Stop, look, listen, count

Dawn came suddenly. One minute we were driving through the high desert, unable to see beyond the beam of our headlights. The next it was daylight.

But we had little time to appreciate the spectacle. Jon Feenstra, riding shotgun, saw to that.

“We’re coming into a hairpin curve,” he told driver Ron Cyger. “Three-quarters of the way in, pull over to the shoulder and we’ll all roll down our windows for a black-chinned sparrow.”

Houdini himself couldn’t have conjured one quicker. We pulled over, stopped and in the cool morning air heard the sparrow’s unmistakable reedy trill.

Then we were off, in pursuit of the next bird.

We had met up that morning at 2:20. By 2:40, three teammates and I were headed up the Angeles Crest Highway and by 2:55 we had heard our first bird of the day, a Western screech-owl calling from a parking lot at Red Box near the road to Mt. Wilson. If all went as planned, by sunset we would have logged more than 150 species and covered more than 300 miles.

We had embarked on a big day.

Normally birding is a contemplative endeavor. It’s all about enjoying and studying birds in nature. A big day is about numbers. You pick a geographic boundary -- ours was Los Angeles County -- and try to see (or identify by sound) as many species of birds as you can in a 24-hour period.

It’s a manic marathon not meant for novices, and something non-birders regard as utter madness.

It’s hard to do much better than Los Angeles County as a setting for a big day. The habitat range is greater than in many states, with mountains, wetlands, desert, ocean, meadows and chaparral, each with its own endemic species.

We had planned a route that took in the San Gabriel Mountains, the Antelope Valley, the Mojave Desert, the San Fernando Valley and the coast from Malibu to Manhattan Beach.

It was an ambitious plan. But we had a secret weapon: Feenstra, Cyger and my other teammate Mark Scheel had scoured the county in the weeks leading up to our quest.

Scouting is essential to a good big day. Some birds are so abundant in Southern California they are virtually guaranteed -- mockingbirds, for example, or mourning doves.

Others you have to hunt down.

But birds are, fortunately, creatures of habit. Many species, when they find a spot to their liking, tend to stick pretty close to it, particularly during the spring when they are nesting.

So if you see a bird in a particular tree one day, there’s at least a chance that it will be in the same general vicinity a week -- or even two -- later.

Feenstra, who had done another big day two weeks earlier, was the most organized of our team. At a planning meeting a few days before the big day, he brought out a notebook in which he’d recorded -- down to the highway marker -- where he’d seen or heard birds we might have trouble finding. Hence the miracle of the black-chinned sparrow.

There were other miracles as well.

On a cold and dark turnout my teammates had scouted along Mt. Wilson Road, we jumped out of the car, played a tape of a calling Northern saw-whet owl and within a minute an actual saw-whet answered, apparently angry at the intruder.

Just before noon in Apollo Park in Palmdale, we quickly located the rare (for the area) red crossbills we knew had taken up residence there.

In a tree alongside a meadow at Malibu Creek State Park a little after 2 p.m., we found the elegant white-tailed kite we’d hoped would be there.

But here’s the weird thing about a big day: Although you see a lot of birds, you don’t have time to really take them in. You focus solely on the mission.

Our day consisted of driving to a destination, jumping out of the car, making a quick sweep of the area with an eye to picking up birds unlikely to be at any of our other planned stops and then piling back into the car and heading for the next spot on the route.

Conversation in the car consisted of snippets like this: “The only thing we need at Bob’s Gap is a rock wren, and with luck we can get that at Saddleback.” Or, “We shouldn’t have any problem getting Lawrence’s goldfinches at the abbey.” Or, “What time is it? Dang. We were supposed to be at Piute by now.”

When we had a long drive between stops, someone tallied up the total. Seven birds, then 47, then 102. The list was growing.

By noon, when we left the Antelope Valley to head back to the Los Angeles Basin, we’d logged 131 species.

But there wasn’t, as I learned early in the day, time to waste.

On the north slope of the San Gabriels around 7 a.m., I stood gazing through my binoculars at a particularly beautiful Western bluebird. When I commented on it, Feenstra responded with what would become our mantra for the day: “We already have a bluebird. What do you think this is, birding?”

I had to be reminded again at St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Valyermo, where I would have been happy to spend a half-hour watching a fledgling great-horned owl in plain view on a tree branch.

Truth is, I was the team’s weak link -- and not just because I sometimes took the time to appreciate a beautiful bird. As birders go, I’m lame. I can easily identify the 150 or so species I see regularly. And I can impress my non-birding friends by recognizing the calls or songs of maybe 50 species. But in the birding world, that’s pathetic. My partners could identify almost all the birds we encountered by sound alone.

We’d jump out of the car, and they’d start calling out what they were hearing. “Green-tailed towhee.” “Western wood-peewee.” “Olive-sided flycatcher.”

The pace would have been exhausting even if we hadn’t started at 2 a.m., so it was probably a good thing that much of the late afternoon involved spots best birded by telescope. Scoping involves longish periods of standing in one spot.

At Point Dume in Malibu we scanned for pelagic birds -- loons, shearwaters and the like -- that fly far offshore. At Ballona Lagoon we scanned for shorebirds and a greater white-fronted goose we’d heard was in the area. And my teammates found what they considered to be the bird of the day: a red knot, an uncommon, rust-chested, robin-sized shorebird we hadn’t expected to see.

At dusk, heading back to Pasadena, where we’d met up 17 hours earlier, we totaled our sightings: 179 species.

It was more than respectable. A year earlier, my teammates had set the county record on a big day in which they saw 175 species.

But since then, the record had been broken twice, most recently by Feenstra and three others who two weeks earlier had seen 215 species in a nearly 24-hour big day.

We’d known we couldn’t top that record. It was two weeks later, and in that time many of the birds that spend only winters here had left. And I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I was thinking of my favorite bird of the day, a particularly colorful male Western tanager with a bright orange head and a yellow and black body basking in the sun on the branch of an oak tree at Malibu Creek State Park.

It wasn’t a rare bird -- I see them in my own yard almost daily during migration. And we’d already logged one for the big day list.

But I got to spend a good minute looking at him through my binoculars before anyone noticed and sounded the call: “What do you think this is, birding?”