A bigger Big Day?

Editor’s note: In last week’s Outdoors, Sue Horton wrote about identifying 179 bird species during a one-day outing on May 1. On the same day, Todd and David Easterla, Steve Glover, Gjon Hazard and John Sterling set a Big Day record in San Diego County with 217. Here’s an excerpt from their online report.

We left the Silver Strand with 212 species, and added only Clapper Rail at Mission Bay (no brant, harlequin duck or little blue herons -- it was high tide). With 213, we had our last daylight at La Jolla where black-vented shearwaters and northern phalaropes flew offshore. With 215 species and a tie for the highest single county Big Day record, we tried the Mission Bay breakwater for black turnstone and surfbird at night with spot light. No luck, so after much consideration (we were dead TIRED), we decided that we had to go to the grasslands in Ramona. At our first stop, Todd told us all to be quiet and a burrowing owl started calling spontaneously! We were overjoyed to break the record. Another stop at 11:28 p.m. at the Ramona Pond yielded our last bird, cattle egret -- 217 for the day.