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Neotropic Cormorant and a Vexing Booby

Apologies for the long break since my last post, but the second half of July was uninspiring. The first two weeks of August were then very busy as I had 5 days of work, followed by my daughter’s wedding. Bird wise, in late July the only minor highlight was a large concentration of 700 or more Elegant Terns at the Santa Maria River Estuary that attracted a few other tern species. I made a couple of visits there and saw up to four Common Terns, mostly first-summers as well as a few Forster’s and the breeding Least Terns. Unfortunately, a Sooty Tern that graced Arroyo Grande, just a few miles to the north of the SMRE, did not put an appearance in Santa Barbara County. I then found another first-summer Common Tern on the beach at Devereux. A couple of days later, I made another trip to Devereux with Hugh Ranson and Mark Bright. Although we did not see the bird in the field, Mark later noticed an apparently much smaller cormorant in a distant photograph of some Double-cresteds, quite po...
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An Early Solitary Sandpiper

The morning after the excitement of the White-rumped Sandpiper at the SYRE, I had arranged a bird survey at Laguna Blanca – a freshwater lake in the upscale Hope Ranch area of Santa Barbara. The lake is surrounded by a golf course, but it is shut for maintenance every Monday morning and the La Cumbre Country Club has kindly given us access to survey the lake for birds during those periods. Since water levels were still too high for any extensive mudflats to have formed, my main purpose was to look for breeding records for the on-going California Bird Atlas project. I was joined by Hugh Ranson and we also kept an eye open for dragonflies and damselflies but were disappointed to only see very common species. There were plenty of (American) Coot and Pied-billed Grebe families in evidence and some well-grown Ruddy Duck ducklings confirmed breeding for that species as well. Otherwise, a summering Bufflehead was really the only bird of note. Eclipse Male Bufflehead The edge of the lake h...
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End of a 38-year hoodoo ... well sort of

  If you have read enough of my blog posts, you probably know that shorebirding is my favorite birding activity. This may stem from starting my birding in areas of the UK and Oregon where passerine vagrants were almost non-existent, but rarer shorebirds rather more frequent. Ever since I arrived in Oregon in 1988, I have been out diligently searching for a Red-necked Stint from late June to late July in Oregon, Washington and now California. As the decades went by, I despaired of ever finding a stint, but in early June 2023, while hoping to find a late spring vagrant White-rumped Sandpiper, I instead found an adult Little Stint – the first for Santa Barbara County. Breaking my stint “duck”, to use a cricket term, renewed my hopes of finding a Red-necked. Unfortunately, during June 2025, while I was away in Europe, Lynn Scarlett did find the county’s first White-rumped Sandpiper. This bird naturally hung around for three days and everyone got to see it. Everyone that is to say...
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Spectacled Eider or eider spectacle? Why not both?

  After a day and a half of forgettable birding around Anchorage and the Glenn Highway – the highlight being a couple of Gray (Canada) Jays – we boarded the flight to Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow). This was to be the first and only time we would reach the true Arctic on our trip. Utqiagvik has a limited road system that enables access to the arctic tundra, where breeding shorebirds and waterfowl abound. More specific targets for visiting birders are the three breeding eider species – King, Spectacled and Steller’s – and Snowy Owl. In addition to the breeding species, Utqiagvik has proven to be a fairly productive location for vagrants and a check of the RBA for the area revealed that a Temminck’s Stint has been present for two days. While Paul and Andy waited for our bags to unload from the flight, I went off to the vehicle rental location. The interior of the vehicle was by far the dirtiest I had ever rented, with mud all over the floor mats. Although I was not at all bothered...
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Utqiagvik (Barrow): Days Two through Four

  The next day we birded mostly the same areas as previously, discovering one or two more spots either through our own initiative or by following up RBAs. We also invested time in accurately counting most of the birds we saw, with the exception being Greater White-fronted Goose, which may have been the commonest bird present, Long-tailed Duck, Snow Bunting and Lapland Longspur. Song-flighting Lapland Longspurs were one of my most vivid memories from my first visit and this species is still common today. Lapland Longspur The eider show continued with totals of 20 Steller’s and 14 Spectacled. We counted 493 Red Phalaropes but just 41 Red-necked Phalaropes. Semipalmated Sandpiper was the most numerous calidrid by far, but by checking multiple locations, we came up with five White-rumped and three Stilt Sandpipers, along with small numbers of Pectoral and Western Sandpipers, Dunlin, Long-billed Dowitcher, Ruddy Turnstone and Sanderling. News then broke of a male Brambling in the airp...
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Completing the Ptarmigan Set

After returning home from Alaska (there will be some belated posts from that trip), I had to work for a couple of days before heading off to NE Utah where my wife and I were meeting up with our son – Aidan – and his girlfriend – Sara, who live in Colorado. This was not a birding trip but one of our goals was to hike up to the summit of Leidy Peak in the Uinta Mountains. I selected this peak because the round-trip hike is only five miles, which my wife and I can easily manage. By pure coincidence, it also happens to be the only easily accessible location for White-tailed Ptarmigan in Utah. As in California, the Utah population of this species is introduced but has been established for many years. After spending a night in Vernal, we drove up to the trailhead through a mix of meadows and aspen and coniferous forests. The weather forecast was decidedly unpromising although the worst of the weather was not supposed to arrive until late morning. At the trailhead, I had a brief look at a G...
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Gambell: The Auklet Extravaganza and Rare Migrants

  Gambell lies at the western tip of Saint Lawrence Island and is only 40 miles from the coast of Russa. We were fortunate to have a couple of days where the weather was nice enough for the snow-covered mountains along the Russian coast to be visible from the island. As much as I was looking forward to a return visit to the Arctic at Barrow (now Utqiagvik), Gambell was the most anticipated segment of our Alaska trip for me as I had never previously visited this fabled location. Gambell is well known as an excellent location for vagrants and for spectacular seawatches, involving tens of thousands of alcids streaming by. Since we had all birded extensively in the Old World, the vagrants took a back seat to the breeding seabirds from our perspective. In addition, after our failure in Nome, Rock Sandpiper was now a major priority. After arriving at midday and settling into our rooms, we decided to head out to the south end of Troutman Lake, where a couple of displaying Rock Sandpip...
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