Month: December 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

5MR Lifer: Red-necked Grebe

Red-necked Grebe Marina del Rey California

Red-necked Grebe fleeing before any other birders even know it’s there

5MR Lifer: Red-necked Grebe at Marina del Rey

It’s been a somewhat slow early winter for rarities in my 5MR. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg situation, I believe. There don’t seem to be as many people birding the usual popular spots in my 5MR, and therefore the rarities that are undoubtedly there are not being found. But there are probably fewer people birding the spots in my 5MR because no one is reporting rarities. We’ve all seen it before – one good bird is found in a spot, a bunch of nerds with binoculars converge, and more rarities are found.

Anyhoodle, I went for a midday bike ride down the creek to Playa del Rey the other day, not expecting to find anything usual. And I didn’t, until I ventured out onto the middle jetty. About 70 yards ahead in the channel, there was another loon-ish bird. But it looked different. It seemed in-between the bigger loons/Western Grebes and the smaller Eared/Horned Grebes. The profile wasn’t right for a cormorant. I got it in my binoculars and knew right away it was a good find: a Red-necked Grebe.Red-necked Grebe Marina del Rey California

 

I snapped a quick photo with my pocket zoom camera, and biked ahead to get a closer look. As I was headed out the jetty, a jet skier was coming in from the ocean, right for the grebe. Before I could get to the spot, the Red-necked Grebe flushed. As it did, I saw two white flashes in the wing, one on the trailing edge and another at the front edge. It was a strange bird to see fly. It looked like a cormorant that had swallowed a cantaloupe, with a spatula stuck to its backside. 

The bird initially headed in towards the marina, and landed on the water. Just as I hopping on my bike to go back and try for a closer look, it took flight again. This time, it was headed more or less right toward me.  I snapped a few shots of the bird in flight, and watched it sail off south parallel to Playa del Rey. I didn’t see it land, and there’s no telling how far south it flew. There are large rafts of Surf Scoters and Western/Clark’s Grebes along that stretch of beach. But picking it out in the afternoon sun without a scope would have been difficult, if it was even there.

Red-necked Grebe Marina del Rey California

Behold the flying hunchbacked blob with a spatula sticking out the back

Red-necked Grebes are rare in Los Angeles County. I’d seen one before at Castaic Lake, where it is almost annual, at great distance. They are much rarer along the coast. The regular February Pasadena Audubon pelagic spotted one a mile off shore this year. But other than that, the last report in Santa Monica Bay was from 2014. They breed in Canada and Alaska, and winter along northern ocean coasts. Fun fact about Red-necked Grebes: they ingest large quantities of their own feathers. Theirs stomachs apparently have two distinct balls of feathers whose function is unknown. One thought is the feathers help protect the lower digestive tract from bones and other hard, indigestible material.

The Red-necked Grebe was actually the second addition to my 5MR life list in the past week. For whatever reason, it’s been a mini-invasion winter of Pine Siskin into the Los Angeles basin. I figured the best bet was the goldfinch feeder in the Japanese Garden at Kenneth Hahn park. And I was right. Slowly but surely, 300 species for my 5MR is coming into sight.

Lifer Harlequin Duck in Lifeless Irvine, CA

Harlequin Duck Irvine, CA

Harlequin Duck – for some reason in Irvine, CA

Lifer Harlequin Duck in Lifeless Irvine, CA

You’ve got to have a really good reason to go to Irvine, California. It’s a monument to vapidity, a man-made (master-planned!) anodyne nightmare. It’s also full of those rage-inducing, suburban intersections where red lights last for hours. But, truth be told, it’s got a lot of open and green space. And I somehow stumbled onto an eBird report of a female Harlequin Duck hanging out at a creek in Irvine. It’d been around for more than a week, and would be a lifer. (In fact, if you plug your nose and count exotics and escaped or released pets like Budgerigars, Island Canaries, and Helmeted Guineafowl, it would be worldwide bird species #900 for me). So I decided to try and find it.

I arrived at the spot, the San Diego Creek right next to the Irvine Civic Center, just after 9:30am. I missed the bird during my first sweep of the area. Back at my starting point, I met up with another birder who’d been walking around for an hour looking without success. We bantered for a few minutes. And then I spotted the Harlequin Duck, directly in front us, 30 feet away. It was actively feeding amongst the swift moving water around a bunch of rocks. As we watched, it disappeared behind a big boulder and didn’t come into view again for at least a minute.  Had it been there all along, feeding or maybe napping, but obscured from view? 

Harlequin Duck Irvine, CA

Observe the subtle racing stripe down the middle of the head

Male Harlequin Ducks are decidedly more colorful. Harlequin Ducks primarily breed along whitewater rivers, and winter in rough surf along rocky coasts. They apparently regularly suffer broken bones. No one would describe the San Diego Creek as a whitewater river, and this certainly was a rocky coastline. And these ducks aren’t regularly seen south of Morro Bay, California. So what is was doing in Irvine, and why it was staying around, was a pretty good mystery.

Beyond the Harlequin, the spot was surprisingly productive. There were American White Pelicans, White-faced Ibis, all kinds of ducks, and some Swinhoe’s White-eyes buzzing around. With the pandemic suppressing traffic all over, maybe I’ll peek more regularly at what’s being found in Orange County.

Swinhoes White-eye Irvine, CA

Swinhoe’s White-eye: non-native, increasing, and one of 99 species of white-eye

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