We went out to San Jacinto Wildlife Area looking for the Gyrfalcon… again. We went prepared with hot drinks, hats and gloves to keep from freezing. In that, we were mostly successful, but in finding the jeer-falcon, not so much. The greater San Jacinto Wildlife Area has had a fabulous winter for raptors. In addition to the ‘mythical’ Gyrfalcon, the four basic falcons, American Kestrel, Merlin, Prairie and Peregrine were all present. Everywhere we looked, there was either a Northern Harrier or a White-tailed Kite, and Red-tails were seemingly more numerous than crows. Along Gilman Springs Road was an overwintering dark-phase Swainson’s Hawk that was rather shy. The fields around Alessandro and Davis Roads harbored many Ferruginous Hawks, including several dark-phase birds. Ospreys were fairly common, and both Bald and Golden Eagles were recorded. At least two Rough-legged Hawks were found this winter, and a Harlan’s Hawk was seen regularly. Both Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks were also present, and if you hung around until evening, it wasn’t hard to find 3-4 Short-eared Owls flying over the marshes along Bridge Street. Other birders alerted us this Burrowing Owl hunkered down right next to the levy road. It was not particularly pleased to see us!  

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After 2 or 3 hours of waiting, we packed it in to go look for birds that could actually be seen. Down by San Jacinto Creek, we found a small flock of Mountain Bluebirds – not a rare bird here, but certainly a pretty one. Further up Davis Road into an area of dryer grasslands and sage chaparral, there were hundreds of sparrows, including many White-crowned, with a few bright Savannah Sparrows and the occasional Vesper Sparrow mixed in. Canyon and Rock Wrens were both singing from the tops of boulders along Davis Road and a distant Greater Roadrunner was moaning out his love song from further away.

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The real star of the show up there was the Sage Thrashers. When we first heard reports of upwards of 30 thrashers in that location, it didn’t sound real, but there they were! For a while, we had half a dozen sitting on fence posts like meadowlarks while others were running around like robins in the grass behind them. You could hear the occasional one singing from a perch in the sage behind while you looked at more than a dozen right in front of you. It was really spectacular!

All pictures were taken with a Nikon CoolPix P300 digital camera attached to a Kowa TSN-883 spotting scope, using a Vortex PS-100 adaptor attached to a Kowa TSN DA-10 adaptor.

We were at San Joaquin Marsh Sanctuary in Irvine to participate in the Southern California Audubon Coordinating Council meeting, which was being hosted by Sea and Sage Audubon. The great thing about a location like that for a meeting is that you can go birding before the meeting starts, so of course, we did. With winter giving way to spring, and many birds beginning to molt into their nuptial plumage, a lot of the species present were beginning to look pretty good. The American Avocets were starting to get peachy-headed. There were many Tree Swallows hawking insects overhead, with the occasional Northern Rough-winged to keep us honest. Marsh Wrens and Common Yellowthroats were yelling at us from the sedge beds. And as it turned out, there were several unusual birds to be seen. The first of these was somewhat unexpected at this location: a dainty little Lesser Yellowlegs, feeding with characteristic rapidity in the shallows of Pond D. Notice the delicate beak, whose length is less than 1.5x that of the head. This bird was difficult to get pictures of because it kept sprinting out of the frame!  

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On Pond C, we found the one unusual visitor to the marsh that we were expecting from previous visits: the continuing drake Common Teal. Formerly recognized as a distinct and unique species, males of this Eurasian sub-species of our Green-winged Teal are readily recognizable by the absence of the vertical white bar on the anterior portion of its flanks, and by the horizontal white bar on the scapulars that ours lacks. Another more subtle identifying feature of the drake Common Teal is the more prominent white striping in the face, which is much reduced or invisible on male Green-winged Teal. Watch this space for future developments: the International Ornithological Union has already re-split Common Teal out from the Green-winged Teal. Who knows if or when the American Ornithological Union will follow suit. Either way, it’s a snazzy looking bird!

All pictures were taken with a Nikon CoolPix P300 digital camera attached to a Kowa TSN-883 spotting scope, using a Vortex PS-100 adaptor attached to a Kowa TSN DA-10 adaptor.

On a routine weekend in late November, we went to look at a Harris’s Hawk reported recently at San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary in Irvine, California. Even though this bird is likely to not be accepted by the Orange County Bird Records Committee due to questionable origins, you just can’t miss a bird that cool in a location like this. We arrived at about 8:45 on a sunny Saturday morning. There had to be at least 200 Cedar Waxwings calling from the parking lot as we got set up and headed out. We walked to the end of the boardwalk, and there was the hawk, sitting regally in a bare branched tree. After taking numerous photos of him, we headed back towards the main pond area. Our walk was interrupted by a nice male Sharp-shinned Hawk who posed obligingly in a sycamore some 200 feet away. Next up was what seemed like at least 7-8 Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, all fussing away like tiny, angry felines. As we got back to Pond D, one of the birders with us asked “Isn’t that the Vermilion Flycatcher?” He was right! It was, and a nice bright male at that.

While that bird was being photographed, one of us noticed what appeared to be a Brewer’s Blackbird, walking along the shore of Pond D in the stubble of sedge stalks. Closer examination revealed that this bird had a tremendous amount of cinnamon plumage on the crown, nape and saddle, a bright pale supercilium extending well behind the pale yellowish eye, and pale gray between the wings and on the rump. This was an apparent female Rusty Blackbird, a first for San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary and only about the third for Orange County. Further observation revealed the handsome rufous edging to the flight feathers contrasting with the shiny black wings. The bird showed a paler brownish gray chest with faint, short vertical streaking across the chest and belly, all consistent with a female Rusty Blackbird. Rusty Blackbird is a species of special concern in the United States at large, where its population has been in precipitous decline in recent years.

All images were taken with a Kowa TSN-884 spotting scope with 20-60x zoom eyepiece and a Nikon CoolPix P6000 camera attached using a Kowa TSN-DA-10 digiscoping adapter. The optics were mounted on a Manfrotto 701HDV,055CXV3 carbon fiber tripod with digiscoping head. The two Rusty Blackbird photos are of the same bird - one in direct sun at 160 feet, the other in shade at about 40 feet. The difference in these two photos illustrates how much lighting can alter the appearance of a subject.

Bruce Aird, who had birding clients in from Eastern Tennessee, asked if I would guide them for an evening of local owling. Participants David Johnson and Jean Alexander had a list of four local owls they wanted to see. Great Horned Owl, though common nationwide, happened to be one of their owls of choice. This is our largest owl in Southern California and a very beautiful bird. They are fairly common in the city suburbs and Bruce spotted one very close to Optics4Birding sitting on a light post. (I’ll bet a hundred people drove by that owl and no one even noticed it sitting there.) Great Horned Owls are probably more often noticed in the city at night because of their typical owl “hoot”. Most people associate the hoot with an owl. It also tends to be fairly bold and is more commonly seen on an exposed day perch.

Barn Owl is certainly our most prevalent Southern California “city owl”. We had driven right down the road from here (the Optics4Birding Store), along Irvine Blvd, and immediately spotted a Barn Owl sitting on the perimeter fence of the El Toro MCAS (the “Orange County Great Park”). Getting out of the car and squeaking a little bit brought in two more individuals. Barn Owls are not common in Tennessee so it is an appropriate target owl while here in So Cal. They are probably more frequent here in CA than any other state. If you watch the vineyards along the Central Valley they frequently have Barn Owl boxes in the fields for rodent control. We see and hear them here in the city all the time. Since they screech rather than hoot, their calls are often not recognized as sounds made by an owl. Barn Owls have a distinctive ghostly white appearance in flight and a unique heart-shaped white facial disk.

The next two target owls would take us into Silverado Canyon to get into forested habitat. The first of these was Western Screech-Owl. In oak woodlands from lowland to mid elevations, this is certainly the most common owl in the west. We had three or four individuals calling at the first location we stopped, and eventually got great looks at one bird perched within 20 feet of us. Western Screech-Owls are very vocal and territorial and so fairly easily heard, though not necessarily easy to see without some practice. I have posted on Western Screech-Owl in this blog previously so did not take pictures of this owl. We had one final target we hoped to show our visitors, and that bird, shown in the picture at the left was one that I would never depend on finding in mid September.

Although a permanent resident in some of our Orange County canyons, Northern Saw-whet Owl is totally quiet at this time of year. They are small (blackbird size), uncommon, strictly nocturnal, and live in a thick habitat. This makes them almost invisible at this time of year. Even when you can locate them by sound during their vocal/breading period, they are still shy and often only seen here as some small owl whizzing by in the night. Add a dark moonless evening in our owling equation and this bird was going to be a difficult find so I had warned the group that this was a long shot. Never-the-less, in a very short period of looking, we found a beautiful little Saw-whet Owl. This one was less than 20 feet away just sitting on an exposed branch for us to admire. The owl is just too cute and certainly a favorite amongst our local owls! It made for a stupendous ending to our night of owling.

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For us, it was a no-brainer: we were going! Even with a stop or two along the way, we made it to the site just a bit before noon. We pulled together the cameras, scopes, tripods and binoculars and made the ¼-mile trek out to the site. As we arrived, we could tell something was off from the assembled crowd of birders. Strange and angry mutterings like “!*^$&% Peregrine Falcon!!” and worried bits of encouragement like “It’s got to be here somewhere!” suggested the nature of the problem. With over 20 birders searching, no one found the bird for at least an hour. At that point, we decided to break for lunch and come back later, so we drove off in search of fast food. As it turned out, the food wasn’t fast enough: it had just been delivered to the table when the phone rang. The bird was back! Unlike the stint, this wasn’t a life bird for either of us, so we opted to hurriedly finish our sandwiches before charging back out there. Apparently everyone had heard. The crowd of birders had more than doubled, and the mood was ebullient. The bird itself was calmly feeding on the near edge of the water, evidently oblivious to the mob of admirers mere yards away. It put on quite a show, feeding and preening and occasionally lifting its wings.

Local cell towers were set vibrating early last Saturday morning with the news that Brian Daniels had found a Lesser Sand-Plover at the extreme south end of Bolsa Chica Preserve in Huntington Beach, Orange County, California. The 11^th state record, this bird was a first for the county, and a life bird for many potential viewers. What followed was the usual scramble as people who could, dropped everything and barreled towards the spot. Those of us who couldn’t (and we sympathize as we were among them) watched the email boards in agony, as news of the Peregrine Falcon incident broke (the moan was almost audible county-wide) and the search for it in Bolsa’s inner bay began. At 10 AM, the bird was refound briefly, then flew off again and disappeared. And then late that afternoon, confirmation arrived that it was back near where it was first discovered, pushed south by the rising tide.

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At that point, the three of us at Optics4Birding were finally able to do something cogent about it, so we each packed a different digiscoping rig and headed for Harriett Wieder Regional Park, a spot overlooking the mudflats the bird was frequenting. The location presents a challenge as there is no close approach to the birds, which are almost 150 yards out, and the light was more or less behind the bird at that hour of the evening. It wasn’t a question of taking publication-worthy photos; in this case, that was never a rational possibility. What we hoped for was documentation quality shots, and to that end, we were all gratified with some success.

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People ask why you would bother with digiscoping; the Lesser Sand-Plover was a perfect example of why you would. Only distant views were available, well beyond the ‘reach’ of a superzoom camera or a DSLR with a conventional long lens. No closer access was available to anyone without a special permit to enter that section of the park. Only the 1000-4000 mm equivalence of digiscoping allowed even passable images to be obtained under these circumstances. The bird spent long periods of time unmoving, allowing us to take many exposures, with adjustments in between to compensate for the challenging lighting. When the bird came forward from its resting spot among the pickleweed to chase flies on the mudflats, the noise of camera shutters going off was impressive. And everyone there was digiscoping. When we were done shooting, we went back to just scoping and enjoying this spectacular bird.

Judge the results for yourselves. Using three different cameras and spotting scopes from two different manufacturers, we took a great many shots. A little digital editing, and this is what we got: shots that more than suffice for documentation. No, these won’t grace the cover of any glossy magazines, but they are plenty good enough to ID the bird from and adequate proof we were there at the same time the bird was. And what a bird!