Skip to main content

Season Finale at Scorpion

Shortly after returning from Baja, I noticed that a heatwave was about to hit the coast of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. These heatwaves are caused by offshore airflows that bring hot air from the interior and push the cool marine air away from the coast. One of large fall-outs that had previously occurred at Scorpion Anchorage (on Santa Cruz Island) was associated with such a heatwave, so I decided to roll the dice and head out there on Oct 29. The winds associated with the offshore flow were very light, so I didn’t get my hopes up too high.

On arrival, there did initially appear to be a bit more activity than usual with several Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Yellow-rumped Warblers zipping around and I quickly found a couple of Western Tanagers and a Clay-colored Sparrow. However, as I proceeded further towards and into the campground, it quickly became apparent that there had been no significant arrival and some expected migrants like Fox Sparrow were not around at all.

This late in the season, sparrows make up the main volume of migrants, so I was carefully checking all the sparrows. At the far end of the main campground, I found a small White-crowned Sparrow flock that contained a second Clay-colored Sparrow. A few of the sparrows flew over to a dry creek bed a short-distance away and I wandered over there to see what else was there and to my surprise, I flushed a largish, long-tailed passerine that was bright rufous-brown above – a Brown Thrasher. The bird perched in a low bush to give me a decent look at it. This was my first new “self-found” county bird of the year and only the third Brown Thrasher I had seen in over 30 years in California.

Intriguingly, a Brown Thrasher had been seen a couple of times in this very area the previous October-November but had eluded me and others who searched for it after the second sighting. I contacted Paul Lehman who told me that wintering Brown Thrashers have a very poor rate of returning for a second winter. So it may be just coincidence that this bird was in the same area.

Clay-colored Sparrow

I moved on to the group campground, where I found a large flock of White-crowed Sparrows that contained two each of Chipping and Clay-colored and an associated junco flock. The junco flock contained two birds with dark lores that were candidates for “Pink-sided” Junco, a more interior race that is rare in coastal Southern California. Given the difficulties associated with junco identification, I got some photos and had them reviewed by Paul Lehman and Peter Gaede. The conclusion was that neither was a pure “Pink-sided”, although one was getting close. After looking at some photos on-line, I found that several photos of apparent Pink-sided x Gray-headed Junco matched my bird well. I had seen this hybrid once out on Santa Barbara Island, although that individual was closer in appearance to a Gray-headed.

Not quite a Pink-sided Junco

I did a couple more back-and-forths between the campgrounds and the beach and had some success on the last one. First, a male Merlin swooped in to catch an unfortunate junco in the group campground and then I turned up a tan-striped White-throated Sparrow in the main campground. Although not a big fall-out, the saying "it only takes one bird" very much applied in this case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Productive Pelagic

  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...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Big Montane Year Arrives

  Although a few bird species that require coniferous forest are resident in the highest peaks of the San Rafael Mountains in Santa Barbara County, these mountains need special access permissions and require multi-hour drives on poorly maintained dirt roads. As a result, it makes more sense to drive a slightly longer amount of time to the California Sierras or other high mountain ranges in Southern California to see these species and several others that do not breed or winter regularly in the county. In my case, you may have read here that I just had driven a lot further to see many of these species in Washington and British Columbia. However, in some years the failure of cone crops can trigger irruptive behavior in many montane bird species when they can appear in areas far from their normal range. On the morning of September 5, I visited the Hollister Tech Park, which is sometimes a productive site for migrating warblers. I found very few warblers but was surprised to turn up...
Post a Comment
Read more

Return to the 49th State

  Over 30 years ago, I made my first visit to Alaska. Several more followed over the next few years and culminated in me publishing the state’s first bird-finding guide. I eventually sold 3000 copies before passing the rights on to the American Birding Association as the basis for a new guide. Since the mid-90s, I have only visited the state once, with my family in 2008. That trip was memorable for the wrong reasons as my young son and daughter spent the long drives to Denali and the Seward Peninsula constantly fighting and bickering in the back of the car. Fortunately, they grew out of this after that. A return visit was always in my plans because of my goal to see again the great majority of western USA and European bird species. Two of my old UK birding friends, Paul Thompson and Andy Silcocks, were keen to join as they had never been to the Arctic or the Bering Sea area. After a fair amount of planning and booking, we arranged to meet up in Anchorage on May 30 and from there ...
Post a Comment
Read more