New Year’s Day Birding – Malibu Lagoon to King Gillette

[Chuck Almdale]

Just to kick off the new year right — or wrong, depending on one’s point of view — a few of us decided impromptuishly to tuck a few year-birds under our proverbial birders’ belts. Nothing major — shore/sea birds, creek birds, small park birds, big park birds.

Maybe we’d hit 100 species — a number with lots of roundness to it. Probably not. Merely rising early on New Year’s Day doesn’t offset one’s inherent laziness, albeit along a spectrum of laziness, to be sure.

It hit 34°F passing by Malibu Creek State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains enroute to the lagoon, our low for the day, but at the beach a few miles away it was a roasty toasty 50°.

Breezy, chilly — thin gloves a comfort. Still, surfers in the water, kicking the year off right, waiting for that great big set outside.

I thought perhaps we’d be efficient, find all the birds quickly and move on to the next location. Ha! Not a chance! Three-and-a-half hours for lagoon, upcreek and circling the small Legacy Park pond, where one of us added one whole species – Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. By the time we arrived at King Gillette State Park, it was already time to knock off for lunch.

The tide was high and the lagoon was full, the beach was gone and most of the birds stood in the water and on damp sand at the far side of the wide outlet stream. Floating wood choked the southern channel and the western edge of the outlet, almost certainly washed down the creek during the recent storm.

Still we picked out seven species of gull and Royal Tern. I’m sure that Marbled Godwit and Snowy Plover were over there but we couldn’t find them.

Western Grebe are common in SoCal nearshore waters in flotillas of varying sizes. Loons appear in small numbers: a Pacific Loon today, but a Red-throated Loon last Sunday. Small flocks of Surf Scoter dotted the water, several svelte Pelagic Cormorant dove in the surf zone, and – more unexpected at sea – a nice-looking Red-breasted Merganser about 100-200 yards out.

The Hooded Mergansers had left, to our great disappointment, no doubt because millions of gallons of water came charging down the creek earlier in the week. Not very pleasant for diving ducks who prefer still waters.

An Osprey sat perched on a low metal pole for hours. Shortly after we arrived Malibu Creek-side, just the other side of PCH bridge, it flew over for a closer look. After seeing those talons up close, I have a better understanding how it hangs on so securely to those thrashing mullet when using only one claw.

Two Green Herons, seven Black-crowned Night-Herons (2 adult), a female Belted Kingfisher (with rust on sides of the breast), and a Spotted Sandpiper, which we hadn’t seen in months in the lagoon proper — all were nice to see.

I wrote an essay a while back about “Sexual Dimorphism Reversal and Polyandry” which I mention now only because Belted Kingfisher is one of very few avian species in which the female is more colorful than the male, but has no noticeable tendencies towards polyandry (female has multiple mates). This has been widely noticed and remarked upon, but no one has figured out why. Several conjectures are offered:

• Many males maintain year-round territories, fending off other males. The bright cinnamon band of the females, returning from migration, signals the males to welcome, not attack.
• In breeding season, females tend to be more aggressive and territorial than males. Their testosterone levels may be higher-than-normal testosterone levels, and may affect how pigment (specifically carotinoids) is incorporated into their plumage.

There was surprisingly little activity at Legacy Park, other than a small girl feeding seed to the Mallards. Generally speaking, Sora and Wilson’s Snipe are more common there than they now are at the lagoon, as are a few fresh-water ducks, and even oddballs like Red-whiskered Bulbul pop in and out — the last bird mostly out, as in somewhere else, in my experience. Nope. Nada. Nil. Femi visited there earlier and found a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, which the rest of us missed.

Chris Lord and I stopped at the SW corner of Mulholland Drive and Las Virgenes road and found seven Lewis’ Woodpeckers, where I’d found a bunch four days earlier. Over fifty have been reported from the general area, including Malibu Creek State Park where Lillian and I saw about a dozen last Tuesday. Quite an irruption; the most I’ve every heard of in this area.

Lunchtime at King Gillette (named for the razor blade magnate) brought towhees, kinglets, titmice, Yellow-rumped Warblers, two Red-tailed Hawks and foreboding Turkey Vultures. Do they like peanut-butter sandwiches? I hope not. No Nanday Parakeets though, which are usually around.

King Gillette set up a very weird drive-through display for Christmas. The fronts (only the fronts) of little houses and stores, animals of wicker (see checklist below), fake snow, Santas and elves in abundance, little lights everywhere. Drive through it at night with the lights all aglow and it would look quite cheery and festive and a delight for children of all ages, as they say. I suppose. In daylight it just looked weird.

In the middle of all this excitement was a pine tree with a roosting Barn Owl. Chris and Ruth have been peeking at it for months. There are sometimes two, in two adjacent trees, but only one today, peeking at us, squinty-eyed.

Nuttall’s Woodpecker are a near-endemic species of California; their breeding range extends down into northern Baja California and they occasionally wander north into Oregon. Not a large range, but common enough within it. We heard their rattle more often than we saw the bird.

I originally put “raindeer” on the list and several people felt compelled to send me a correction to “reindeer.” Now duly corrected. But that piqued my etymological curiosity. I can understand deer in the rain being called (erroneously) “raindeer,” but are they “reindeer” because the Saami (Santa Claus’ Laplandian native tribe (not)) make them haul their sleighs around, controlled with reins by the driver?

Nope.

The word comes not from rain-deer or rein-deer, but from (most likely) an Old Norse word ‘hreindyri,’ which divides into hreinn + dyr. ‘Dyr’ means ‘animal’ while ‘hreinn‘ is — and this is really helpful — the Old Norse name for the reindeer. This seems a bit strange, as I’m sure the Old Norse could discern that a reindeer was an animal, so appending ‘animal’ onto a perfectly adequate name for an animal doesn’t make much sense. To me. They weren’t always whacked out on mead. And I wonder if ‘hreinn‘ might not be cognate with ‘horn.’ ‘Horn-deer’ makes a lot more sense than ‘reindeer animal.’ Further searching quickly led me into repetitive and viciously cyclical self-referential entries about proto-Germanic and proto-Indo-European languages, folk and fake etymologies, without any satisfactory enlightenment.

Anyone out there care to take a look at ‘reindeer’ and ‘hreindyri‘, and get back to us?

Lu stopped by Malibu Creek State Park, across Las Virgenes Hwy. from King Gillette after meeting us for lunch, and then by Sepulveda Basin Nature Reserve on his way back home, and picked up a few additional birds at both locations (see list below).

One person sighted a swallow which they identified as a Violet-green. Problem with that ID is that this species is quite uncommon in SoCal in December, whereas Tree Swallow is abundant in some areas. The two are easily confused because they are both glossy, have pale faces and prominent white areas on their sides between the tail and the rear of the wings—their fuselage, so to speak. So I put it down as a Tree/Violet-green Swallow.

Last but far from least was an excellent sighting of a Bobcat at King Gillette. We’ve seen them before in various parks in this part of the Santa Monica Mountains, but they always beat a hasty retreat, vanishing over the hill or into the brush. This Bobcat was sitting in the sun on the ground squirrel-festooned lawn at King Gillette, near the brush at the northern border of the property, quite close to one of Santa’s Little Helper-houses, and did not look at all like it was thinking about moving just because a few pesky humans had come along. We all looked at each other for a few minutes, then it roused itself and stretched-staggered-slunk into the brush, not far from the California Quail who had been enjoying the sun not far away. The Bobcat’s tail was short and curly.

	Birder’s Outing	Malibu	Malibu	Legacy	King	Malibu	Sepul.
	New Year’s Day 1-1-22	Lagoon	Creek	Park	Gillette	Ck. SP	Basin
1	Gr. White-fronted Goose						X
1	Canada Goose	X
1	Northern Shoveler	X
1	Gadwall	X	X	X
1	American Wigeon	X	X
1	Mallard	X	X	X	X
1	Green-winged Teal	X
1	Ring-necked Duck				X
1	Surf Scoter	X
1	Bufflehead	X
1	Red-breasted Merganser	X	X
1	Ruddy Duck	X		X
4	California Quail				X
2	Pied-billed Grebe	X
2	Eared Grebe	X
2	Western Grebe	X
7	Feral Pigeon	X		X	X
7	Band-tailed Pigeon				X
7	Mourning Dove	X		X	X
8	White-throated Swift	X				X
8	Anna’s Hummingbird	X		X
8	Allen’s Hummingbird	X		X	X
2	American Coot	X		X	X
5	Black-bellied Plover	X
5	Killdeer	X		X
5	Whimbrel	X
5	Ruddy Turnstone	X
5	Sanderling	X
5	Least Sandpiper	X
5	Spotted Sandpiper		X
5	Willet	X
6	Bonaparte’s Gull	X
6	Heermann’s Gull	X
6	Ring-billed Gull	X
6	Western Gull	X		X
6	California Gull	X
6	Herring Gull	X
6	Glaucous-winged Gull	X
6	Royal Tern	X
2	Pacific Loon	X
2	Black-vented Shearwater	X
2	Double-crested Cormorant	X		X
2	Pelagic Cormorant	X
2	American White Pelican						X
2	Brown Pelican	X
3	Great Blue Heron	X
3	Great Egret	X		X
3	Snowy Egret	X			X
3	Green Heron	X	X
3	Black-crowned Night-Heron	X	X				X
4	Turkey Vulture	X	X	X	X
4	Osprey	X	X
4	Northern Harrier					X
4	Red-shouldered Hawk	X			X
4	Red-tailed Hawk	X	X	X	X
8	Barn Owl				X
8	Belted Kingfisher		X
8	Acorn Woodpecker				X
8	Lewis’ Woodpecker				X
8	Nuttall’s Woodpecker	X	X		X
8	Downy Woodpecker	X		X
8	North.(Red-shafted) Flicker				X
9	Black Phoebe	X		X	X
9	Say’s Phoebe				X
9	Cassin’s Kingbird				X
9	California Scrub-Jay	X			X
9	American Crow	X	X	X	X
9	Common Raven			X	X
9	Tree/Violet-green Swallow					X
9	Oak Titmouse				X
9	Bushtit	X		X
9	Marsh Wren	X
9	White-breasted Nuthatch				X
9	Blue-gray Gnatcatcher			X
9	Ruby-crowned Kinglet	X			X
9	Western Bluebird				X
9	Hermit Thrush			X	X
9	Northern Mockingbird	X
9	European Starling	X		X	X
9	House Finch	X		X	X	X
9	Lesser Goldfinch	X		X	X
9	Spotted Towhee				X
9	California Towhee	X		X	X
9	Song Sparrow	X		X
9	White-crowned Sparrow	X		X	X
9	Golden-crowned Sparrow				X
9	Dark-eyed Junco				X	X
9	Western Meadowlark			X	X
9	Red-winged Blackbird	X				X
9	Great-tailed Grackle	X
9	Orange-crowned Warbler	X
9	Common Yellowthroat	X		X	X
9	Yellow-rumped Warbler	X		X	X
		Malibu	Malibu	Legacy	King	Malibu	Sepul.
	Total Species	Lagoon	Creek	Park	Gillette	Creek SP	Basin
1	Waterfowl	10	4	3	2	0	1
2	Water Birds – Other	9	0	2	1	0	1
3	Herons, Egrets & Ibis	5	2	1	1	0	1
4	Quail & Raptors	4	3	2	4	1	0
5	Shorebirds	7	1	1	0	0	0
6	Gulls & Terns	8	0	1	0	0	0
7	Doves	2	0	2	3	0	0
8	Other Non-Passerines	5	2	3	6	1	0
9	Passerines	18	1	15	22	4	0
	Totals Species – 93	68	13	30	39	6	3
	Bobcat				1
	Wicker Reindeer				7
	Wicker Bear				3
	Suger Plum Fairy				4,842
	Ground Squirrel (minimum)				25