even get up at 3:00 A.M. for pelagics!

When Nancy called me to confirm on Saturday morning I was very iffy, but then I made the mistake of reading up on the sites we were visiting in my recently acquired A Birder’s Guide to Southern California, and saw all the great birds we might see out there. I figured the opportunity was too good to miss, so I went to bed at 8:00 P.M. the night before, and was on the road by 3:30 A.M.
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Sunday morning (2008-05-18) around 8:00 A.M. Jill drove us over to Covington Park in Morongo Valley. It’s a local hot spot. The greenery and water pull in a lot of birds at the western most edge of their ranges, plus there are feeders.

We started with the feeders at the house across the road when I heard a woodpecker. It didn’t take us too long to locate it, and it turned out to be a Ladder-backed Woodpecker, #425. This is a Western species that doesn’t usually cross the mountains to the coast. One was seen regularly at Irvine Regional Park earlier this year, but I hadn’t really chased it and never saw it. This one cooperatively posed on a telephone pole:

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Desert Spiny Lizard, Sceloporus magister cephaloflavus
Butterbredt Springs, Kern County, CA, 2008-06-01

Saturday, May 10, I got up bright and early to catch a boat out of Dana Point that the Sea & Sage Audubon Society had chartered for a four-hour cruise starting at 7:00 A.M. The goal was just to see what we could find in Orange County Waters. May is not the best time of year for pelagic birding, but the trip a few months ago had been canceled, and there’s usually something out there if you look. Plus it would be my first West Coast pelagic.

The route was out a a couple of miles to sea, north to roughly Newport Beach and then back a little closer to shore. This limited us to relatively near-shore species, but that still offered some good possibilities.

The parking lot produced Rock Pigeon, American Crow, and Black-crowned Night-heron (three perched on a small pier). Before we even left the harbor we had Double-crested Cormorant, Hermann’s Gull, Brown Pelican (in the hundreds), American Crow, and too many California, Western, and Ring-billed Gulls to count. I spotted a Spotted Sandpiper on the jetty. We were barely out of the harbor when we added Caspian Tern and Brandt’s Cormorant to the trip list.

At first we mostly just saw more gulls and pelicans, but once we got a little ways offshore we picked up our first real pelagic bird: a Sooty Shearwater. Not a life bird for me. I’ve had them on East Coast pelagics, but at least one for my California list, and the first Shearwater I’ve seen in a couple of years.

At 7:42 we pick our first loon of the day: Red-throated, a relatively common species around here, and even commoner around New York.

At 8:05 we get our first phalaropes, 2 Red-necked Phalaropes in the water, off the starboard side. However the leader doesn’t see them, and the boat blows right past. (I tend to think most pelagics go way too fast.) Oh well, there are more out here.

8:30 A.M: I’m beginning to think the trip will be a bust when we spot a Rhinoceros Auklet! My first life bird of the day, #421. Some Least Terns also fly by.

(Yes, I know the photos are even worse than usual. You try taking pictures of fast moving birds far away from a rocking boat with a point-and-shoot camera.)
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This was one of those tricky lifers. You’re not quite sure when you saw it first because you’re not quite sure about the first sighting. I think my first Red-necked Phalarope was at San Joaquin Wildlife Refuge on April 27. However those birds weren’t in breeding plumage, and I didn’t have a scope. I can’t say with absolute certainty that they weren’t Wilson’s Phalaropes (though I do think they matched Red-necked much more closely.)

Fortunately just a few days later I was in Santa Clara County on business, and as I like to do I went to Mountain View Shoreline before work. Usually I start out at the end of San Antonio road and walk around the lake. However, today I decided to take a different route and explore the area to the north along the 101. About halfway to the next exit, I found some ponds, and in one of them a flock of about 20 Red-necked Phalaropes were feeding. This time most of them were in full breeding plumage so even without a scope there was no doubt. I even got some recognizable pictures:

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These photos were taken at Bolsa Chica today (May 26, 2008), at the first pulloff from PCH, where the boardwalk is. This was looking away from the ocean just past where the bench is that overlooks the tern colony (at a different time of year). I’m pretty sure the bird with lots of rufous on its chest is a Red Knot. What are the others? Red Knots? Dunlins? Curlew Sandpipers? Ruffs? Something else? There may be more than one species present.

The photos you see on this page are reduced in size. Click on each photo to see it at full resolution. The images are cropped but otherwise unretouched.

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