The Goleta Birder

  In my previous post, I alluded to a number of species that are distinctly commoner in spring migration than at other times of the year in Santa Barbara County. In between doing bird surveys up on the Strauss wind farm, near Lompoc, I have been making regular visits to Refugio Canyon, Goleta Slough, Campus Point and the Santa Ynez River to try to catch up with them. I also did a couple of seawatches at Point Conception Lighthouse, part of a volunteer migration monitoring program I organize each spring. The photo above is courtesy of Jamie Chavez. Initially, I failed to have much luck with the best being a few Blue-winged Teals arriving at Area K in Goleta Slough and the Santa Ynez River Estuary. Both my seawatches at Point Conception were not blessed with favorable weather for large movements, but we did have both a male Black Scoter and a breeding-plumaged Rhinocerous Auklet close-in on the water on April 5, while a White-winged Scoter flew by on April 12. Fortunately, things...

 Some 40 years ago, birders at Cape May in New Jersey discovered a ‘morning flight’ during which warblers and other “nocturnal” migrants migrated from the Avalon Peninsula back towards the Delaware coastline in the first two to three hours of daylight. A similar flight was discovered around that time at Butterbredt Spring in Kern County in the Mojave Desert of California. For a long time, the phenomenon was believed to be confined to a few locations but the discovery of another large morning flight at Bear Divide in eastern Los Angeles County heightened interest elsewhere in southern California and birders began to discover additional sites. Starting In spring 2018, I began spending more time in Refugio Canyon, about 13 miles west of Goleta, during periods of strong northwesterly winds as local birders had become aware that larger numbers of western migrants sometimes occurred in such conditions. One motivation of course was to find rarities but there are many western migrants, i...