I’m not doing so well with birds I actually look for. Yesterday I blew four hours on Willow Flycatcher and California Gnatcatcher at San Joaquin and the UCI Arboretum without conclusively spotting either. (I had a maybe on the Willow Flycatcher, but since it didn’t call I couldn’t be sure.) However the birds I don’t expect are making up for it.
Today I drove out to the Dorothy Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary to try for Costa’s Hummingbird, Black-chinned Hummingbird, and maybe even Calliope Hummingbird. The sanctuary is only 12 acres, but it’s up in the mountains and abuts a National Forest. Most importantly, it has lots and lots of bird feeders and benches to watch them. This qualifies it as a hot spot.
Well, it least it does on a good day. Today, though, I saw maybe two Anna’s Hummingbirds and a single Allen’s Hummingbird. However, while I was sitting on a bench watching the House Finches, Acorn Woodpeckers, and Scrubjays what should fly in front of me but a Towhee with a distinctly golden tail. Then, about a minute later, it flies back the other way giving good looks at its golden wings. If it were a different shaped bird, I’d think flicker, but this was obviously not a woodpecker.
I had to check my field guide to see what might have such bright golden undertail feathers out here, and I started in the sparrows because that was what it looked like. First pass through though, some pages stuck together and I missed it. But I thought there were shockingly few sparrows mentioned so I checked again and this time I found it, #434 Green-tailed Towhee. (The name’s a bit of a misnomer.).
I waited quite a while to see if it would reappear but although I saw plenty of Spotted Towhees and California Towhees and even a few Band-tailed Pigeons, it never did come back. Nonetheless, that was enough to tick it off. Hopefully I’ll find some more, and maybe even get a photo the next time I’m up in the mountains.
I hoped to wander a little further, but the adjacent Forest Service lands had been closed off since February due to a fire. Total species count was only 16 but this included quite a few birds we don’t see down here in the plains:
California Quail
Band-tailed Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Anna’s Hummingbird
Allen’s Hummingbird
Acorn Woodpecker
Black Phoebe
Ash-throated Flycatcher
Western Scrub-Jay
American Crow
Green-tailed Towhee
Spotted Towhee
California Towhee
Black-headed Grosbeak
House Finch
Lesser Goldfinch
Besides Green-tailed Towhee, Band-tailed Pigeon was also an Orange County bird for me. At 176 species, Orange County has now passed Queens to be my #2 county and is closing fast on Kings (Brooklyn).
I’ll also note that I’m now caught up with all my scheduled writing. The life birds were coming too fast for me to finish blogging about them, much less other random but interesting trips that didn’t produce new species. Some changes I’ve made to my home office have helped noticeably. Perhaps I can now pick up speed a little in the future.
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