A Birdman’s Quest Is Drawing to an End

The sea breeze was still and the ocean-side valley quiet Thursday as the bird hunter drew a bead on his most elusive target yet.

David Allen Sibley glanced one more time through his 30-power Swarovski telescope before leveling his mechanical pencil at the clipboard cradled in his left arm.

Fifty feet away, an island scrub jay perched motionless on the limb of a Catalina chokecherry tree, almost as if it realized it was posing for America’s top ornithological artist.

Sibley, 43, had come by airplane to sketch the jay, which is found nowhere else in the world but on this narrow spit of land 20 miles off Ventura.

The island scrub jay is clad with blue feathers on its side and has a grayish-brown patch on top and a grayish-white breast. It is one of only three of the 810 bird species in the United States and Canada that Sibley has not personally observed.

It had flitted to a landing on a leafy branch a few steps from the 120-year-old ranch house that the conservation group the Nature Conservancy uses as a headquarters for island habitat rehabilitation. Conservancy staffer Erik Aschehoug summoned it with a gentle “psh, psh, psh, psh” bird call sound.

“Oh, wow!” exclaimed Sibley. “It has a dark, rich, almost ultramarine blue color. I knew I would see one if I came to the island, so it’s not as though I came upon it unexpectedly. And I certainly have no trouble identifying it. It’s the only blue jay on the island. But it’s exciting to see.”

Sibley is legendary among bird-watchers for his “Sibley Guide to Birds,” a hand-illustrated field guide to North American birds published in 2000. Filled with more than 6,600 illustrations, it is the outgrowth of a bird-sketching hobby Sibley began at age 7. So far, the $35 book has sold half a million copies.

For the guidebook, Sibley relied on photographs when depicting the island scrub jay. But when the volume is updated and reprinted, he intends to include opaque-watercolor paintings of the bird at rest and in flight drawn from Thursday’s sighting.

Sibley travels light. He sketches on surplus computer printer paper clamped to a thin plastic clipboard box. Later he will use a special projector to enlarge his drawings so they can be refined and painted.

Experts say the island scrub jay is endemic to Santa Cruz Island, which means the whole species could be wiped out if the 24-by-6-mile island were to be swept by brush fire or disease. For that reason, the Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service, which share the island’s ownership, prohibit open fires.

“We’re very concerned about West Nile virus,” said Ken Corey, division chief for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for Los Angeles and Orange counties. For now, though, the island bird population is robust.

“They’re distinct from jays on the mainland,” Corey said. “They’re about 25% larger. They live longer than the mainland jay. We’ve had them live up to 17 years.”

Corey has studied the island scrub jay for 15 years. So it was a particularly exciting moment, he said, when genetic work done four years ago showed that the Santa Cruz jay is a distinct species, different from the mainland’s commonly seen Western scrub jay.

Santa Cruz Island is well known among serious bird-watchers as the one-and-only home of the species, which numbers about 13,000. Aschehoug said hundreds of bird enthusiasts make the two-hour boat trip to the island each year in hopes of seeing it.

“I tell them to bring a sandwich and sit down by the harbor and the birds will come,” said Aschehoug, the island’s restoration manager.

Watching Sibley work was Lee Moldaver, vice president of the Santa Barbara chapter of the Audubon Society.

“He’s got the muse of an artist as well as the skills of an outdoorsman,” Moldaver said.

Sibley said his other two missing birds are the whiskered auklet, found only in Alaska’s central Aleutian area, and the Gunnison sage grouse, found in southwestern Colorado. Sibley, who lives in Concord, Mass., has not yet scheduled trips to sketch them.

Suddenly, there was a flutter from a distant bush. Sibley swung his telescope around and zeroed in on a red-eyed phainopepla.

“Are they regularly out here? That’s a very cool-looking bird,” he said.