Ciblek Mania

On the pelagic trip I joined out of San Diego, California, in early March, I got a chance to take a few images of what just might be North America's most beautiful gull. Note that I said "gull" not "girl." And I suppose this is where, by law, I am required to insert the joke "I wish they all could be California gulls."

We did see Cali gulls on the trip, as well as western, ring-billed, Bonaparte's, and glaucous-winged. But the most beautiful, in my Humboldt (Current) opinion is the Heermann's gull. Breeding adults are sooty-gray above, white below, with a white head and bright red bill. They just appear elegant mixed in with the other, often larger, gulls.Like most pelagic trips, our was a chum fest. Bag after bag of bright orange popcorn kept the gulls glued to our stern. They were mostly westerns, but the Heermann's were the next most populous. Above you can see San Diego in the background as we leave the harbor.

Hard as it was to get a decent shot of a flying bird while standing on a rolling boat deck, I managed one or two keepers.


I'll post more about this trip in the near future. After all, I've just gotta share the experience of getting a handful of lifers.

I believe I have discovered the secret of how the light-footed clapper rail keeps its feet so clean. After all, if you made your living striding around in the marsh mud, do you think you could live up to the name "light-footed?"

This sub-species of the clapper rail is found along the Pacific Coast of southern California, south of Los Angeles. It is critically endangered due to a number of factors: habitat loss, increased predation, rising ocean levels, and the effects of pesticides. Efforts to help the species to recover have been fairly successful where there is enough appropriate habitat.

Our "Birds Along the Border" field trip at the San Diego Bird Festival encountered this bird in the salt marshes in a park along San Diego Bay. A handful of us lingered to watch this bird after the rest of the group headed back to the bus and we were rewarded with a nice long view of the rail taking a bath.

I've gotta give another BOTB shout-out to the most amazing bird I've seen in the United States thus far this year: the black-throated magpie jay. There's a small number of this species that lives along the San Diego/Tijuana, Mexico border. They are probably there as a result of some bird smuggling gone awry or as escaped cage birds. They are native to west-central Mexico, but have begun breeding in southern California. They are not countable now for North American bird lists, but methinks it only a matter of time....

Countable or not, this bird can make even the most jaded birder go "Wow!"

While visiting a park (ahown above) along the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California, I happened to look down and there, in the concrete right next to where I had parked, was this inscription carved 30+ years ago.
Now 1978 is the year my family started Bird Watcher's Digest in our living room, and we had a surprising amount of support from the birding community right from the start, but I'm not sure we were impressive enough to inspire someone to carve our initials in the wet cement of a California coastal town (which by the way, is pronounced La Hoy-ya—not La Jah-la—I discovered).

Pretty funny what you end up seeing when you take the time to look around.

Digiscoped images from my Friday all-day birding field trip along the US/Mexican border. We saw some great birds, including—but not limited to—these.



A peregrine falcon has been roosting on the lights at the ball fields. I wondered if he'd was watching the hepatic tanager, just 50 yards away.

Along the Pacific coast, near San Diego, my birding group ran across this flock of sleeping shorebirds. The flock was mostly marbled godwits with a few dowitchers and a willet thrown in.

Our group tallied 100 species in our Birds Along the Border field trip. If you've never attended the San Diego Bird Festival, take it from me, it's a good one! It's amazing how many birds you can find when you've got ocean, freshwater sloughs, mountains, desert, and lush spring vegetation all in abundance.