The Goleta Birder

  On August 17, I began the 1500-mile drive north to visit my brother, who lives in Burton in interior British Columbia. I was planning to do some birding in Washington State to get a few new state birds on the way up. My initial goal was to see the three remaining shorebirds that occur at more or less annually in the state that I had not seen, followed by a visit to the boreal forests in the extreme NE corner of the state. I arrived in WA around 4 pm on Aug 18 and proceeded to check out some ponds near Pasco for shorebirds. The water levels and viewing angles were not that great and the best were four Solitary Sandpipers I saw flying off.   At that point, I decided to drive to another set of ponds about an hour away that had some good recent ebird lists. Upon arrival, I saw no fewer than five Solitary Sandpipers in a single scan, as well as a Semipalmated Sandpiper in with the Leasts and Westerns, both yellowlegs and Black-necked Stilts. All very nice but not what I was hop...

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...

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...

  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...

  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...

  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...