With a day off in Long Beach, Los Angeles - and a month still to go before my year-listing exploits begin in earnest - I decided to rent a car and make the short journey down the coast to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve for a relatively easy morning’s birding (come January I’ll make far more of an effort I promise!). With absolutely cloudless skies and an excellent, flat light I was hoping to get a few decent photographs too -time to give my still hardly-used new Canon 40D an extensive workout in other words: I wasn’t disappointed as I hope the following images will demonstrate…

One of my favourite US birding sites, Bolsa Chica presently consists of approximately 1550 acres of undeveloped coastal wetland and adjacent upland areas and has had a remarkably turbulent history of environmental destruction, public disquiet, conservation effort, and subsequent restoration. In 1900, the tidal nature of the wetland was essentially destroyed when the natural ocean inlet to the wetland was closed to improve duck hunting. Since then, the area has been used for agriculture, cattle grazing, military coastal artillery emplacements, and oil production, and is surrounded by development and housing. Yet, after an intense campaign that has already lasted some thirty years, natural tidal flow was restored in August 2006 an event which “capped a two-year project by eight state and federal agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California State Lands Commission, and the California Department of Fish and Game to restore nearly 600 acres of wetlands at Bolsa Chica.” (www.bolsachicalandtrust.org/restoration.html)

Bolsa today is therefore a very different place from the threatened ribbon of saltmarsh I first visited about 15 years ago. Saltmarsh plants are regenerating and the restored tidal-flow must be increasing nutrients in the Reserve to the benefit to all levels of the food-chain. Most importantly a huge area of newly-restored wetland is now protected behind fencing where it’s hoped some of California’s most threatened wetland species will breed in the coming years (including Snowy Plovers which are disappearing from beaches and wetlands all over North America). Of course early-December is not the best time to see breeding birds, but Bolsa is a fantastic place to get close views - from both a boardwalk that leads out from the small car-park and from raised trails that run like banked spines through the Reserve - of a number of wetland species whatever the time of year. I’ll post a day-list when I get time to work one out, but I reckon that in just a few hours I easily saw about 60 species. (Incidentally - and this may perhaps be of interest only to me - in the photo of the boardwalk to the right there are two sets of footprints in the early morning dew: the one in a straight, regularly-spaced line were laid down by a jogger, the second - which wanders around like a drunk - are mine as I went from side to side peering over the planks into the water below.)

 

Marbled Godwit Limosa fedoa in a dawn roost

Non-breeding Willet Catoptrophorus semipalmatus

Least Sandpipers Calidris minutilla

 

The focus at Bolsa is, of course, on wetland/coastal saltmarsh species. Large numbers of egrets and herons (especially Snowy Egret and Great Blue Herons - plus I saw one Reddish Egret, a bird I haven’t seen at Bolsa before) and shorebirds winter here (including Willet, Long-billed Curlew, Marbled Godwit, Grey (Black-bellied) Plover, Greater Yellowlegs, Short-billed Dowitcher, and some very confiding Least Sandpipers), as do scattered flocks of wildfowl (Lesser Scaup, American Wigeon, and Bufflehead are common, and Northern Pintail, Blue-winged Teal, and Surf Scoter are easy enough to find). Both species of Pelican, Brown and White, are usually present, small numbers of both Pied-billed and Black-necked (Eared) Grebes dot the water, and there are always small groups of (very noisy) Forster’s Terns either fishing by a dam towards the northern end of the Reserve or loafing around on raised muddy islands in the marsh.

 

Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias

Immature male Surf Scoter Melanitta perspicillata (and crab or shellfish)

Male Bufflehead Bucephala albeola

Blue-winged Teals Anas discors

 

Whilst for most ‘casual’ birders I would think the emphasis at Bolsa is on large and conspicuous birds like pelicans, ducks, and shorebirds, Bolsa is an important site for at least one passerine: the Californian saltmarsh race of Savannah Sparrow beldingi. Once split as a separate species Belding’s Savannah Sparrows Passerculus sandwichensis beldingi are endemic to southern California’s and northwestern Baja California’s coastal salt marshes, living and preferring to nest in the mid- to upper-littoral zones. They eat insects, seeds and some vegetation, and - remarkably for a bird - have adapted to drinking saltwater.

Belding’s Savannah Sparrow has suffered population declines with the loss of suitable high pickleweed marsh: in California, over 75% of the pre-settlement acreage of California’s coastal wetlands have been lost to human development, which highlights the importance of the restoration here at Bolsa. They are nonmigratory and are therefore dependent on this salt marsh habitat during all months of the year. Listed as endangered by the State of California, statewide censuses of Belding’s Savannah Sparrows reveal wide fluctuations in local population sizes, with local extinctions occurring in some years (Zembal et al. 1988). The population dynamics of Belding’s Savannah Sparrow may therefore reflect the effects of marsh fragmentation.

I only saw a handful of these sought-after sparrows on this trip - a little ironically the improvements at Bolsa include stopping birders getting access to the pickleweed and saltbush and making it more difficult to see them well, but if it helps numbers build up I can’t see anyone complaining (I’m not in case anyone wonders). The one sparrow I did see well has caused me some puzzlement though. Beldingi is a very distinctive race: it’s a little smaller and heavier-billed than most other Savannah’s, and most notably is dark and heavily-streaked. The two images below are of a typical bird I took at Bolsa Chica three years ago in mid-November:

A typical Belding’s Savannah Sparrow, Bolsa Chica.

The following two photos are of a Savannah Sparrow I took at Bolsa on this visit. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one with such a yellow face and it’s clearly nowhere near as dark as a “typical” beldingi and the flank streaks are nothing like as heavy. Maybe a local birder reading this could help me out: is this just a bird within the variation for beldingi (which seems unlikely), or is it another race that might also be found here?

(For more photos of Savannah Sparrows please go to beldingi and Panoche Valley - Savannah Sparrows)

Other passerines I saw at Bolsa include small numbers of White-crowned, Gold-crowned, and Song Sparrows (the very dark Californian coastal race). House Finches are common too, but otherwise I only saw one Californian Towhee, one Yellow-rumped Warbler, a single Yellowthroat, and - unexpectedly - a Say’s Phoebe, which like the Reddish Egret was the first one I’ve seen here (interestingly there were no American Robins around though which surprised me). As this wasn’t really the group of birds I was looking for I really didn’t spend much time hunting them out, so undoubtedly there would have been more.

By 11:00 am the heat had built up to the low seventies (far too much for this Brit), and the light had changed from flat to highly-reflective and very bright - at which point I thought I’d save my energy for January (I’ve just been rostered another Los Angeles if anyone would like to spend a day with me?) and save some rental money by getting the car back. It may have been a brief visit, but as always Bolsa Chica was worth visiting and great birding. If you’ve a few hours to spare in southern LA, you could do far worse than send a few hours here. And try to get there for dawn - the views can be stunning…

 

All photographs copyright Charlie Moores