The Goleta Birder

 Hailing originally from the UK, where there are many offshore island legendary for find rare vagrants, the (California) Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara exert a magnetic attraction for me. Unfortunately, the most accessible islands are very large and tend not to have the same concentrating effect on migrants as the small islands off the UK. In addition, the two most westerly islands – Santa Rosa and San Miguel – are extremely exposed to the dominant NW air flow along the outer coast. This flow is a death knell for landbird migrants reaching the islands. The ideal conditions are calm with a “marine layer” (a fairly low layer of cloud typically several hundred feet off the water) or an offshore wind. For this reason, and the fact it is a shorter and cheaper boat ride, I concentrate my efforts on Santa Cruz Island. Santa Cruz has two locations that you can easily visit during the day – Scorpion Anchorage and Prisoners Harbor. Initially, I used to visit Prisoners more ...

Late August and September have been very slow in terms of the warbler migration through Goleta and Santa Barbara . Initially we hoped this was due to a delay resulting from the incredibly late spring migration, where many species were running three weeks late. However, as numbers continue to remain low, there are always concerns about a potential population crash. Another likely contributor to the low numbers is lack of suitable feeding concentration areas. Unlike my native Britain, where birders look for migrants on islands or more prominent headlands, along most of the southern California coast, we search for migrants in areas that have insect infestations that attract large numbers of birds to feed. The traditional sources of such rich feeding are red-gum eucalyptus groves , mall and business car parks with Tipuana trees and tamarisk windbreaks. Over the years, many of the tamarisk windbreaks have simply died or been removed in a misguided effort to eliminate invasive plants (t...

  On September 5, we had our second pelagic trip out to Santa Barbara Island (SBI) to view the booby colony there. This trip proved as productive as the first one with several additional species as a result of being further into the fall migration period. The photos in this post are provided by Sue Cook and Brad Hacker. On our first trip, I had been surprised to see only a single pair of Craveri’s Murrelets, given how common they have been in recent years. It transpired that we just needed to be a bit later in the season (and perhaps with a bit warmer water) as this time we had over 30 Craveri’s, including 7 in view at once. These were the only alcids we saw. Pomarine Jaeger Parasitic Jaeger Compared to the early August trip, where we failed to see a single jaeger, on this trip we saw all three species. Although Long-tailed was the commonest, with over half a dozen noted, we had best looks at a spoon-tailed Pomarine and at least one Parasitic. Sabine’s Gulls were similarly common...

Common Tern Viewers of this blog may be wondering why it’s called “The Goleta Birder” since there have not been any posts about Goleta! This reflects both the fact I have been out of town a lot the last few months but also the fact that the birding around Goleta so far in fall migration has been pretty putrid. I have been out checking the beach at Coal Oil Point, which is our best local shorebird spot, on most days. When talking with Florence Sanchez, another local birder, I likened the recent birding there to the movie “Groundhog Day” since every visit I seemed to see the same variety and number of birds! Desperate to escape this, I decided to make on September 2 to make a sweep up through various shorebird spots in the northern part of the county, starting (and ending) with the Santa Ynez River estuary (SYRE) and then heading up to the Santa Maria Valley and river estuary. Note that the photos in this post are mine, which is why they are so bad … Upon arrival at the SYRE, I was d...

  When both my children were working in Phoenix, I started to visit Arizona more frequently, often also heading down to the Tucson area to visit long-time birding friend Jeff Gilligan, as well as other birders from my Oregon days who have subsequently relocated there. Although my main birding goal was to see birds that are absent or rare near my home in coastal California, perhaps inevitably, I decided to work on my state list. I added Arizona to the list of Pacific coast states where I am aiming to see at least 300 species. I have since bumped this to 350, given how easy reaching 300 appears to be. This will give me a greater incentive to look for harder species like Flammulated Owl, which I haven’t seen anywhere in over 20 years. The downside is that I am also chasing birds like loons, Willet and egrets that I see frequently at home! Fellow Santa Barbara County birder and professional bird photography guide Wes Fritz decided to join me. Wes is a pretty handy photographer hims...

  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...