Rare birds and new friends: A 5-day California birding journey leads to great finds
You know it’s a big and important bird festival when you stroll through the exhibit hall and see other bird festivals hosting tables. If you like this festival, you’ll like ours too! Let us show you some new birds! That’s the basic pitch, and it applies to the birding tour companies on exhibit as well.
Birders, when not outside watching birds, can be observed inside plotting their next big trip. I was one of them last month, attending the 30th annual San Diego Bird Festival. The display belonging to Canopy Tower and Lodge held me captive (by choice) for 15 minutes. Panama is high on my travel wish list.
California was in my dreams last fall when I registered for the festival and a pre-festival adventure with Red Hill Birding, a 10-year-old Chicago-based tour company. The five-day “Condors & Corvids” tour would visit habitats north of Los Angeles to experience special birds not found in the San Diego area.
Red Hill founder Josh Engel and Adam Sell guided our group of 12, leading us to well-scouted birding hot spots in two extra-tall passenger vans. Often the less scenic spots paid off too, such as our first pullover, a rest area just north of San Diego. The prize, my lifer Allen’s Hummingbird, proved again that for birders a bathroom break can be productive in more ways than one.
Refreshed, we continued north in search of our first major target species, California Condor. The guides knew exactly where to go, of course, a key reason for hiring a tour company. But even with huge birds like condors, sightings are never guaranteed.
We got lucky. Really lucky. Four of the majestic flyers materialized in the high hills of Los Angeles County, a site Josh and Adam had been monitoring via eBird in recent days. Condors glided directly over us, close enough to read their numbered tags. Then they came back and did it again. To say the least, the show surpassed our expectations. Did Red Hill train these birds?
I’d seen California Condors once before, by myself, at the Grand Canyon. Seeing them this time was even better because I was sharing the experience with new birding friends, all of us appreciating the rare spectacle above.
California Condor once came within an eyelash of extinction and is critically endangered. We visited the “hack site” where the first condors from a controversial captive-breeding program were reintroduced to the wild in 1991. Four years prior, the population numbered just 27 birds, all in captivity. About 300 condors are flying free today.
Our condor quest complete, we turned to the family of birds known as corvids, which includes crows, ravens and jays. Common Raven was ubiquitous throughout our tour. But the corvids we most coveted were two California endemics: Island Scrub Jay and Yellow-billed Magpie. Both are found nowhere else in the world.
The magpie occupies a wide swath of central California. We encountered several along a country road in Santa Barbara County. Yellow-billed Magpie is a handsome bird, large and vocal like its black-billed cousin. With my most-wanted trip species secured, I breathed easier as the vans headed west toward the Pacific.
In the morning, we boarded a tour boat in Ventura Harbor for a one-hour ride to Santa Cruz Island, part of Channel Islands National Park and the exclusive home of Island Scrub Jay. The bird practically greeted us upon arrival, as did the endemic Island Fox, a cutie no bigger than a house cat.
Back on the mainland, a few harder-to-find species tested the “fieldcraft” of our guides. The guys met the challenge, delivering good views of LeConte’s Thrasher, Bell’s Sparrow, Lawrence’s Goldfinch, and Tricolored Blackbird. Three memorable raptors — Golden Eagle, White-tailed Kite and Prairie Falcon — added to our bounty.
I was impressed with Red Hill (redhillbirding.com). Adam and Josh excelled at efficient bird-finding, applying their experience and next-level ID skills. They hustled, too. It’s amazing how fast a professional guide can stop a vehicle, set up a spotting scope, and get a bird in view for clients. It’s an underrated superpower.
Southern California supports an array of “exotic” or non-native bird species. We located two at Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino: Red-whiskered Bulbul and Yellow-chevroned Parakeet. The bulbul is a looker with a song to match. I’d searched for it before, in Miami, without success.
The Red Hill tour ended back in San Diego, 143 total species later and just in time for opening night at the festival. I crashed early, anticipating the next day’s “Birding on the Border” field trip, key targets being California Gnatcatcher (yes) and Ridgway’s Rail (another happy yes).
Before leaving town, I had some free time at the hotel on Mission Bay. Fellow birders told me they’d seen Swinhoe’s White-eye on the grounds, a tiny non-native with a fast-growing local population. With coffee in hand, I began looking around. Soon, a yellowish comet landed about 30 feet away. Stay there, stay there, hold still … wow, that bird is wearing little white goggles!
Somehow I’d found a bird on my own, a lifer no less. I savored this modest achievement before heading to the airport, concluding my own “biggest week” well before the first day of spring. It felt like cheating.
• Jeff Reiter’s column appears regularly in Neighbor. You can reach him at jreiter@wordsonbirds.com.