SoCal birding trip strikes avian gold
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| California Condors by Joe Demko |
You know it’s a big and important bird festival when you stroll through the exhibit hall and see other bird festivals hosting tables. If you like this festival, you’ll like ours too! Let us show you some new birds! That’s the basic pitch, and it applies to the birding tour companies on exhibit as well.
Birders, when not outside watching birds, can be observed
inside plotting their next big trip. I was one of them last month, attending
the 30th annual San Diego Bird Festival. The display belonging to
Canopy Tower and Lodge held me captive (by choice) for 15 minutes. Panama is
high on my travel wish list.
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| Adam Sell (left) and Josh Engel |
Red Hill founder Josh Engel and Adam Sell guided our group of 12, leading us to well-scouted birding hot spots in two extra-tall passenger vans. Often the less scenic spots paid off too, such as our first pullover, a rest area just north of San Diego. The prize, my lifer Allen’s Hummingbird, proved again that for birders a bathroom break can be productive in more ways than one.
Refreshed, we continued north in search of our first major target
species, California Condor. The guides knew exactly where to go, of course, a key
reason for hiring a tour company. But even with huge birds like condors,
sightings are never guaranteed.
We got lucky. Really lucky. Four of the majestic flyers materialized
in the high hills of Los Angeles County, a site Josh and Adam had been
monitoring via eBird in recent days. Condors glided directly over us, close
enough to read their numbered tags. Then they came back and did it again. To
say the least, the show surpassed our expectations. Did Red Hill train these
birds?
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| Yellow-billed Magpie by Albert Lau-Chang |
California Condor once came within an eyelash of extinction
and is critically endangered. We visited the “hack site” where the first condors
from a controversial captive-breeding program were reintroduced to the wild in
1991. Four years prior, the population numbered just 27 birds, all in captivity.
About 300 condors are flying free today.
Our condor quest complete, we turned to the family of birds known as corvids, which includes crows, ravens and jays. Common Raven was ubiquitous throughout our tour. But the corvids we most coveted were two California endemics: Island Scrub Jay and Yellow-billed Magpie. Both are found nowhere else in the world.
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| Island Scrub Jay by Joe Demko |
In the morning we boarded a tour boat in Ventura Harbor for
a one-hour ride to Santa Cruz Island, part of Channel Islands National Park and
the exclusive home of Island Scrub Jay. The bird practically greeted us upon
arrival, as did the endemic Island Fox, a cutie no bigger than a house cat.
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| Allen's Hummingbird by Dexter Patterson |
I was impressed with Red Hill (redhillbirding.com). Adam and
Josh excelled at efficient bird-finding, applying their experience and next-level
ID skills. They hustled, too. It’s amazing how fast a professional guide can
stop a vehicle, set up a spotting scope, and get a bird in view for clients.
It’s an underrated superpower.
Southern California supports an array of “exotic” or
non-native bird species. We located two at Huntington Botanical Gardens in San
Marino: Red-whiskered Bulbul and Yellow-chevroned Parakeet. The bulbul is a looker
with a song to match. I’d searched for it before, in Miami, without success.
The Red Hill tour ended back in San Diego, 143 total species later and just in time for opening night at the festival. I crashed early, anticipating the next day’s “Birding on the Border” field trip, key targets being California Gnatcatcher (yes) and Ridgway’s Rail (another happy yes).
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| On the Mexican border, watching California Gnatcatchers |
Somehow I’d found a bird on my own, a lifer no less. I savored this modest achievement before heading to the airport, concluding my own “biggest week” well before the first day spring. It felt like cheating.
Copyright 2026 by Jeff Reiter. All rights reserved.