Louisiana Waterthrush’s distinguishing features = long white eyebrow, clean throat
Chasing a Louisiana Waterthrush in San Diego
I had originally planned to use the day after a big, 36-hour rain storm to check the coast in my 5MR for something interesting. But I changed my mind. After zipping over to my oldest kid’s high school parking lot to see a rain-soaked Bay-breasted Warbler (sadly, just 1/10 of a mile outside my 5MR circle), I ate dinner with some younger birders. They had plans to get up early the next day and drive over 4 hours to Blythe, California to try and see a Chihuahuan Meadowlark. That kind of road trip for a non-lifer is not for me. But it did change my plans.
I often talk myself out of chases that take me outside of L.A. County. Not always. Five of my last 8 lifers were seen in Orange, Santa Barbara, or San Diego County. That Olive-backed Pipit was a big rarity, and just 45 minutes away. Indeed, it was closer to my house than many parts of L.A. County. Still, I’m just not obsessed enough with my lists, even my life list, to automatically drive multiple hours to see a new bird. Maybe I fear the guilt of failure, and having to then justify a 4-hour drive plus 1-3 hours spent looking around for a bird and not seeing it.
But one bonus of this dorky hobby is the adventure it can involve. So I decided to make a drive down to Solana Beach in San Diego in search of a lifer Louisiana Waterthrush. There had been one of these eastern U.S. warblers in San Diego in September. But I never made the chase. Now there was another. And this one was apparently a returning bird. That means it spent last winter in the same spot. That made me more confident that the bird would stick around, and that I wouldn’t be chasing a ghost.
The spot was a densely vegetated creek/drainage that ran behind a business complex parking lot. Many of the reports from last fall were “heard-only”, or noted 1-2 second obscured views of the bird. I was optimistic that I’d do better than that. After arriving at the spot, my optimism sunk a little. It was overgrown, with few clean lines of sight. The heavy rains from the previous 24 hours looked to have made a mess of the place. For an hour, I neither saw nor heard a waterthrush.
Just when the fear of striking out started to surface, I heard the unmistakeable loud chip of a waterthrush coming from somewhere deep in the tangle behind the creek. Merlin called it a Northern Waterthrush, but Merlin isn’t perfect. I couldn’t see the bird, but it was definitely there. Waterthrushes are land-loving warblers. There are two species. Northern Waterthrush breeds in Canada and the Northeast, and is a regular vagrant in L.A. County. Louisiana Waterthrush breeds in the eastern half of the U.S. and has never been reported in L.A. county. Both have big eyebrows, with the Louisiana’s whiter than the creamy Northern. Both bob their tails as they walk around the ground. The Louisiana tends to have a clean throat, while the Northern’s throat is often streaked. When this bird finally showed itself, the eyebrow was white, not creamy, and the throat was unstreaked. Lifer!
The bird made me wait for it, but I was rewarded with good looks
So Many Warblers
Adding the Louisiana Waterthrush got me curious about how many warblers I’ve seen. It’s a question without a simple answer. “Warbler” turns out to be a complicated category. There are many birds called warblers. But they are not all in the same family. Some aren’t even that closely related. The biggest group is the new world warblers, a family consisting of (at current count) 120 species found in North, Central, and South America. Of those, 56 regularly occur in the Lower 48. Other families include the leaf warblers, reed warblers, bush warblers, some birds named warblers in the family sylviidae (all of these primarily in Eurasia and Africa), and the new world Olive Warbler (not in the new world warbler family, and actually the lone member of its family).
I have seen 43 (of 56) new world warblers in the Lower 48, plus 2 vagrant leaf warblers in L.A. (Wood Warbler and Dusky Warbler). I’ve still got a few to go, all of them eastern warblers that rarely are found on the west coast. My world species total for new world warblers is 56. Other warblers that I’ve seen include 4 more leaf warblers (Arctic, Willow, Yellow-browed and Common Chiffchaff), an Oriental Reed Warbler, a Cetti’s Warbler (bush warbler), a Sardinian Warbler (inf the family sylviidae), and an Olive Warbler.
Lower 48 warbler faces