Vacay Birding: Keeping It on the DL

This past weekend Butler's Birds headed west to San Diego for some R&R. This trip was not a solo effort and as such the travel routes, travel times, and social entailment precluded any serious or concerted birding. Despite the allure of Jacumba and Anza Borrego, there were no detours between PHX and SD, and not just because all the driving was done at night. 

Even so, it has been touted much and more that one of birding's strengths is that is is easily doable in some capacity in any new area (or old) and this still held true on Coronado Island. As for that more serious birding trip out west...well that will be coming later this spring I think.

The west coast is famed for its birding and rightly so, but of no lesser notoriety are the aquatic mammal populations. To my mind, Sea Lions and their pinniped ilk are fascinating living links in the mammalian evolutionary chain. To other minds like those of some ancient sailors and perhaps modern day bronies, they were no doubt a troubling point of attraction that necessitated the invention of mermaids to assuage, justify, and bridge unnatural lubricious inclinations that develop after many weeks aboard a sea-vessel. There I said it. To be fair, they bask in the sun like Milanese in a coffee shop.

We spent a chunk of Saturday out on a whale and dolphin "safari," which was actually pretty cool for all the conversational pablum that sometimes accompanied the clientele.  At one point the catamaran became surrounded by a massive pod of Common Long-Beaked Dolphin, who can do a pretty good job of 'sharking it' with their dorsal fins and also, like most Dolphins, are probably more dangerous to people and animals than most sharks.

 

Beautiful, smart, and deadly...Dolphins are the femme fatales of the bay waters. They certainly slew me anyway. Apparently this huge pod off Dana Point is one of the largest in the U.S. and is composed of different recognizable sub-groups that have conglomerated over time. They operate with a republic-style government within this autonomous collective and also eat fish.

Even with hundreds of Dolphin, one sometimes feels a lack of mass, size, or grandeur when staring out into the vastness of the Pacific. Fortunately, there were a couple Gray Whales, presumably late migrants, making their way south along the coast. WHALES. I had never seen a whale before, and to be fair in a sense still haven't, at least not the whole thing, but if you take the pieces from these photos and glue them together you'll get like 62% of a Gray Whale.

 

 Even though neither crew nor captain nor chorus seemed to have an interest in pelagic birds, I was still able to snag a few species, including a lifer in the form of fly-by Black-vented Sheerwaters. It also provided a reminder that I am really bad at identifying Loons (not super a lot of practice in central AZ ya know). This bird has a stout beak and partial white collar, which would point to Common, but it also has a lot of white on the face, white speckling on the wings, and seemingly a hint of rust on the front of its throat, which could indicate Red-throated. My guess is the speckling is variable and the red is an artifact of light, but are Common Loons often miles out from shore?

Both going out and coming in, this fellow stood sentinel of the Dana Point harbor. Ever been mugged, shark-attacked, or otherwise accosted at Dana Point? Me either, and we have him to thank for this preservation.

Like the fellow above, Surf Scoters off the Tidal Park of Coronado Island provided another photo-first for Butler's Birds. I had a limited amount of time to explore this area Sunday morning and was tantalized all the more in that with it being east facing, the rising sun was back-lighting just about everything on the water. The male SUSCs were farther out from the shore/pier. A lone female was more accommodating but still...birding brings out misogynistic tendencies in all of us.

 

 

"Suddenly...Bushtits!!!" These loudly foraging birds were pretty common at the Coronado park. Their ability loudly and quickly to show up out of nowhere always impresses. They typically live around 4,000 feet in AZ so seeing them next to the ocean was a bit odd. A Belted Kingfisher also made for a pleasant and necessary sight at the so and so yacht club nearby.

The exposed rock along the muddy shore was largely devoid of peeps, no long-shot Wandering Tattler wandering or tattling through here. An accommodating Marbled Godwit did make for pretties, and reminded that two-tone beaks are often better than one, and even scavenging can be done with grace and poise. 

Alas, since I do not live in nor have visited the upper midwest or central Canada in the summer, I have never seen MAGOs sporting their coldstone marblery in full breeding force. Latin word on the street, of course, is that it is very imago dei.

There was another interesting Loon doing Loon stuff off the Tidal Park shore. He was accompanied off and on by a few Greater Scaup, one of which is included below entirely because I just now realized I have not posted any photos of that species before, and this causes me shame. Of course, one of the best ways to distinguish between Greater/Lesser Scaup is to view the birds in a blurry, out-of-focus way, such as to focus on the silhouette and not be distracted by other stuff.

 

The intriguing Loon was sporting much white on the neck and face, including in front of the eye. The beak is also very dainty and slightly upturned. It seems to be a good candidate for Red-throated, though I would be grumpily open to other suggestions.

 

I am led to believe that the bird below is a Black Phoebe based on plumage, behavior, range, and raw gut instinct. As GBRS #7 mentioned in a recent post and other have as well, this bird really drives the east-coast visitors wild. It makes for birding around urban water features in the southwest that much more exciting anyway.

More exciting, though less photogenic, were some Red-crowned Parrots that would streak overhead from time to time. No I am not proud of the documentation shot, nor am I super proud of listing established exotics. But I will do what is necessary to survive. We all have skeletons in our closets and dirty ticks on our lists or even elsewhere. When did you last do a tick check???

A little more clean to behold and clean of plumage and clean to list was a small flock of Brant feeding a little ways offshore. What was not clean was the murky oyster beds in which they were foraging for eel grass and other delectable slimes. Still, all in all, it was a pretty formal gala.

"Stubby Little Tuxedo Gooses" as Audubon once called them, the Brant are simple and striated creatures who enjoy pinacoladas, even if they won't admit it (this describes most people in part or whole) and long walks/waddles near the beach. Seeing Geese in the ocean was similarly odd to seeing Bushtits near the ocean. On the one hand, well, why shouldn't they be there? Of course they should. On the other hand it's like, Geese anywhere else hang out in freshwater ponds and lakes and are generally unscrupulous. Not these Brant; they were a very respectable bunch.

As for all those southern California endemics, exotics, and isolated Tri-colored Blackbirds, well, this weekend in San Diego was a passive warm-out. Those birds will be birded in a birdacious way sooner or later or somewhere in the middle.

Superior Birding: Oak Flats

What's that they say, without ups and downs in life, you're dead? Well, sometimes Flat or Flats is good, especially if the Flats are covered in oak scrub. 

Superior, AZ, located about an hour east of Phoenix on the Hwy 60, is well known for its gorgeous, oaken canyons and the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, the site of many an exciting avian and botanical find. A little farther east the mountains are broken down into boulder and oak-strewn foothills where campers, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, and naturalists can all find plenty to do, if not necessarily all at the same time...

In many ways this habitat is similar to that recently visited near Prescott and also leading up to Mt. Ord in east Maricopa. As far as AZ habitats go, it's a favorite of mine for several reasons. It's relatively lush (not as hot/desiccated as Sonoran Desert stuff), it's cooler in temperature, and the scrub oak and manzanita, which make up the bulk of the vegetation, don't get to be very tall, so this allows for much better looks at and photos of birds that might otherwise be high canopy dwellers.
Case in point, I was unable to get a good photo of this skittish Scrub Jay not because it was high in a ponderosa or something, but because it was just too wise to let me get near. Oak Flats...err hem...levels the playing field.



Jays are a funny bird. Generally speaking they're pretty wary of people and always have sentries on the look out, but in certain areas where they're used to us hominids they're incredibly resourceful and comfortable (the head-perching Florida Scrub Jays coming quickly to mind).
Ash-throated Flycatchers, on the other hand, are loud, lovely, conspicuous, and usually pretty accomodating. They're common, but I like these birds quite a bit, and miss them during the winter.

My target bird for the Oak Flats, one seen and photographed very well only a couple of weeks before by Gordon "Wizard Staff" Karre. This little butt of a bird has been a photo-nemesis for me for some time now. It's still early in the year and their numbers will grow in these areas, but there will also be bigger game to chase in later April and May, so taking care of business here in relatively slower March would have been most efficacious to efficient birding. It's tougher to make the early morning call to spend one's Saturday chasing GRVIs in May, when they're easier, when there's better all-round birding to be had elsewhere.
It's not glamorous, but going Gray Vireo hunting does have a positive externality in that they inhabit the same scrubby stuff as many the beloved emberizid, so the backdrop to this search would be continued sparrow-crushing.

Black-chinned...black-eye, black-and-blue after such crushing...These birds have a great call too, one that rings through the scrubby hillsides this time of year.

The scrub oak habitat is not just a favorite of mine and the Black-chins; it's also populated with many other vocal species. Early morning in March is a truly symphonic time, or maybe cacophonous...anyway it's great practice for audio birding, a serious weakness of my birding repertoire.

Bewick's Wrens are among the loudest and most persistent chatterbugs. They also have a myriad of calls, both those immediately recognizable to the species and all kinds of other half-assed chips and chirps and even some imitations of other birds. They're terrible gossips. 

Townsend's Soliatire's, by contrast, are not very vocal, but are not above messianic posing atop their perches. Townsend's Redeemer wouldn't be a bad sobriquet for this fellow. Another couple of weeks and the Solitaire's will be clearing out of the oak/juniper scrub and heading back to higher elevations.

 

Naturally, scraggily perches and their panoramic vantage points attract more than Solitaires and ASFLs. Vermilion Flycatchers (in this case, female) and the tragically bland (when perched near VEFLs) Say's Phoebe's meticulously watch from the surrounding scraggily stuff.

Male Vermilions are staking out territory now and pairing up. I was able to witness and snap a couple blurry shots of this guy's distended belly territorial/impress-the-ladies display. It was pretty good.

After a couple hours' searching and listening, and even helping some campers find their lost kid, the birding gods still withheld the Gray Vireo photo op from me. As the sun rose higher in the sky while simultaneously chased by ever-encroaching clouds, I had the option of continuing the thus far fruitless pursuit or pushing out into other habitat that would hold new birds for the day but no GRVIs. 

The enchanting calls of Black-throated Sparrows and their face-melting handsomeness, as always, was far too much for me to resist. Have I gushed enough about how good-looking this bird is in recent weeks? It's the Derek Zoolander of Sparrows.
Old Legend has it that one of the Medici Popes commissioned Michelangelo to try and paint this bird and he refused, saying he could not complete the task satisfactorily and it would be sacrilege even to try (lucky we have cameras now and mustn't resort to impression).

I want to consume them...take their gorgeousness into me. Don't pretend like you other weirdos out there haven't thought this way too about handsome birds, people, etc...

You know that feeling you get about two and a half hours into a chase when your morale drops to thinking that your sighting just isn't gonna happen? We've all hit that nadir, when things start to get more quiet, when birds aren't calling much any more. 

It's that time when one has to bring in the contingency plan, which in this case was another little gray bird, one I'd seen only a few weeks before but also never photographed. 

Of course, I didn't see or hear any Juniper Titmice when patrolling the juniper bushes for Vireos and Solitaires. No no, I found the shy little bugger in an oak tree. See, Plain Titmouse, this is why people just don't know what to do with you! If you're named for a tree, you better stick to that tree, and not the one your otherwise identical cousin is named for!
Without knowledge of where this bird was seen, could it be anything other than Oak Titmouse? Life is confusing, and full of disappointment, and exaggeration, and lists, and run-on sentences.

The Titmouse was happily inhabiting the understory of the oak tree while other little gray birds chittered up top. Bushtits are another new species to grace the pages of Butler's Birds, a common enough sight and sound once you gain a couple thousands feet, but not so commonly photogenic. 

Oak Flats is popular not just for its oaks but for its flats, making it a great camping and go-karting spot. A bit further away from this heavily foot-printed site the landscape gets very bizarre and equally cool.  The heavily weathered rock piles look almost otherworldly, an aesthetic enhanced by the near-silence broken only by one's echoing footsteps. 

A bit southwest from the Oak Flats site is a little pond--I'll call it Magma Shaft Pond, after the nearby road. The water feature was itself unimpressive though a pleasant discovery, but it allowed me to add Redhead, Ring-necked Duck, American Coot, and Wilson's Snipe to my Pinal County list.

The Gray Vireo still needs crushing, but Oak Flats is a fabulous spot, one of my favorites within an hour or so of Phoenix, and it's definitely one I'd recommend to anyone in the area, especially if looking for scrub species. Combining a trip back here in a month for GRVIs and then spending time at the Boyce Thompson would be the way to go. Stay tuned!