Birders in Paradise

Have you ever glanced out your window and excitedly called to a loved one: “Come quick, I see a red-breasted sapsucker out here”?

Not likely. Until recently, most Angelenos paid little attention to sapsuckers, bushtits, towhees, grosbeaks and other birds that grace the Los Angeles landscape. In fact, Los Angeles County hosts more bird species than can be found anywhere else in North America, except San Diego County. Of the approximately 750 species found on our continent, about 450 of them make appearances here. Our air space is a veritable avian LAX--a milling terminal used by thousands of birds flying north or south--or just flying.

Some are common to our area, others stop on their way to somewhere else. Still others wing into our paradise by accident (they’re known as vagrants) and are so enticed by our ecological charms that they decide to stay a bit. That’s when the swelling numbers of bird watchers around town (known as “birders”) call dozens of telephone hotlines and Web sites to report rare sightings and locations so that other birders can race to see the newcomers, too. The hotlines, and the people who use them, are increasing daily, bird experts say.

That’s because birding is becoming big sport in America, and especially in California. A spokesman for the American Birding Assn., for example, says it has twice as many members in this state than in any other.

“It’s the fastest-growing form of outdoor recreation in our country, with 60 million people now participating,” says John Fitzpatrick, director of Cornell University’s ornithology laboratory, the country’s biggest center for the study, appreciation and conservation of birds.

Third Annual Birdcount Event

The lab, in conjunction with the National Audubon Society, will conduct its third annual Great Backyard Birdcount this Friday through Monday.Fitzpatrick expects thousands of Angelenos--people who used to consider birding a pastime just for elderly eccentrics in bush hats and clumsy shoes--to participate via a Web site that accepts information on what birds they’ve seen while hanging out in local parks or their own backyards for as briefly as 15 minutes. To take part in the tally, designed for novices, log on to https://birdsource.org/gbbc or https://www.birdsource.org.

Local bird enthusiasts are exultant. Now that our populace has become aware of healing-the-bay and saving-the-whales efforts, we are beginning to comprehend the necessity for bird appreciation too, says the new breed of birders, who aggressively search for species, driving from spot to spot, reporting what they see.

Gail Portman, a 40-year-old mother of three from Woodland Hills, is too new to know the lingo. She saw a birding walk listed in the paper, persuaded her husband to go along and imagined they would both be “bored out of our skulls.” Then they saw something “fantastic--a bird standing in the tide pool with a long, thin, arced beak and a body shaped like a pear. It’s hard to explain. It was distinctive and beautiful, so very exciting to see.”

She’s still not sure what kind of bird it was. Like most Angelenos, she has never thought much about birds, except when hosing their droppings off her patio or accepting a dead feathered gift from the family cat. But among those who know (or are learning) about Los Angeles bird life, the city’s everyday landscape can be exciting. Like one of those “Where’s Waldo?” picture puzzles, every trip outdoors becomes a contest, scanning trees, scrub or shore to distinguish and identify different species.

Whereas many city dwellers can expect to see mostly pigeons on their daily rounds, and must travel distances to find more colorful species, Angelenos can go birding in their parks and gardens or take birding breaks within blocks of where they work. The city’s appealing location, climate and topography explain the great diversity of birds here, much as it explains the diversity of human residents.

Geologically isolated for millions of years by deserts and mountains, coastal California has developed a unique array of plant and animal life found nowhere else on Earth, ornithologists say. That and our moderate climate create a natural lure for a large variety of bird species, both common and rare. Of course, humans were attracted to the same area for the same reasons--and we created our urban jungle in the midst of the birds’ paradise.

Luckily for them, there still exist acres of chaparral, waterways, woodlands, wetlands and open grassy spaces amid the areas of dense development. On the upside, this allows Angelenos to spot beautiful birds almost anywhere we look--beaches, parks, golf courses, city streets, gardens. On the downside, man’s increasing development of hill and vale is threatening many species of birds whose natural habitat is disappearing.

This has led to two meanings of the word “rare,” as used by birders. Some birds are rare because they are not usually seen here. These vagrants may have accidentally flown off course during migration and decided to stay while they get their bearings. This causes much excitement among hotshot birders, who fan out around Southern California every autumn during vagrant season. Many of the strays are spotted in Glendale and Burbank, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, near the Los Angeles River, and in parks and creeks around town. Basically, places with groves of trees and water.

More Species at Risk

The other meaning of “rare,” says Dan Cooper, ornithologist for the National Audubon Society, refers to birds that used to thrive in this area but are being “bulldozed to extinction by humans who’ve appropriated all their habitats.” As people continue to build up into the hillsides and down through the coastal scrub, Cooper says, more and more species are at risk. Among those, he lists the high-profile California gnatcatcher, the least Bell’s vireo, the cactus wren, grasshopper sparrows and the burrowing owl.

Cooper, 26, works just a block from bustling Figueroa Street in Highland Park and goes birding every day in parks just a minute or two from his office. Armed with binoculars, he scouts the lush foliage for sounds or sightings of different species, which change depending on the season. These days, he’s finding spotted towhees, wrentits, oak titmice, bewick’s wrens and Hutton’s vireos, he says.

To indoctrinate a new birder who went along on a recent jaunt, Cooper set binoculars on a tripod and scanned the trees. He listened attentively to distant songs and tried to spot the singers. He talked in detail about their diets, habits, their often quite-touching lifestyles.

Some birds pick a mate and remain monogamous for life. Some weave intricately beautiful baskets in which to cradle their young. Some could be called country birds, others seem to thrive in the city, he said. And some former country birds are “adapting to city life in ways we never thought they could.” He cites the Cooper’s hawk (no, they’re not related), for example, which “almost became locally extinct in the 1970s. It staged a comeback in the ‘80s. Now it nests fairly commonly in urbanized habitats such as golf courses, residential areas with tall trees, cemeteries and office parks.”

Longtime birder Charles Bragg’s favorite bird of the moment is the cedar waxwing.

“They’re gorgeous, with bright yellow feathers at their wingtips, that look as if they’ve been dipped in wax,” he says. “They have a very soft, mournful song . . . and they come down to your garden bushes and eat your pyracantha berries.”

Bragg is membership chairman of the Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society and a believer that “birds have been taken for granted for too long.” Birds are predictive, he says. “If they get in trouble, they’re saying it won’t be long before we humans are in trouble too.” He cites the bald eagle and peregrine falcon, two species threatened with extinction by the deadly pesticide DDT. Humans could have been next, he says.

‘Closest Tie’ With Nature

Cornell University’s Fitzpatrick, perhaps the country’s most respected ornithologist, spouts both poetic and scientific reasons for California to keep its finger on the pulse of what’s happening to our birds. They represent “man’s closest tie with nature. Once you know just a teensy bit about them, they grab you, begin to draw you in. They teach us about relationships in nature and the degree of interdependence among all things.”

In Southern California, he says, they show us just how variable nature is.

“You can walk along a marsh and on one side you see beautiful big shore birds with long curved beaks probing the mud flats,” he says. “On the other side, up in the trees, you can see little songbirds found only along the West Coast of California . . . birds that depend on those hillsides for their very existence.”

A major goal of his lab’s Backyard Birdcount is to assess which species are disappearing in what areas or are shifting their migration patterns--and then figure out why. With sophisticated computerization, the lab can create instantaneous mappings of all birds sighted across the U.S. within a certain period. Then it can overlay maps depicting recent climate changes, new construction or other human incursions, and try to determine what factors may be causing diminished numbers of certain species in certain areas.

To Southern Californians who ask, “Why bother with all this?” Fitzpatrick offers just one example of many:

“There’s a spectacular gathering of migratory birds that depend on the Southern California ecosystem each winter. These are birds that populate the prairies and tundra and Alpine mountaintops from Washington state to Alaska and Canada during other parts of the year.

“As water usage changes in Southern California,” Fitzpatrick says, “these birds that spend their winters on your rivers and lakes are suddenly without habitat. They have nowhere to go in wintertime. Entire species begin to disappear. The point is that the seemingly little changes that take place at the community level in California can end up to be very big changes as to [what birds] get to survive and breed across the western part of the entire continent.”

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Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.