In the meantime, I thought that I would take advantage of this slow time of year to catch up on posting about a major birding trip I took to the American southwest last winter. With no further ado...
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February 19 and 20, 2011 - Los Angeles area
February 21 and 22, 2011 - San Diego and the Salton Sea
February 23, 2011 - Phoenix, Tucson, the Santa Cruz flats and Madera Canyon
February 24, 2011 - Madera Canyon, Patagonia, and the San Rafael Grasslands
February 25, 2011 - Cave Creek Canyon, Barfoot Canyon, drive to Ventura, CA
February 26, 2011 - Kern and Santa Barbara Counties, CA
February 27, 2011 - Santa Cruz Island
February 28, 2011 - Los Angeles, flight home
Back in February of 2011 I went on an epic adventure with three
good buddies. The place was the southwestern United States, and the goal was to
see birds, herps, insects, mammals, the desert, the mountains, the ocean, and
cool local restaurants. But mostly, birds.
The planning had been done the previous autumn as I was keen
on going on a trip somewhere over my February reading week at school. Brett
Fried, a birder from Cambridge and a friend who I’ve known for a couple of years,
was game right from the start, so we planned on Costa Rica. Unfortunately for
us the flight tickets doubled in price the day before we were going to order
them so we started thinking of other possibilities. David Bell, a Sault-Ste-Marie birder who also
attends the University of Guelph, was keen on going, and he mentioned southern
California and Arizona. It didn’t take much to get my buddy Matt Strimas-Mackey,
another U of G student, to commit to the trip. I think our conversation went
something like “Hey, do you want to go to Cali with us next month?” “Yeah sure,
I’m in!” And so the trip was a go.
Dave planned most of the itinerary and Matt got the rental
car (with full insurance cause we were going to beat it to shit!) and
accommodations ready. Before we knew it, the day had arrived!
Matt Strimas-Mackey: Matt had many nicknames by the end of the trip, such as Mr. U-turn (he made exactly 307 of them this trip and the guy with no respect for stop signs or red lights. Check out that intense look!
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| Matt Strimas-Mackey |
David Bell: a.k.a. trip planner extraordinaire. He could tell you exactly what species we could find at every single location we might go to on this trip, straight from memory. And 99.9% of the time, he was right! Except when he said that Mountain Plovers exist - we actually found out later in the trip that they don't.
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| David Bell |
Brett Fried: a.k.a. the guy we brought along to help pay for gas and to be the butt end of our jokes. Well, he also has a pretty sweet scope.
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| Brett Fried |
February 19, 2011
I picked up David and Matt and by 12:30 we were on our way.
After a bit of a detour and great views of a Bald Eagle we arrived at Brett’s
place, and from there left to go to Detroit. On the drive, we had our only
Tundra Swans of the trip (perhaps newly arrived migrants). We crossed the
border, went to the Park and Fly, and arrived at the airport. The guys got on
their flight OK but it turned out that I was with a different airline, so I had to
take another shuttle to the other terminal. Finally, we were off! My plane was
a dinky little plane with about 40 seats. I arrived in Chicago, gave Laura a quick
call, and hopped on my plane to LA. On the flight, I had a nice chat with a
lawyer from LA and a college student from Detroit. I only got about 30 minutes
of sleep, and after a while we touched down in LA. After a bit of confusion I
saw the guys in the rental van while they were driving around looking for the
hostel. They picked me up, we had some amazing food at In n Out, and had a hell
of a time finding the hostel. Finally we arrived but at this point it was 2:00
AM. We were going to leave to start our big day at 3:00, so our 55$ for the
hostel was spent sitting around in the room and making use of the free wifi.
February 20, 2011.
Our big day in Los Angeles county! We picked up John
Garrett, a student in grade 12 who knew the area well as well as a phenomenal
birder. Upon meeting him at his house he said that the mountains were closed
due to heavy snow. Great.... So instead of starting the big day with Spotted
Owls, the best we could do was drive up the foothills for some semi-montane
species.
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| birding in the hills above Los Angeles - February 20, 2011 |
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| location of our only Canvasback for the trip |
Needless to say, we could see why the mountains were closed.
There was about 8 inches of snow everywhere and the roads were slick. We ended up
getting lost about 3 times but finally the sun rose and we were kind of in the
right area. The first Cali bird = a flock of Western Bluebirds off in the
distance.
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| Western Bluebird (from later in the trip) |
In short order we saw Red-tailed Hawk, Common Raven, and
White-crowned Sparrow (ended up being the most common bird of the trip, most
likely). At this point the air temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit but as the
morning wore on, the sun came out and warmed things up to the balmy temperature
of 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Ah, spring break in southern California!
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| Dave keeping track of the number of ravens while John looks on |
The birds were slow to come, but eventually they woke up and we found them. California Quail, Lincoln’s Sparrows, Red-shouldered Hawks, and Oak Titmice graced our binocular views in short order along with some other expected foothills species. It was exciting to be in a completely new area – even Black Phoebes (they ended up being insanely common on this trip) were a lifer so we stopped to view the first one for quite some time. Fortunately John humoured the idiots from Canada and let us stop to appreciate the common southwestern species for the first time.
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| Phainopepla - accidental in Brampton, common in SoCal |
Before long we hit up the desert, picking up things like
Loggerhead Shrike and some ducks (Common Goldeneye, Bufflehead, etc) near an
impoundment. The highlight of the day was when we hiked along a wash in the
Antelope valley. Dave had a great find with 2 LeConte’s thashers! These had
been previously found by others, but it was still satisfying to relocate this
difficult species.
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| Antelope Valley |
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| Oh look, a Rock Wren! |
Another highlight from the Antelope valley was this scenic piece of concrete. Unfortunately a pesky Burrowing Owl kept getting in my photo.
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| Burrowing Owl - Antelope Valley |
The Antelope Valley is where our epic Mountain Plover saga
began. And I don’t take the words “epic” and “saga” very lightly! John
thought they would be pretty much guaranteed at one spot, but we couldn’t turn
them up (a dark-morph Ferruginous Hawk was a nice consolation prize, however).
This was the theme of the trip – everywhere we went, we couldn’t turn up the
stupid Mountain Plovers, a.k.a. Dirtpipers, a.k.a. Colorado Dirt Plovers. We
are pretty sure they are extinct. The American Coot below was the closest we got to them.
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| American Beach-coot |
Brett, Matt and I had picked up a fair number of lifers,
but the big day wasn’t as big as we had hoped at this point. It was already
noon and we were only at about 65 species. There was still hope, however, as we
hadn’t done any birding near the coast yet. The next stop, Lake Palmdale, was quite productive
and just the type of stop one needs on a big day....Get in, see the birds, and
get out without f*cking around too much. The location was essentially a city
park/pond in the middle of the Antelope Valley where a Greater White-fronted
Goose and Ross’s Goose were supposedly over-wintering. Without too much trouble
we relocated these super tame geese hanging out with all the mutants, as well
as a surprise Snow Goose.
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| Ross's Goose at Lake Palmdale |
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| Greater White-fronted Goose at Lake Palmdale |
We had a pile of waterfowl and our first Violet-green
Swallows of the trip here. A couple more stops at various lakes to pick up odds
and ends, and by late afternoon we found ourselves on the coast. Bird 100 of
the day was a Forster’s Tern. Along the cliffs we had decent views at a number
of gull species as well as Western, Eared, and Clarke’s Grebes.
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| Eared Grebe - February 20, 2011 |
We raced along to the
coast, with John seeing a Cassin’s Kingbird on the wire, and arrived at Malibu
lagoon with about an hour or two of light left. A highlight for me here was
getting my lifer Snowy Plovers, and some killer photos of them to boot.
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| Snowy Plover - Los Angeles |
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| Snowy Plover - Los Angeles |
Love that evening light!!
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| Snowy Plover - Los Angeles |
Also
seen here were good looks at Glaucous-winged and Mew Gulls, and a few other
shorebirds and waterfowl. We had brief looks at an Allen’s Hummingbird as well.
Our plan from here was to race to the Spotted Dove location to close out the
day, but we were stuck in traffic, adding only Marbled Godwit (there was a
flock on a beach).
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| Marbled Godwit - Los Angeles |
The Spotted Doves would have to wait til the end of the
trip! Instead, we tried for Western Screech Owl at John’s neighbourhood in
Pasadena after dark. We do remember hearing them and eventually having great
looks at them, but we were also running on about 5 minutes of sleep in the past
2 days so we might just have been hallucinating. Anyways, the owls were a sweet way to end to the big day and species
number 123. This was a lot less than our goal of 150, but still not too bad for
a bunch of Easterners who were beyond the point of exhaustion. Somehow we managed
to drive to San Diego without falling asleep at the wheel that night, rolled
into our motel, and crashed.
2 comments:
Least Grebe eh?
Keep the posts going!
Whoops, typo! *Spoiler alert* must have had what we saw a few days later in AZ on my mind...
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