The Goleta Birder

  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...

  Since my last post, there has been a distinct pick-up in fall migration – both in quality and quantity.   The montane invasion has picked up in species diversity with more Pinyon Jays, Mountain Chickadees and some Evening Grosbeaks and Cassin’s Finches. I have only managed to hear a couple more flocks of Pinyon Jays and a single grosbeak but will be making more efforts for both those species over the coming weeks. Following a couple of reports of the commoner vagrant warblers, I started to check out some of the local warbler hotspots. I followed up finding a Northern Parula at Evergreen Open Space, which is quite near my home, with an American Redstart in one of the tipu-covered parking lots in east Goleta. The next morning, I hit up Winchester One park followed by the Hollister Tech Park. Winchester One was quite birdy and I had my first Tennessee and Nashville warblers of the season. I followed this up with another Tennessee at the Tech Park and a Lucy’s Warbler, along...

  Whenever there is an El Nino, there is a lot of anticipation of rare pelagic species owing to the changes in water temperatures and potential displacement of species far from their normal abodes. In practice, there are a number of species – Least and Black Storm-petrels, Craveri’s Murrelets and Elegant Terns, for example – that do predictably move further north, but we are still waiting for Wedge-tailed Shearwaters to show up more commonly even though they are quite regular in numbers around the southern tip of Baja California. One group of birds that has become much commoner over the last decade is boobies. I was hopeful that the “Super El Nino” would bring in an influx of Masked, Nazca and Red-footed Boobies into Southern California mirroring the effect of the “Blob” a few years ago. Although sea surface temperatures were much warmer than normal in the spring, after that they failed to advance much through the early part of the summer and it was only in August that they sta...