Skip to main content

My Santa Barbara County Philadelphia Vireo


2026 has been proving to be a productive year for additions to my Santa Barbara county list. Most of the more ‘gettable’ additions are seabirds, assuming I can stomach going on enough pelagic trips. Among the potential passerine vagrants I had yet to see, Philadelphia Vireo stood out as one that I should get sooner or later. However, after 26 years in the county with only one chaseable bird that I had missed, it seemed far from inevitable that I would see one.

Ironically, when I first moved to California in 1992, Philadelphia Vireo was the first CBRC rarity that I found – a bird at Andrew Molera State Park on the Big Sur coastline of Monterey County. A few years later, the CBRC removed this species from their review list as it had proven to be a fairly regular vagrant. However, Philadelphia Vireo occurs much more frequently in the (San Francisco) Bay Area than they do along the southern coast of California. During my time in the county, there had been only three records, so about six or seven years ago, I hatched a plan to try to find one.

At least around the Bay Area, this species is often found in willows. As riparian habitat there is also productive for vagrant fall warblers, you don’t need to do anything special to look for the vireo. However, around Santa Barbara, migrant warblers primarily occur in exotic vegetation such as tipuana and eucalyptus trees. Along creeks, one pretty much gets an endless diet of Townsend’s and Orange-crowned Warblers with a few Wilson’s. Yellow Warblers are distinctively scarce in such habitat. Therefore, I needed to force myself to start birding along creeks with good riparian to find the vireo. For the first five years, I mostly focused my efforts along Atascadero Creek, which offers the best riparian habitat in Goleta. A couple of years ago, using some deductive reasoning Einstein would have been proud of, it occurred to me to also start checking the last location one was seen in the county! This was along Refugio Creek, just upstream of Refugio Beach State Park.

September 22 saw me start off at La Cumbre Peak, where the montane bird invasion continued with 166 Clark’s Nutcrackers and over 40 Cassin’s Finches. After I finished up there, I headed back down to the Hollister Tech Park, where I hoped to catch up with a Prairie Warbler than had shown up the previous day and had been claimed earlier in the morning. By the time I arrived there, other birders had also seen a bright male Blackburnian Warbler. Unfortunately, there was no sign of either bird and while trying to look for the Blackburnian, another birder reported a Chestnut-sided at the other side of the park, which I couldn’t refind either!


At that point, I decided to cut my losses and head up to Refugio Creek to make an attempt to find a Philadelphia Vireo. Once I arrived, I worked my way along the creek playing a mobbing tape to pull in birds from the extensive riparian strip. This didn’t prove all that effective but at my final stop, I did get a couple of Wilson’s Warblers and Western Tanagers to appear. I started to walk back to the car but had only gone about 50 yards when I noticed a Chestnut-backed Chickadee and a couple of Bushtits in willows above my head. Thinking there was possibly a feeding flock in the vicinity, I decided to try playing some Red-eyed Vireo alarm calls as a variation on the mobbing tape. This immediately brought in a couple more birds, one of which showed a yellow wash throughout the underparts and dark eyeline. I immediately thought Philadelphia Vireo but waited a couple of seconds to get a better look to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating on a bright Orange-crowned Warbler. The bird progressively came closer and I had really good looks for 30-40 seconds. I was able to see the yellow wash throughout the underpart that was strongest on the breast and very well-defined dark lores, both key distinctions from Warbling Vireo. I even had time to check the Tech Park again, this time missing a Blackpoll Warbler. However, I would trade missing those warblers for finding a major rarity like a Philadelphia Vireo every day.


It is very rare that I go looking for specific rarity and then actually find it. Many of the remaining potential additions to my county list are so infrequent that it is hard to have a plan to effectively search for them.

I thought the vireo might be hard to relocate in the extension riparian strip, but it fortunately stayed for four days so most caught up with it. The photos in this post were generously provided by Sophie Cameron and Hugh Ranson.

Location: Goleta, CA, USA

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