The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Pajama Lister

The trail along Trabuco Creek or Arroyo Trabuco, a 22-mile long stream flowing out of the Santa Ana Mountains to the San Juan Creek in San Juan Capistrano.

Day 243 of the Quarantine (November 12, 2020)

On Thursday morning, the wife and I drive up to San Juan Capistrano to hike along the upper reaches of Trabuco Creek through a dry chaparral of sage scrub, brittlebush, buckwheat, and thistle heads the size of softballs.  The air smells of heat and dust and thorn.  I’m after two California specialties, a scrub-jay and a long-billed, long-tailed, buff-bellied thrasher wearing the mask of Zorro. 

The trail takes us past a golf course with its mown grass and water hazards, privet hedges and purple sprays of Mexican sage (Salvia leucantha), which the fiery Allen’s hummingbirds probe with obvious relish. A tiny California gnatcatcher the color of smoke searches the desiccated stems of brittlebush for insects.  My guide says the species numbers only about 3000 pairs, and I wonder if their decline is due more to habitat loss or cowbirds.  Or both.

A female Allen’s Hummingbird feeding on Mexican sage. Similar to our Rufous Hummingbird, the species is common on the California coast during summer but does occasionally show up in my yard.

Life bird #447, the California Gnatcatcher is similar to our Black-tailed Gnatcatcher but only lives in coastal sagebrush of southern California and Baja California.

The California Scrub-jay and our Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay were once considered a single species, the Western Scrub-jay.

Life bird #446, the California Thrasher is only found in brushy habitats in California and northern Baja California.

Farther up the trail we come to the cowbird trap, a modified version of the Australian “ladder trap” used for crows.  A large wire box shaped like a three-dimensional M with no moving parts, just a slot along the vertex between the two upper arches.  Cowbirds check in but they don’t check out—until the end of the nesting season. 

The trap is empty and unused this late in the year, but I’ve hiked this route many times to find it full of brown-headed cowbirds, which volunteers monitor and refresh with food and water.  The idea is to only hold the cowbirds while other songbirds like least Bell’s vireos, willow flycatchers, and the gnatcatchers are breeding, preventing the “brood parasites” from laying eggs in the nests of these host birds, which would then raise baby cowbirds to the detriment of their own young.

In my yard, the feral kitties deal with the cowbirds.

A male Brown-headed Cowbird. Females do not build nests but instead lay their eggs—as many as 50-60 in one season—in the nests of other birds. The behavior is thought to be an adaptation to following bison herds.

            On our way back to Dana Point we stop at Marbella Market, our favorite place for groceries on the West Coast for almost 20 years now.  While the wife browses for artisan cheeses and crusty breads (mango salsa!), I pick out a bottle of 2017 Chateau Montelena chardonnay. 

A little Napa Valley bottle shock to celebrate our birthdays.

The 2017 is like the two of us: “Bright, focused and tightly wound,” but we enjoy its “citrus peel, orchard fruit and floral character.” Well, I do. The wife only likes the idea of wine. We discovered Chateau Montelena after watching the movie Bottle Shock with Chris Pine, Bill Pullman, and Alan Rickman.