Baja California: A Relaxed Morning South of Los Barriles

Our third day on the WINGS tour to Baja California’s Cape Region was a very relaxed one. It began with a picnic breakfast outside my hotel room, as we watched the sun rise over the Gulf of California. We then drove to some coastal desert scrub south of Los Barriles in search of better views of California Gnatcatcher and other desert birds.

We got great views of the gnatcatchers, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Gray Vireo, and this Gray Flycatcher. The plant is one of several species of elephant tree in the genus Bursera found here, and the berries are food for the ash-throat and the vireo, but I’m not sure about the Gray Flycatcher.

It was fun to see this Fouquieria diguetii, Adam's Tree in bloom. I have one in a pot on my front porch that I bought at a nursery here in Tucson several years ago. Costa’s Hummingbirds love it.

This appears to be Cochemiea poselgeri, Baja California Cochemiea, a genus of cactus endemic to Baja California, related to Mammillaria.

In the later morning we walked about 3/4 mile (to avoid getting stuck in sand) to a small estuary north of La Ribera.

We padded the list with several shorebirds, herons, and ducks, but we also had two surprises here, both new for me in Baja California. One was this first winter Glaucous-winged Gull.

The other, even bigger surprise was a group of four Groove-billed Anis. The species bred in the region in the 1800’s but is now a very rare vagrant from across the gulf. There were only about four records in over a hundred years up until what appears to have been an irruption in late November 2015, with one eBird submission reporting 14 birds. They have now been reported on eBird almost continually since then, up the gulf coast of the peninsula from San José del Cabo as far north as La Paz. I suspect they bred last year.

We finished the day with a drive to La Paz, where we had a full day and a morning of birding, the topic of my next blog.

Baja California Day 2 – San Antonio de la Sierra

On the second day of my WINGS tour to the Cape Region of Baja California Sur we headed towards the Sierra La Laguna Biosphere Reserve in the core of the peninsula. There is only one bumpy, washboarded road that leads 23 kilometers from the main highway to an elevation of  about 700 meters (2300 feet) in a collection of private ranches known as San Antonio de la Sierra. It’s not that high, but the slightly cooler temperatures and higher rainfall support an open oak woodland and a fascinating mix of vegetation along the arroyos that differs strongly from the tropical thornscrub and desert from the more accessible areas of the peninsula. Brahea brandegeei, Brandegee's Fan Palm, is one of the most beautiful members of this plant community, which also includes several endemic oaks, an endemic cottonwood, and many others. This palm isn’t endemic, also occurring across the gulf in Sonora. In fact, the northernmost records are only about 50 miles (80 km) south of Douglas, Arizona in the same watershed as Guadalupe Canyon.

Another non-endemic is Acacia farnesiana, Sweet-ball Acacia, also known as Huisache in Texas. The plants here were in full bloom and particularly fragrant, the enchanting smell filling the air as we walked near them.

Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of all the plants are endemic to the peninsula, including nearly 30 species of nipple cactus. This looks closest to the endemic Mammillaria schumannii, but the field guide only includes eight species in the genus, and flowers are needed for certain ID.

Despite not having a tall, dense evergreen forest, this elevation is apparently offers perfectly good habitat for the endemic subspecies of Northern Pygmy-Owl, which when split will be called Cape Pygmy-Owl (with slightly higher, shorter, and downslurred notes, as well as slightly faster delivery than most birds from California and Oregon). We had two of them, and I’ve never missed it in my six trips here. They are only rarely found away from this oak woodland in the mesquite and acacia-dominated woodland at lower elevations in well-watered arroyos.

The endemic Xantus's Hummingbird also prefers woodland over open desert scrub, but it’s not picky as to the plant species and can be found down to sea level as long as there is food and cover. This is a very reliable place for them, and we watched this male feeding repeatedly from the developing inflorescences of the Brandegee’s Fan Palms, presumably a sweet exudate on the buds. It would rest between feeding bouts on shrubs just a few feet away from us below eye level.

This area is crawling with passerines that breed in the Pacific Northwest. This is Pacific-slope Flycatcher.

I was amazed and delighted to see the orange on this Orange-crowned Warbler through my camera’s viewfinder as I snapped this shot.

There were several Western Tanagers here and many other places where we birded.

Ash-throated Flycatcher is very common in all habitats in the peninsula, largely feeding on fruits of Bursera species.

This Red-tailed Hawk is probably a resident bird, looking very much like the pale subspecies Buteo jamaicensis fuertesi from Arizona. A lot of the immature and darker adult birds we saw were probably wintering here from the US or Canada. A bird fitted with a satellite transmitter in the Goshute Mountains, Nevada in 1999 wintered not far north of here three years in a row, returning to a summer territory in Idaho each year.

We did not see nearly as many butterflies as I have in previous years, but it began to get cloudy before noon, keeping it pleasantly cool for us. This is Danaus gilippus, the Queen.

Anthanassa texana, Texan Crescent. Both of these are also common in my yard in Tucson.

On the way back to our hotel in the afternoon we stopped in San Bartolo to admire a grove of these amazing Ficus palmeri, Desert Rock Figs. They were full of fruit, attracting probably over 20 Western Tanagers.

Baja California's Cape Region Day 1

I came back from my sixth visit to Baja California Sur earlier this week. This was the third time leading the regular WINGS tour here, with other trips being my first scouting trip and two private tours. It was a delightful tour – short, full of birds, beautiful scenery, and a really good group. We had six and a half days in the field, though it seemed more like a long weekend, it went by so fast. Our first morning at San José del Cabo began with this sunrise from in front of our hotel.

We birded for about three hours at the Estero San José, one of the birdiest places in all of southern Baja, thanks to the ponds, marshes, and oasis vegetation. We pretty quickly found the endemic Belding’s Yellowthroat, getting good comparisons with the more common wintering Common Yellowthroats. Out at the beach we enjoyed watching these Magnificent Frigatebirds coming in for a morning bath, which they do only in flight.

This was one of two Palm Warblers wintering where the marsh meets the beach and some weedy patches of morning glory create the perfect structure for this mild rarity.

Almost back to the car, I spotted this Gray Thrasher preening low in a bush, our second endemic species. Unlike all other endemic taxa, which are pretty much restricted to the southern tip of the peninsula, the Gray Thrasher is found north almost up to the US border.

Later morning we visited the inland oasis-like wash of Miraflores. Hooded Orioles are very common winter birds here.

This area hosts a sizeable and rather isolated population of Thick-billed Kingbirds, and we managed to get good views of one.

Xantus's Hummingbird was our third (and final) endemic species, all in the pocket before lunch. This is a female.

I recognized this Rhynchosia precatoria, Rosary Snoutbean (called Bird-eye Bead in my Baja California Plants book) from one of my trips to Rock Corral Canyon in SE Arizona, the only place in the United States where it occurs naturally.

After a delicious lunch of fresh seafood tacos (I had the lobster), we drove to a remote headland on the Gulf of California called Punta Arena. In the desert scrub along the way we flushed many Northern Mockingbirds and California Scrub-Jays, then paused just long enough to get good photos of this Loggerhead Shrike.

We strolled along the beach casually, finally catching up with the group of over a dozen Snowy Plovers that I’ve seen here before, but also noting a Least Tern hunting just beyond the surf (apparently quite rare in the winter here), as well was Munk’s Devil Rays leaping out of the water.

There were dozens of shells on this remote beach, and it was impossible to resist picking them up. I rarely have the urge to take things like this home to clutter my shelves but am glad I decided to take a photo. My tour participants helped select some diversity of  sizes and colors.

On our way out, our van got mired in the sand where we had earlier driven without any problem. I shouldn’t have slowed down, but on the way here it didn’t seem a problem. The Nissan Urvan’s weak motor and disproportionately small tires are not well suited for any loose substrate, I learned. I jogged nearly 2 miles back to the beach to enlist the help of the very friendly fishermen (visible behind us on the beach in the photo above) who helped dig the sand away from the wheels and push the van out.

A Late January Garden and Yard Update

As I’m about to begin my short WINGS tour in Baja California Sur, it’s a good time to post some photos from the yard with an update on my wonderful winter vegetable garden here in Tucson. After the passage of two cold fronts in three days that delivered about 3/4 of an inch of rain, we’ve had five nights of frost, the lowest temperature being this past Thursday morning and yesterday at 26.6°F  (-3°C). The nasturtiums, tomatoes, and basil can’t handle those temperatures, so I put a frost cloth over the 93 square feet of garden.

Amazingly, the tomatoes made it, and this one seems to be very slowly growing four tomatoes. This is a plant I first put in the garden last March, which limped along all summer, not getting enough rain (too much competition from the mesquite tree), not setting any fruit (too hot all summer), it and barely survived my transplanting in early October (though it clearly liked the new soil and availability of moisture). The other tomato is a volunteer seedling.

Some of the nasturtiums look a little frost burned but their growing points survived. This was the first flower, exactly 12 weeks after sowing.

This is mizuna, or Japanese mustard greens.

Turnip Tokyo Market

My favorite for flavor, abundance, and the most lush growth of all my plants are the snow peas, Oregon Sugar Pod. I’ve picked two bowls full already.

The Broad-billed and Anna’s Hummingbirds regularly visit the flowers for nectar.

I have a few other flowers growing and surviving the frost including marigolds and some snapdragons.

Lots of things are volunteering too, some native plants, some weeds that I pull up (especially Sisymbrium irio, London Rocket), and some poppies that continue from a sowing I did in 1998. But I have no idea what this volunteer is; it looks like no weed or plant that I’ve sown over the years, so I’m letting it grow until I can see some identifiable flowers or fruit.

There are other things going on around the yard too. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed moss growing in our yard. I watered around some of the trees and shrubs a few times in November and December, and since the end of last year we’ve been having some decent amounts of rain, so that may be what has encouraged it.

I also noticed patches of cryptobiotic soil, or biological soil crusts, a sign of a very happy community of microorganisms. This is probably mostly a lichen, but there may be some tiny bits of moss, algae, and cyanobacteria living in here too.

The hummers continue to be abundant, and I’m now keeping up 13 feeders. Anna's Hummingbird is the most abundant, possibly as many as 30 or 40 in the yard over the course of a full day. This is a female.

I may have as many as 10 to 15 Broad-billed Hummingbirds, though at any one moment you can see only about five. This is an immature male.

And for the first time ever, I’ve had multiple Costa's Hummingbirds in the yard all winter. The usual pattern has been for one to show up for a day or two every few weeks – or one will stay at most for a week in late January. There are at least two males (one immature without the long flanges of this adult), and two females that are now present all the time, since at least October. This is a region-wide pattern this year, with a record 83 being tallied on the Tucson Valley CBC last month.

The female Costa’s Hummingbird is often mistaken for female Anna’s or especially Black-chinned, due to the very clean, pale appearance of the underside, especially the throat. But we never get Black-chinned in the winter (at least not from November to late February), and their voices are very different.

A Third Visit With Mr. Nutting

I saw the Nutting’s Flycatcher in California Gulch for the third time this month today. I don’t get tired of birding down there and would be happy to go back tomorrow, but my time in Tucson is running out before my next series of tours begins. Last week I went back there with Will Russell and Evan Obercian in advance of Evan’s first time leading the WINGS SE Arizona tour. We found the bird within seconds of parking (Will wasn’t even out of the car yet). This time presented me with some unique challenges.

One challenge was birding with a couple in their late 70’s and early 80’s who show various and obvious stages of hearing and sight loss as well as expected issues with balance, strength, speed, and stamina. I may not be at my peak either, and Jeff and June hold a special place in my heart. I met them when I was 20 years old, seemingly yesterday but actually over 26 years ago, when I was a junior in college during my year abroad in Freiburg, Germany. They have four lucky children of my generation, so I remind myself to cherish my time with them.

Another issue was the status of the water in the gulch. It must have rained well over an inch from the front that passed through this past Friday night and Saturday morning (which left about 0.6 of an inch of rain in my part of Tucson, not an insignificant amount). All of the washes were running with clear water when normally quite dry. The main drainage of California Gulch was a veritable torrent.

But we were able to make it in my friends’ low-clearance 2WD Hyundai Sonata as far as the usual spot at the junction of the California Gulch and Warsaw Canyon junctions.

Jeff and June are not wimpy tenderfoots. Though they both grew up in New York City (Staten Island and Brooklyn), you should hear their stories of farming in Bozeman while forging academic careers in the 1960's and 70’s. They didn’t think twice about pulling up their pants and wading across the unbelievably full California Gulch. June was actually pleased it wasn’t the icy cold waters one would have expected in Montana.

We spent well over an hour looking, pishing, wading, hobbling over boulders, and pausing for a quick picnic lunch. There was no sign of the bird. We watched a group of Chipping Sparrows, two pairs of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers, a pair of Rufous-winged Sparrows, a wonderful Dusky Flycatcher, and had a bit of excitement with what turned out to be an Ash-throated Flycatcher. I noticed what at first looked like a female Northern Cardinal (with a red bill), then changed my mind to Pyrrhuloxia when I saw the gray back, rump and tail. Then changed my mind again when I saw the brownish breast. Then began to wonder about a hybrid. This is indeed what I’m pretty certain is a rare Northern Cardinal X Pyrrhuloxia hybrid.

It was associating with this male Northern Cardinal.

Then suddenly I saw this bird with a rich yellow belly only 10 meters in front of me, just a meter off the ground. The Nutting’s Flycatcher! We spent some 15 minutes with it, as it foraged on grasshoppers. In the past three weeks it had been feeding on bees attracted to the blooming Desert Olive (Forestiera shrevei), but it was nearly done blooming, and there were few bees today.

I don’t think one could normally expect to see this bird three out of three tries, but I won’t be pushing my luck on this one. I’m home for just another five days before my next bout of travel begins – Baja California, Palm Springs, Peru, Japan, Costa Rica, and Nepal all loom in the next three months