The Goleta Birder

  After returning to Anchorage from Utqiagvik, we embarked on the final leg of our Alaska birding trip. This started with visiting the interior around the eastern end of the Denali Highway, traveling via the Glenn Highway. Following that, we would head back south via Anchorage to Seward, where we were taking a cruise out into the Kenai Fjords. After a night in Anchorage, we headed out early on the Glenn Highway. The key target for the interior part of the trip was Hawk Owl. Once we reached the spruce forest areas, we did most of driving at 45 miles an hour or so to allow easier scanning of the roadside treetops for the owl. We also looked for side roads that allowed good views of spruce forest to check along these as well. Short-eared Owl The first side road we tried was near the Eureka Roadhouse. The small lakes and marshes here held a decent variety of wildfowl, including Trumpeter Swan and Barrow’s Goldeneye. Noisy Lesser Yellowlegs teed up for photo opportunities on the top o...

I am finally catching up with the last couple of posts from our amazing Alaska trip back in June. This first one covers one of our 'schedule padding' days between Gambell and Anchorage. After returning from Gambell, we had an evening and most of the next day to bird before catching a late flight to Anchorage. The evening session was a dud and the next day we decided to head up the Kougarok to find a Wandering Tattler in some breeding habitat as well as check out Salmon Lake again. The tattler search proved futile and activities devolved largely into photographing some common species we had yet to see very well. Golden-crowned Sparrow The first of these were American Tree Sparrow and Golden-crowned Sparrow. We also had very nice looks at singing Arctic Warblers, which were abundant in the roadside willows. Arctic Warbler Ruddy Turnstone We then checked out a different part of Salmon Lake for ducks and other waterbirds. A flock of Common Goldeneye was our first of the trip and th...

  After the excellent pelagic in September and the recent run of rarities on land, I had high hopes for a 12-hour pelagic on October 11 followed by the next cruise down to the booby colony at Santa Barbara Island on October 13. Unfortunately, rough sea conditions caused by a combination of the first storm of the winter from the NW and the tail end of a hurricane system from further south resulted in the first boat being cancelled. The booby cruise was still on and with the hope that the remnants of the hurricane might have brought something exotic up from the south, I was busy studying up on potential rarities like Juan Fernandez Petrel. Countering such optimism were recent reports from pelagic birding and fishing trips off LA and Orange County where very few birds had been seen. Once the pelagic proper got underway after we left Scorpion Anchorage on Santa Cruz Island, we ran into a couple of issues that we don’t normally face. First, the hurricane had added a southwest swell co...

  After our successful visit to Point Conception (PC) the previous week, I scheduled another visit on October 8 with Peter Schneekloth, since the forecast was for a light offshore flow in the area. Inevitably, news broke on the evening of October 7 of another Asian vagrant – a Bar-tailed Godwit. Although this species is a lot more frequent in California than Dusky Warbler, this isn’t the case in Santa Barbara County and it would be a new county bird for me. The only chaseable bird has been at the Santa Ynez River estuary. I bird this location more frequently than anyone else in the county, but it unfortunately showed up the day I left for a business trip to Texas and then left the day I was returning. A classic case of there being no justice in birding! Although this species is generally considered as an ‘Asian’ bird, it in fact breeds quite commonly in western Alaska and the population there is famous for undertaking a non-stop migration in fall to New Zealand, where they winter...

  My discovery of the Philadelphia Vireo seemed to mark the tail end of a good pulse of eastern vagrants through the county, although most of these were frequent ones like Tennessee or Blackpoll Warblers. Other than enjoying the continuing flow of Cassin’s Finches, Clark Nutcrackers and Pinyon Jays from the montane bird invasion, the next few days brought little of interest, although I did twitch a Chestnut-sided Warbler – an annual vagrant to the county - at the Hollister Tech Park on Sep 27. Things started to look up that evening when a return check of the Tech Park turned up a nice male American Redstart – most birds we see are in female or immature plumage. As a change from vagrants from the east, the next morning Sophie Cameron and I found our first Tropical Kingbird of the fall during a survey at Laguna Blanca. This Mexican species is a frequent vagrant during the fall as birds reverse migrate north up the Pacific Coast and typically several birds spend the winter. Noting...

2026 has been proving to be a productive year for additions to my Santa Barbara county list. Most of the more ‘gettable’ additions are seabirds, assuming I can stomach going on enough pelagic trips. Among the potential passerine vagrants I had yet to see, Philadelphia Vireo stood out as one that I should get sooner or later. However, after 26 years in the county with only one chaseable bird that I had missed, it seemed far from inevitable that I would see one. Ironically, when I first moved to California in 1992, Philadelphia Vireo was the first CBRC rarity that I found – a bird at Andrew Molera State Park on the Big Sur coastline of Monterey County. A few years later, the CBRC removed this species from their review list as it had proven to be a fairly regular vagrant. However, Philadelphia Vireo occurs much more frequently in the (San Francisco) Bay Area than they do along the southern coast of California. During my time in the county, there had been only three records, so about six...