Where to Look for Birds Around the Southland

If you feel like going birding, call the Los Angeles Audubon Society at (213) 874-1318. A taped message will tell you where the rare and special birds have been spotted each week. But whether you decide to drive a distance or stay home, there are birds to be found throughout Southern California.

Here are some of the places to begin your search for birds:

The City: Look in your backyard, or in the trees and shrubs around your apartment building. At any season, you may see nesting hummingbirds, mockingbirds or house finches. Look overhead; that big bird soaring in tight circles is a red-tailed hawk. Those dark birds flapping more and flying straight are crows or ravens. Parrots chatter as they fly with short, fast wing beats. When you go Downtown, watch for peregrine falcons chasing pigeons between the high-rises.

In winter, any sizable parking lot will have California gulls scavenging tidbits during the day. When you’re out at night, listen for soft hoots from the tops of big trees or street lamps. Look up and you might see a great horned owl, our largest and most ferocious avian predator. It’s fairly common, more abundant even than the decoy owls people put on their roofs to scare pigeons. It’s fond of rats, but will go after anything it can carry. So if you hear one, keep your kitten inside at night.

Urban Oases: Big parks and recreation areas concentrate wild birds in heavily urbanized areas. Griffith Park, mountainous and brushy, has most of the usual chaparral. Poor-wills hibernate in winter in cliffs near the Hollywood sign, and migrants are easy to find in the Ferndell area of the park during the spring.

The Whittier Narrows Nature Center, on Durfee Avenue in El Monte, has ponds, marshes and riparian woodlands that host ducks, herons and egrets year-round, plus many land birds, including the only breeding population of bright-red northern cardinals in our area. These birds were transplanted from the East, but are still worth seeing, especially for homesick Easterners.

Other good freshwater wetland oases include Madrona Marsh in Torrance, Harbor Lake in Wilmington and the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach.

All arboretums and botanical gardens are good, especially for wintering rarities. Perhaps the best park for all-around good birding is Huntington Beach Central Park in Orange County. With just a small patch of wet woods and pond and plenty of shrubbery, it attracts an incredible variety of rare strays and local birds, even when crowded on weekends. Brazilian cardinals can sometimes be found here, too.

Along the Coast: The Malibu Coast, where the Santa Monica Mountains come down to the sea, offers good coastal and land birding in the same general area. Malibu Lagoon, with its newly restored marsh, has a good assortment of gulls, terns, shore birds, a few ducks, and migrant land birds.

A short drive up Malibu Canyon is Tapia Park, with oak and riparian woodland birds like acorn woodpeckers, red-shouldered hawks and black-chinned hummingbirds. Next door, in Malibu Creek State Park, a few pairs of golden eagles nest in the highest crags and occasionally come down and roost in oak trees near the parking lot.

Farther up the coast are two good lookouts for whales and ocean birds: Point Dume and Point Mugu. Big Sycamore and La Jolla canyons, just east of the Point Mugu lookout, are good for migrants, strays and chaparral birds in the wild, undeveloped hills of Point Mugu State Park.

Another state park up the road is McGrath, just south of the Ventura Marina. The large estuary here is like Malibu, but on a much grander scale. It’s the best shore-bird spot on the coast; Eurasian rarities show up nearly every season, and there are always hundreds of gulls, terns, cormorants, pelicans and other water birds. It’s one of the last and best nesting sites for the endangered snowy plover.

The best coastal marshes in our area are in Orange County. Bolsa Chica, near Huntington Beach, has the usual herons, terns, plovers and rails, with ducks in the fall and winter. But its specialty is black skimmers, which have established a permanent breeding colony here. These bizarrely beautiful birds have expanded their range from the Sea of Cortez in recent years.

Behind Newport Beach is Upper Newport Bay, long and narrow, and bordered with a paved road, which makes it much more accessible than any other salt marsh in the Southland, and the best place to see rails. Virginias, soras and even the rare clapper rail can be spotted from a car. At the highest tide, even black rails emerge from hiding just to keep from being swamped; this is perhaps the shyest bird in North America, and the fact that it can be seen at all here makes Newport Bay a mecca for birders from all over the country.

The Mountains: The California condor, North America’s largest land bird, no longer flies over Mt. Pinos. But it’s still possible to see calliope hummingbirds, the smallest birds, feeding from the flowers in Iris Meadows, next to the parking lot on the summit.

A few miles west on Mil Potrero Road is Happy Gulch, a Kern County campground at the intersection of the road up Mt. Abel. A leaky water faucet in the campground attracts mountain birds from miles around, especially in the summer.

Shy birds that are hard to see, like mountain quails, line up in family groups with mountain bluebirds, green-tailed towhees, Brewer’s sparrows, purple finches, Steller’s jays and other mountain dwellers, and they can be viewed from 50 feet away.

Closer to Los Angeles, the Angeles Crest Highway has a string of campgrounds and picnic areas that are also prime birding spots: Switzer’s Camp, Charlton Flats, Chilao, Buckhorn and Table Mountain, where whippoorwills can sometimes be heard on summer nights.

The San Bernardinos are the highest mountains in Southern California, and are also the most heavily developed. Nonetheless, there are plenty of good birding spots reachable by car: Mill Creek Canyon for black swifts, dippers and an occasional painted redstart; Baldwin Lake, east of Big Bear, for pinon jays, mountain bluebirds, vesper sparrows and, in the woods to the east, gray vireos; Green Valley for Lincoln’s sparrows and hermits and McGrillavy’s warblers.

But to be sure of seeing really high mountain specialties like Clark’s nutcrackers, Williamson’s sapsuckers, and Cassin’s finch, you usually have to go off-road and up, into areas like the San Gorgonio wilderness or the north-facing slopes south of Big Bear. Bluff Lake, just southeast of Big Bear, is a good place to camp out and bird. It also boasts the world’s tallest Lodgepole Pine.

The Desert: The area around Little Rock Dam, just southeast of Palmdale off the Pearblossom Highway, offers the desert birding closest to Los Angeles. An hour’s drive can bring you to Scott’s orioles, road runners, cactus wrens and Costa’s hummingbirds in the Joshua trees and sagebrush along the road leading to the dam.

It’s worth driving another hour to reach Morongo Valley Preserve, a wooded canyon oasis in the mountains north of Palm Springs. Aside from the usual California desert species, Morongo is the westernmost breeding spot for such Arizona species as Lucy’s warbler, brown-crested flycatcher, and the dazzlingly black-and-scarlet vermilion flycatcher. Colorful eastern birds like summer tanagers and yellow-breasted chats also breed here, and Cooper’s hawk and long-eared owls can be seen roosting on their nests. In May the cottonwoods and willows swarm with migrant birds, many of them lost Eastern warblers. Fuzzy young great horned owls stare down from their tree stump home at the excited birders scurrying below. For many birders, Morongo Valley is the favorite birding site in Southern California.

Other good desert oases include Butterbredt Springs and California City, both off U.S. 395 north of Mojave, and the mesquite thickets at the north end of the Salton Sea, where Abert’s towhees and Crissal’s thrashers can be found, along with many rare water birds on the sea and in the marshes. The East Mojave National Scenic Area, a candidate for national park status, has the best all-around desert birding and can be explored and enjoyed for days. The best season for birds and flowers is late May and early June.

The Ocean: Most people in California never get to see one of the state’s most abundant birds, because it almost never comes within sight of land. From April to September the sooty shearwaters swarm up and down our coast in the millions before returning to their nesting islands around Cape Horn.

During the summer, it’s almost impossible to cruise beyond the Channel Islands without running across an unbroken stream of small dark birds flying close to the water, their pointed wings beating rapidly and flashing silver underneath. These are birds of the open sea, true long-range maritime travelers. They are frequently joined by their larger cousin, the black-footed albatross, and by less common shearwaters like the pink-footed.

Closer to shore, the smaller and more vividly marked black-vented shearwater can gather in flocks running into the thousands, but it is more often found alone or in small groups. Several kinds of storm-petrels, small dark swallow-like birds, dart between the ocean swells anywhere beyond the two-mile limit. Chunky penguin-like birds with names like murre, murrelet, and auklet bob about in the waves, and buzz off like bumblebees when a boat approaches.

To see all of these, birders have to take pelagic trips on boats usually chartered by local Audubon Society chapters. The prime seasons are late summer and early fall, but something good may be found at any season.

If luck is running high, a horned puffin from Alaska may appear. Or a South Polar skua from Antarctica. Or a magnificent frigate bird or red-billed tropic bird from--where else?--the tropics. And there are always whales--blue and fins in the summer, grays in the winter--and dolphins, seals, sea lions, even blue sharks and giant ocean sunfish cruising on the surface. Birding boats usually go out much farther than whale-watching boats, so a greater variety of marine life can be seen.