To San Diego in Pursuit of More Birds

After four nights in Mexico it was time to head back to the US, and we decided to make a day of driving out of it and head east to San Diego. Even on our "travel" days, however, we always looked out for a stop or two to break up the day and hopefully provide some new birds. Jason did some research and found a gem in Yuma West Wetlands, a park right on the California-Arizona border. While we didn't see any burrowing owls in their designated habitat similar to the one we saw at Zanjero Park in Gilbert, AZ, we did see more than 20 species including several we hadn't see anywhere else.

The small common ground-dove, a species I had only ever seen once before on a different trip to Mexico

Our first confirmed Costa's hummingbird - we had likely seen some before but had had trouble confirming due to difficult lighting. I love how they can look so cute and so angry at the same time!

It's so much fun visiting these local parks that are oases for both people and birds alike. Many of the species there are probably very common to local birders, but so exciting for us out-of-towners to see. 

Northern mockingbirds are as common as robins in much of the southern US, but they're a rare treat for us to see from the Pacific Northwest

This park featured a fishing hole for both its human and avian visitors. This great egret was hoping for an easy bite, but after the fisherman wasn't getting any bites the egret moved along and had better success on his own.

When we got to San Diego that evening, Jason returned to eBird to research what we might have a chance of seeing the next day. Two of our most hoped-for species on the trip to Mexico had been the blue-footed and brown boobies that are regularly seen there. We searched hard for them, but didn't have any luck. With the relatively low numbers of terns and pelicans also around, my guess is there wasn't enough fish for them in the northern most reaches of the Sea of Cortez. (I remember seeing similar things in San Ignacio Lagoon - some years the fish-eating birds were abundant, and others scarce, depending on the fish.) That's the way it is with wildlife of course; there are never any guarantees. But when Jason found the rare bird alert for the pair of Nazca boobies that have been in San Diego Bay since mid-December, well, we simply had to give it a shot!

I had never heard of a Nazca booby before, and that's because they are a recent split from the masked booby. Their primary breeding colonies are in the Galapagos Islands but they are also seen in other parts of the eastern tropical Pacific in southern Mexico and northern South America. They are considered a "mega-rarity" to the United States.

From reports from other birders, we knew the views from land were usually distant. The boobies tend to sit on the Number 34 buoy in the bay, near a Naval base, where the only viewing is from the far side of the bay. When they're flying around foraging, some have been lucky enough to get closer looks from land, but these sounded rare. The best views and photos were coming from those who got on a boat to go see them closer. We decided to start on land and make sure the birds were even present before deciding what to do next. From the shore-based lookout, we could barely make out a white speck on the buoy across the water - if it hadn't been for so many reports from others, I wouldn't have even been confident there was a bird on the buoy, let alone that it was a booby.

Do you see the Nazca booby? Do you even see the buoy it's on?

We did, however, see the white speck, and another birder with a scope said it was the booby. With having missed the boobies in Mexico, having this one so close, and being on vacation, we decided, "What the heck. Let's splurge and rent a boat and go see it." So we did just that! Loew's Action Sport Rentals was just down the road (and the booby has apparently been good for business!)

If the booby won't come to us, let's go to the booby!

We headed out for the Number 34 buoy and found....nothing.

Just our luck! The bird that had been sitting there had apparently taken off to forage, meaning it could be anywhere in the bay. We had less than an hour and counting to try and find it.

Finding a booby in a bay aka finding a needle in a haystack

We started cruising around at higher speed, stopping for any black and white bird soaring around.

Nope, not a Nazca booby - but a royal tern, that's cool too!

Then something caught my eye that was most definitely a different shape. We found one!!!

Plunge-diving Nazca booby

At first it was flying around at high speed and we only got distant looks. It would dive, and briefly sit on the water, but every time we got closer it would take off and resume foraging. 

But then it turned and flew right over us!

Wow! Success!

On our way back to the harbor we swung by the Number 34 buoy again, and this time we got lucky - the second bird had returned and let us get a great look.

We had definitely been concerned we were going to be skunked once we got out there, but it turned out to be well worth it! As we slowly motored back to port, I felt like we were being watched - and it turns out that we were, by this osprey:

On a roll, we decided to check out  the near by San Diego River estuary for some other great bird sightings that had been reported there in recent days. We found one of them - a little blue heron, a bird far more likely to be seen in the southeastern US than in the southwest.

Little blue heron - another great find!

By this point, however, us island dwellers had had enough of downtown, so we headed north out of the city and made a stop at one of my all-time favorite birding spots: Batiquitos Lagoon. I used to go here regularly when my grandpa lived in Oceanside and is one of the places that gets credit for getting young me excited about birding. I can't go through the San Diego area without making at least one short stop here. It's still basically in the city but regardless of time of year is home to an astounding amount of bird life.

Yay! Batiquitos Lagoon!

It didn't take long to start adding more year birds.

California towhee

While looking up for a possible great horned owl near a nest in the middle of the park, I spotted a merlin feeding on a vole or other small rodent. Their color is so much lighter here than the darker morphs back home that it took me a moment to recognize what it was!

I stopped at a pipe outlet where the water creates a dark puddle in the bushes. On a visit here with my dad probably about 20 years ago we had stopped here and seen a sora emerge from the reeds, still the only time I have ever seen that species. As I was telling Jason this story I couldn't believe my eyes when another elusive bird emerged from the grasses: a Virginia rail! I was trying so hard all of last year to get a chance to photograph this species and now I got a golden opportunity, right where I had seen a sora. Birding is so fascinating this way - how often you can go to the same little place and see the same type of thing even decades apart.

My first time photographing a Virginia rail!

Our trip was already winding down, but we still had a couple days in California, and we had plans to both soak up as much sunshine as possible and see as many birds as we could before heading back north! I'll wrap up our road trip story in the next blog post.

Day 1 in Baja

After a windy first night in Punta Piedra we woke up ready to get out on the water and experience our first whale-watch of the trip. During our three full days at San Ignacio, we got to go whale-watching twice a day in 22-foot pangas. Depending on the tides, sometimes you had to wade a little bit to get into the boats. Our group of just over 20 was divided into three boats each time, with a boat driver and naturalist with each group.

The first marine mammal we got a good look at was actually a bottlenose dolphin rather than a gray whale - they're the only other cetacean species that frequents the lagoon. No one knows much about this group of dolphins, and this one just cruised right by us and on his way.

Most of the whale watch is spent slowly cruising around the lagoon viewing different gray whales. There's a lot going on, with different whales engaged in different behaviors all over the play. This time of year, early in the season (we were actually the first trip of the year for Baja Discovery), the calves are still pretty young. They're pretty much always right by mama, and tend to stay deeper in the lagoon unless the currents aren't too strong. There's also a lot of mating behavior going on, with groups of males pursuing females who are ready to breed. Females will have a calf every 2-3 years, so those that weaned a calf last year might be ready to mate again, while those who just gave birth steer well clear of the rowdy male groups.

A typical view of a gray whale surfacing

When seeing gray whales along their migration route from Alaska to Baja, you tend to just see surfacings followed by long dives. Here, you see all the other typical whale behaviors much more frequently, like spyhops, breaches, and tail waves.

Eastern Pacific gray whales were nearly hunted to extinction not once but twice - their counterparts in the Atlantic were completely wiped out by the 1700s. The notorious whaler Scammon hunted gray whales in these very lagoons, which makes it all the more amazing that they are now so tolerant of us in their presence during in this place that is very important to their survival.

Even if they're not interested in interacting with us, they don't seem to mind us being around at all, swimming in and among the pangas going about their business. They're also impressively aware of their surroundings and their own strength, maneuvering around the boats with care. Their huge tails are incredibly powerful; they could flip one of our boats over if they wanted to, but they don't. Once or twice they did splash us on the boat with their tails however, and I have a feeling it was on purpose!

On our first whale watch we didn't travel too far from camp - in fact, you can see our camp in the background of these next two shots:

Our closest encounter of the morning came when two adults swam between a couple of our boats. That's another one of our camp's pangas partially concealed behind the spray of this whale:

Gray whales, unlike most whales, don't actually have a dorsal fin. Instead, they have dorsal ridges with somewhere between 6 and 12 "knuckles" along their back:

They can be individually identified by a combination of unique markings, including these dorsal ridges, white barnacle scars, and rake marks and other injuries on their tails. Some of the locals recognize specific whales that they've been seeing in the lagoon every year for the last 10-15 years or more. Gray whales can live to be up to about 70 years old, at least.

If you can tear your eyes away from the whales, there's good birds to see out on the water, too. In fact, while waiting to board our first whale watch, I saw a pair of American oystercatchers (115), also my first life bird of the trip! Here are a few of the birds from my first whale watch:

A royal tern (year bird #116)

Brown pelican

A couple more whale shots from the morning:

Back at camp, we had a bit of time before lunch, so I went for a walk down the beach toward the mangroves. The first bird I saw took me a bit of time to identify - it was a merlin (117), but a prairie morph, much lighter than the ones I'm used to seeing in the Pacific Northwest!

The beach and much of the desert is covered in shells, as this area is an ancient seafloor bed. There's not much walking in bare feet in the sand on these beaches - too many ways to cut up your feet!

I was also reminded that where there is life (in the newborn gray whale calves in particular), so there is death. There were two gray whale calf carcasses along the beach. The second one was being visited by some turkey vultures and coyotes:

Turkey vulture (left) and coyote (right) with a gray whale carcass on the beach in between them

There were a few more coyotes along the beach, and a little bit later after they disappeared over a sand dune they could be heard yipping and howling with many others spread out across the desert.

It was here I got my second life bird of the day - a reddish egret (118)! It's amazing to me that lots of bird species - herons in particular - that are typically found in the southeast US are also found here on the west coast of Mexico, the only place on the west coast they can be seen.

I reached the edge of the mangroves, where the change of terrain is a shock after walking along the edge of the desert. There was some more shorebird activity here, including western sandpipers (119), semipalmated plovers (120), marbled godwits, willets, and greater yellowlegs.

The pace of things at camp was perfect - whale watches and other nature experiences interspersed with meals and a bit of down time. There was definitely never a dull moment. After I got back to camp, there was just enough time for a short siesta before lunch in our main tent. All the power, by the way, is solar:

After lunch, the tides were right to go for a tidal walk along the mudflats on the far side of our little island. We had to do the "stingray shuffle" as we crossed a channel to get out on the tidal flats. If you shuffle your feet they'll scram out of your way, but if you step down on top of one, you'll probably get stung. I was probably one of the only people to be disappointed not to see a stingray. 

We saw a couple pretty spectacular tidepool creatures, like this two-spot octopus that lives in abandoned shells of giant scallops:

We also found a few jawfish holes. This species of fish lives down in a burrow it builds and lines with shells. A few very patient observers held very still and got a glimpse of its giant head as it peeked out. I only looked at the burrow before heading on to see other things:

Jawfish hole - the large shell on the right was covering the hole, making it look just like a pile of shells. After watching for the jawfish, the shell lid was carefully replaced.

One of the other critters I saw was a small and very fast moving brittle star (with a star shape at its center, too):

There were lots of snails, crabs, and other tiny creatures inside or under every large shell:

All over moon snail egg cases could also be seen, basically coils of sand held together by snail goo which they attach their eggs to:

Moon snail egg case

In addition to the intertidal creatures, there were more coyotes out on the flats eating crabs. Whales and dolphins could be seen in the distance, and of course there were tons of birds. My highlight was a white ibis (121, and my third life bird of the day), but there were also great and snowy egrets, long-billed curlews (122), all the sandpiper species I had seen before, and a couple of black-bellied plovers.

White ibis on the tide flats

We got back to camp just in time to change into our water clothes and head out on another whale watch! This time, during a slacker tide, there were more moms and calves out in the lagoon. We got a great look at a curious baby that lifted its head up onto its mom's back to get a look at us, giving me the chance to snap one of my favorite photos of the whole trip:

We had some more great close whale encounters, and of course I had the camera in hand the whole time:

One person commented that they can see where ancient mariners came up with drawings of mystical sea monsters in days past - they could have drawn their inspiration from the almost reptilian look of the back of a gray whale:

We had one whale actually surface backwards: we saw its tail end first, and then it raised its head high out of the water to look at us before submerging again:

I like this shot because it shows you just how close the whales would come to us, even when not interacting:

A couple other shots from the afternoon trip on the first day:

Back at camp, in the heat of the afternoon, we again congregated on the point where we could watch whales from shore. We were very fortunate to have one of the tents closest to the point, the one in this picture, nicknamed "Garropa" or "grouper" (all the tents were named after local animals).

We took in another beautiful sunset before dinner:

The timing was again perfect as the dinner bell usually rung right after the colors of the sunset were fading. The food, by the way, was phenomenal. It's amazing what our two kitchen goddesses could whip up in their camp kitchen, fueled off propane and and solar power. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, local seafood, and traditional Mexican fare made up most of our meals. I tend to be a picky eater, but I ate every bite at every meal. They even baked flan and pineapple upside down cake and other desserts! After dinner we got treated to evening presentations, our first one being about the life history of the gray whale.

Our second night was again a windy one, but much warmer than the first. We had been warned to bring lots of layers. The T-shirts and shorts definitely came in handy during the hot afternoons, but we were lucky not to need the long johns, hats, and gloves, we had been told we might need to keep warm enough for sleeping. It was so nice out I stayed outside for a bit before bed and played around with some nighttime photography. I imagine the stars would be super impressive from Punta Piedra, but we were there around the full moon, which had the benefit of lighting everything up so well you didn't need a flashlight to navigate at night. I used a solar powered flashlight to light up our tent in this long-exposure shot showing some of the stars we could see:

I also stood in front of the camera and used the flashlight to "write" in the air, and came up with some cool results!

My attempt at drawing a whale tail with the flashlight

Then, it was time for a better night's sleep. I didn't know it at the time, but the following morning I would get to experience what we all hoped to while in San Ignacio - the ballenas amistosos (friendly whales)!