Winter Birding

Even when there are no new birds to be seen or locales to visit, birding can give me great satisfaction, as two days this weekend demonstrated. On Friday, December 29, the day before Santa Barbara’s annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC), I took the noon-to-two Snowy Plover docent shift at Coal Oil Point. The beach had been altered by the storm and high tide the day before. Whether that was the cause or not, there was a concentration of white shore- and seabirds at the slough edge. I rarely find a Bonaparte’s Gull on my shift; this day there was a flock of ten, bobbing lightly on the water, black dots on their cheeks. A half-dozen Royal Terns was not unexpected, but still a treat. More surprising was a lone Forster’s Tern–not a rarity but a bird I hadn’t seen sitting on my beach before. The usual Snowy Plovers, Sanderlings, Semipalmated Plovers and Black-bellied Plovers were there in the hundreds, too numerous to accurately count. A Western Grebe, normally on the ocean, was floating by itself in the slough, and an American Pipit, an occasional sighting, was hustling back and forth along the beach. I walked up the Pond Trail to pick up some land birds for my daily count. The Blue Gray Gnatcatcher was there, as it was the week before, and this time, instead of four Cassin’s Kingbirds in the dead tree above there were fully a dozen, taking turns making sorties out over the pond. The big surprise, though, was two birds that aren’t supposed to be here in winter: a male Red-winged Blackbird, with bright red epaulet, flew into the reeds along the pond edge, and a Barn Swallow came racing over the pond, heading toward the ocean. The latter proved a miss on the following day’s CBC, which is a pretty thorough canvass of the avian population.
The next day, Saturday December 30, I spent three hours at Westmont College, for the last ten years my “territory” for the Santa Barbara CBC. There are probably 25 species I regularly see, with up to another six that vary from year to year. This year was no exception, as I logged 27 birds from 7:30 to 9:30. For another hour I wandered back to my car through the main campus and was happy to belatedly pick up a Townsend’s Warbler, Bewick’s Wren and, near my parking lot, a White-breasted Nuthatch. Near the administration building I saw what looked like a common House Finch land 20 feet up in a leafless tree. On closer inspection I saw a strong line through its eye, which identified it as a female Purple Finch, a bird so far unreported on the count. A moment later a male Purple Finch, with a bright red crown and throat patch, took her place. 36 species on Friday, 31 on Saturday, but it was the individual surprises that made both days special.
January1,2024