Notes about your surroundings

Bird Count--The final tallies are in on the Sea & Sage Audubon Society’s Coastal Bird Count taken New Year’s Day. The count was part of a nationwide effort launched by the Audubon Society, which publishes a book with this data each year.

Sea & Sage Audubon’s birders took binoculars, bird books, pen and pad in hand and trekked through the northwestern part of the county to list species found in the region stretching from Corona del Mar to Bolsa Chica wetlands. The count also included inland park areas, such as Huntington Central Park and local golf courses.

Interested in spotting some hard-to-spot species? Go get your birding handbook. Here’s a sample of some of the most rare and most common birds counted.

Species with one sighting: sooty shearwater, American bittern, common merganser, merlin, peregrine falcon, Ross’ goose, brant, parasitic jaeger, glaucous-winged gull, rhinoceros auklet, burrowing owl, least flycatcher, gray flycatcher, dusky-capped flycatcher, golden-crowned kinglet, Nashville warbler, palm warbler, black-and-white warbler, American redstart, northern waterthrush, painted redstart, summer tanager, sharp-tailed sparrow, swamp sparrow, dark-eyed junco, great-tailed grackle, purple finch and Lawrence’s goldfinch.

Here’s a breakdown of the most frequently spotted species (number counted in parenthesis): northern pintail (2,638); ruddy duck (2,305); American coot (3,291); western sanderling (9,879); Bonaparte’s gull (2,085); ring-billed gull (2,278); California gull (3,173); European starling (2,167), and yellow-rumped warbler (2,602).