The Goleta Birder

  For our last day in Puerto Penasco, we elected to bird the first few hours to the NW of town before returning to the hotel to cool off and pack for an hour, before driving back to the USA. We started off at the Islas del Mar resort. The semi-tidal lagoon and single freshwater pond here proved slightly disappointing, although we saw a good number of Yellow-crowned Night-Herons here. The area of trees around the entrance buildings, combined with the green lawns looked like a great migrant trap and did not disappoint. Despite being very early in the season for this far south, we racked up over a dozen species of typical western passerine migrants, with the most interesting being Willow and Gray flycatchers and Black-throated Gray Warbler. A pair of Curve-billed Thrashers seemed a bit out of place and I suspect this species has taken advantage of the resort plantings in the area to achieve a minor range extension. We then headed down to Playa Pelicano, an area of broad mudflats b...

Over the last couple of decades, I have spent a lot of time birding in Mexico, amassing a list of over 900 species. At this point, I have only a handful or endemics or near-endemics I need to see and have been spending more time looking for North American migrants, which were not a priority on earlier trips. One location I have been wanting to visit for some years is Puerto Penasco, which lies on the coast of northern Sonora, only an hour’s drive from the US border. I decided to tack on a couple of days here as part of my Arizona birding trip. Late summer is a pretty bad time to visit due to the high humidity and temperatures, as well as being a poor time for more northerly bird species that sometimes stray down in winter. However, I had a couple of potential “Mexico ticks” that seemed reasonably likely in Common Tern and Baird’s Sandpiper and the visit would give me the opportunity to scout out some areas better. Wes Fritz, who joined me for the Arizona trip, is alw...

  When I first moved to Goleta in 2000, boobies of any species were barely annual in coastal southern California. Starting around 2013, that situation began to change and significant numbers of Cocos (formerly the brewsteri race of Brown Booby) began to occur on Sutil Rock, off Santa Barbara Island. These subsequently began to breed along with odd pairs of Blue-footed Booby. A period of warm water also greatly increased records of Masked, Nazca and Red-footed Boobies with the result that sometimes four or five species of booby might be seen in a single boat trip and all five have been observed roosting on Sutil Rock. Since the booby colony represented a significant detour from the preferred routes of pelagic birding trips out of Ventura harbor, we recently started running some dedicated trips out to Santa Barbara Island. Since Santa Barbara Island is over 40 miles offshore, the journey out and back is in itself quite good for pelagic bird species, providing the optimalroute is t...