Chance sightings, definitive guides

YOU wouldn’t expect a blissful birding memory to come out of a few asphalt-cloaked acres in Central L.A.: Audubon warblers, Hutton’s vireos, an Anna’s hummingbird (acting, in typical hummingbird fashion, so territorial that it buzzes the warblers), a black phoebe and a Cooper’s hawk. There’s also a special guest, heard but not seen, a northern flicker, its piercing cry unmistakable.

These are birds of the suburban gardens or chaparral trails. But in the waning sun of a fall afternoon they have been drawn to this urban pocket to feed on the bug- and nectar-bearing plants of a small garden plot at the 24th Street Elementary School. What started as a project to enrich children is certainly enriching the birds. Some, like the cars thundering on the nearby freeway, are on their way to somewhere else. Others are here for the duration.

It’s uplifting how birds can take what little is given them and thrive. We may be trapped in our cars, but they are free to roam, breaking the rules and surprising us, winging into places we had given up for dead.

I have never known a moment when I wasn’t on the lookout for birds, but I am an accidental birdwatcher, content with what I see by chance. Let others keep life lists, purchase expensive spotting scopes and traipse high and low for that one elusive species. I, on the other hand, am ceaselessly entertained by the happenstance of my own sightings.

My casual approach is only enhanced by the new “Birds of the Los Angeles Region.” No more -- as with the wider-ranging Western field guides -- having to consult color-coded maps or “where found” entries to determine if I might have just seen a blue-throated hummingbird. (Highly unlikely, unless I was in Arizona.) Every bird in this book is among us.

Time-pressed Angelenos can appreciate how authors Kimball L. Garrett, chief ornithologist of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Jon L. Dunn and Bob Morse (whose R.W. Morse Co. published the book) have kept their entries succinct and to the point, perhaps in keeping with the book’s compact size. At 4 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches, it’s easily pocketable. It could even replace my well-thumbed Audubon guidebook. I like the up-close full-page portraits, and its area-specific information is useful. When a friend was uncertain whether she had a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk nesting in her yard, I scanned both entries, concluding that it had to be a Cooper’s.

Garrett and Dunn, coincidentally, are listed in the acknowledgments of another new regional bird guide, “Introduction to Birds of the Southern California Coast,” written by Joan Easton Lentz and published by the University of California Press. Where “Birds of L.A.” is thrifty with its adjectives, the entries in “Birds of the Southern California Coast” are often painterly descriptions or anecdotes. For example, this description for the great egret:

“When the fog begins to lift from the salt marsh at San Elijo or Carpinteria, a long-legged, all-white heron emerges like a ghost from the mist. Motionless, this tall wader stands with neck stretched forward, its thick, sharp bill held ready to strike. When the unlucky frog or fish swims close enough, the Great Egret makes a sudden lunge, evidence that its hunt for breakfast is serious business.”

There’s a similarly personal tone throughout this book. Lentz makes the charming observation that should you see a green heron you should count yourself “fortunate,” as this is the shyest of birds. And that many of us will make our red-tailed hawk sightings from the seats of our cars (this hawk is a common hunter along Southern California’s freeways).

This is an addicting time of year to become a birdwatcher, which makes the publication of these books all the more timely. The fall migrants are passing through and the winter visitors are just arriving from the north and east for their vacations in our spa-like weather. Suddenly it seems as if every lamppost is sprouting a hawk and each oak tree is rustling with warblers.

My favorite sighting this season was a Wilson’s warbler that appointed itself King Neptune of the pond at my parents’ Santa Barbara home. It was particularly peeved when a pair of lesser goldfinches arrived to feed off a favorite plant. It was relentless in his harassment, the goldfinches just as stubborn.

Which reminds me of birding’s greatest pleasure. In every sighting is a memory, and in every memory a more intimate, if not indelible, connection to the city and the world we live in.

The Wilson’s warbler is now in my mind, along with the reclusive hermit thrush I found along a dormitory walkway at USC. And the barn owl once sighted banking over the Harbor Freeway interchange at midnight. Or the red-tailed hawks looping over skid row at midafternoon, the Western tanagers like fireballs in the trees by my first apartment in Santa Monica, a Costa’s hummingbird lording over the children’s garden at the Huntington in San Marino, the Western bluebirds camped out at the 10th hole at Rancho Park Golf Course, the never-before-heard birdcall that sent me jogging down a Brentwood street after a red-naped sapsucker.

And in my West L.A. garden: the furious sallies of the rufous and Allen’s hummingbirds. The house wren whose scolding chatter I listen for each morning. The cedar waxwings in their superhero masks who hung out with the house sparrows one fall morning, briefly, before leaving those dumpy urbanites behind.

Now this is a birding list I can identify with.

ann.herold@latimes.com