Despite Weather, This Day Was for the Birds

Trying hard to ignore the cold, wind-driven rain soaking their clothing and fogging their binoculars, 75 National Audubon Society members concluded an 18-day nationwide annual bird count Sunday along a stretch of Orange County coastline.

“It’s a great day for ducks,” quipped Loren Hays, 38, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist leading one of 15 teams counting coastal area birds in a 15-mile radius including state wildlife reserves at Bolsa Chica near Huntington Beach and Upper Newport Bay, as well as extending out to sea.

“You have to be crazy to do this,” said Robert Fraley, 44, an oil company technician from Santa Fe Springs, as he dried the lenses of his eyeglasses on his shirt tail. “You also have to love birds.”

“Lovely, lovely,” added Phil Smith, 47, of Huntington Beach, as torrents of rain gushed forth in horizontal sheets. “I’m what you call an optimistic bird watcher,”

he said.

If Sunday’s inclement weather was a disappointment to their human observers, many birds in the area did not seem to mind.

Overhead, an immature Caspian tern wheeled in the air above a shallow tidal lake in search of fish. On the ground, a flock of long-billed dowitchers probed the mud with their long, thin beaks for food. Nearby, a rarely seen light-footed clapper rail made a brief but welcomed appearance at the edge of a stand of cord grass.

Count Conducted Annually

“You hardly ever see the clapper rail here,” said Hays, adding, “It’s an endangered species on both state and federal lists.”

The bird count, which began Dec. 18 in selected areas across the nation, is conducted annually under the auspices of the National Audubon Society as a means of tabulating trends in bird populations.

Results of the marathon event are compiled and published in an issue of American Birds, a journal published four times a year by the society, said Gerald Tolman, a 49-year-old Garden Grove resident who coordinated the Orange County portion of the national count.

Tolman said the final tally of Orange County’s portion of the national bird count should be available next week through local Audubon Society chapters.

Even though Sunday’s onslaught of wet and winds boded ill for good birding, the last day of the count could not be postponed, said Tolman, a mathematics teacher at Fountain Valley High School.

“The bird count goes on rain or shine,” he said, adding that he expected the final tally to be somewhat lower than previous years because of the bad weather. “If we count 180 species, I’ll be happy.”

90 Species by 1 p.m.

Traditionally, Orange County produces a bird count that ranks among the 20 highest along the nation’s coasts, said Lee Jones, 44, a Costa Mesa environmental consultant who led a team of observers at Upper Newport Bay.

Between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. Sunday, Jones said, his group had sighted 90 species of birds in and around the upper bay reserve, one of the last remaining coastal estuaries in California. That figure “included everything we hoped to see, and then some,” he said.

In a pine tree near Corona del Mar High School, for example, Jones said he observed a flock of golden-crowned kinglets. The tiny bird with bright white and yellow stripes across its head is normally found in mountain forests and may have strayed there to seek temporary refuge in the storm.

Barbara Berton, 64, a Santa Ana resident and kindergarten teacher in Fountain Valley, was rewarded for carrying a telescope and tripod over her shoulder all day when she spotted what she believed was a rarely sighted lesser golden-plover standing alone near the shore at Newport Dunes. “That could be the bird of the day,” said an excited Berton, whose hair was mussed and damp despite her efforts to stay sheltered from the storm.

But there also were disappointments.

‘A Little Wet and Windy’

A team in a boat off Newport Beach was forced to turn back hours earlier than expected. “It was a little wet and windy out there,” explained Tolman, who led the team on a five-hour journey over stomach-churning waves. “We counted about 1,500 birds,” he said, including black-vented shearwaters and rhinoceros auklets, which rarely set foot on land except to breed.

At Huntington Beach’s Central Park, another team discovered that thick stands of willow trees encircling the park’s many ponds had been bulldozed, eliminating a favorite resting area for migrating birds.

A city park ranger explained that the bulldozing was the result of a joint decision between Orange County Vector Control District and the City of Huntington Beach to eradicate mosquitoes.

“It’s disgusting,” Tolman said. “It is supposed to be a wildlife preserve. Personally, I find more mosquitoes around my house in Garden Grove than I do at the park.”

As for the effects of rain on the human observers Sunday, Tolman said, “It separated the hardy from the less hardy.”