We spent the long Thanksgiving weekend visiting extended family in Los Angeles. I’ve spent very little time in LA, and the recent weekend reminded me why. We read and complain about Phoenix air quality, but once you’ve experienced LA, you know just how good we have it here in central Arizona. SoCal’s demography, geography and topography is a perfect storm of bad air--more people and more cars, those people and cars traveling a freeway system that plies the bottom of deep canyons which concentrate and hold pollutants, and moisture and fog from the ocean that conspire to keep those pollutants from dispersing.
That said, if my sole goal in life were to live somewhere with lots of birds and a great variety of bird species, I’d take LA over Phoenix in a heartbeat. Despite your stereotype that everyone on the Left Coast is a Kartrashian bimbo, a surfer dude, or a non-English speaking immigrant one flat tire away from personal bankruptcy, our LA family is totally normal. There’s nothing normal, however, about LA birding if you’re used to birding in Phoenix where geography and climate conspire to make it one of the bird poorest big cities in North America. Here are four birding snapshots from a winter weekend in LA. Who knew!?
We’re sitting at the breakfast table with our hosts, back patio door closed against the early morning dampness and chill ten miles inland from the ocean, and we hear a vaguely familiar bird call in the backyard. We step outside. A flycatcher flushes into one of their Liquid Amber trees, flipping its tail like Black Phoebes everywhere. “Oh yes, it’s here all the time,” they say. Black Phoebe, a year round yardbird!
We’re negotiating the freeway to the beach, cars everywhere, strip malls on every off ramp, thin sunlight filtering through thick air, and a Red-tailed Hawk flashes across in front of us, almost at eye level, and disappears over a hedgerow into the channelized trickle of water that used to be the Santa Ana River. Okay, there are Red-tails in winter in the deserts outlying Phoenix, but this one is hunting a Californicated concrete jungle. Unexpected to say the least!
We’re at Bolsa Chica, the wetland on the coast just north of Huntingdon Beach. From the boardwalk we have Brown Pelicans splash diving at our feet, gulls and terns passing back and forth to the ocean, sandpipers prospecting in the mud, buffleheads, mergansers, and scoters chasing fish, and Snowy and Reddish Egrets canopy feeding fearlessly within yards of joggers and dog walkers. Oh, and a rather incoherent woman dressed like an . . . um, female escort shall we say, approaches us about taking our picture with her. None of this at, say, Gilbert Water Ranch!
I’m running in a regional park at midday amidst youth soccer games, bikers and the ubiquitous hum of unseen freeway traffic. At the last of a chain of small, man-made ponds I come across 37(!) Wood Ducks. And they don’t flush when two noisy little girls run up to teeter on the rocks rimming the water!
Yeah, LA is another planet. Especially if you’re a birder from the Valley.
