The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Pajama Lister

The Black Oystercatcher is found all along the western coast from Baja to Alaska.

Day 237 of the Quarantine (November 6, 2020)

            The ocean, like the desert, diminishes you in its incomprehensible vastness.  Something of which it never hurts to be reminded.  Often.

The wife and I break quarantine to celebrate our birthdays and head for Dana Point, California, our favorite place for laying salty air against our skin—and eating too much seafood and pizza (Beach Harbor Pizza with “the boys” Mario and Francisco!), and birdwatching.  Nine days of birdwatching.  Not so much chasing birds as paying attention to birds.

The Pied-billed Grebe, the most wide-spread of our seven grebes, prefers marshy ponds and sheltered saltwater like Dana Harbor.

The birdwatching is new—it used to be fishing, like catching rock bass off the jetty while dodging thundering white plumes of surf.  I haven’t unpacked my Big Water rod.  Instead, I spend my mornings running with binoculars, my afternoons hiking with binoculars and camera, and my evenings strolling with binoculars, camera, and the wife. 

Over bowls of ceviche on the balcony of Waterman’s Harbor with the ocean’s atomized brine filling our pores, I watch a pair of black skimmers draw lines in the flat, black water.  The marina offers a multitude of shorebirds like pied-billed grebes and brown pelicans that paddle and dive among the slips with their Boston Whalers and Dufour Cutters.  Across the bridge and along the shores of Dana Island, black oystercatchers with blunt orange beaks probe the rocks for marine worms.  

            The life birds start stacking up. 

            I check off two the first morning.  A pair of Egyptian geese, native of Africa but now breeding in the wild in southern California.  They stare me down through pirate eyepatches next to the nine-foot bronze sculpture of a shirtless and six-packed Richard Henry Dana holding his book, Two Years before the Mast.  Where fishermen in yellow rubber coveralls moor their lobster boats, four yellow-crowned night-herons with beaks like cutlasses post themselves among towers of wire traps.  Life birds #439 and 40.

The non-native Egyptian Goose (life bird #439) has established itself at golf course ponds and city parks from Florida to southern California.

Common in the southeast US, the Yellow-crowned Night-heron (life bird #438) is rare in southern California.

            At nearby Doheny Beach and the San Juan Creek I pick up four more.  Here, runoff from San Juan Capistrano meets the ocean in a swift muddy surge at low tide.  I unexpectedly sink to my thighs and have to crawl through the swift water on my knees with my camera and binoculars held over my head.  But the estuary holds sleek-winged elegant terns among the flocks of blue-backed gulls.  Black-bellied plovers and dunlin sift the silt, zigzagging on the dark stilts of their legs.  A red-breasted merganser darts at thread-thin fish trapped in the shallows. These are new to me, barely recognizable without my bird guide among the familiar crowds of snowy plovers and sanderlings, willets and whimbrels, which preferred their own company.

I’m still an avid fly fisherman...or hope to be once the Pandemic eases up and I can return to drifting elk hair caddis flies and wooly buggers among the algae-slick boulders of eastern Arizona’s clear trout streams.  But, for now, birdwatching has a similar draw on me because, like fishing, it’s not about the catching.  It’s as much about being present for the wild, undiluted stillness and expectation as for the strike of a live-wire rainbow.  Or for something as extraordinary as a Tundra swan among California gulls.

Immature Elegant (left) and Royal Terns are both commonly found on California coastal waters.

Life bird #442, the Red-breasted Merganser prefers sheltered lagoons and bays during the winter months.

The Black-bellied Plover, life bird #445, is a common shorebird of coastal mudflats and beaches in winter.

The Snowy Plover, an uncommon resident of the California coast.

Life bird #443, the American Pipit, nests during the summer on Arctic tundra and winters all across the southern US.

The Spotted Sandpiper is an uncommon winter visitor along the southern California coast.

Our awesome friend, Mario, of Beach Harbor Pizza, serves us the Chupacabra—chorizo, onions, jalapeño, and pepperoni. My all-time favorite.

Thanks for subscribing!