[Text by Chuck Almdale, photos by Ray Juncosa, Chris Tosdevin & Karen Woo]

A large group of people waited at the entrance gate to Madrona Marsh at 8:30am, but they weren’t birders. Most were Eagle Scouts, there to build some sort of wooden structure. They were still at it when we left at 11:30, and I still couldn’t tell what it was. A lot of other people had shown up: trail-workers, weed-pullers, tree-fanciers, docents. Even the number of birders for our walk was sizable — seventeen.

The nine vernal pools were full of water, and there were plenty of waterfowl and Red-winged Blackbirds there to celebrate.

The male red-wings seemed eager to get on with breeding, as everywhere in and near the reed beds they were prominently displaying their red & yellow epaulets.

Once upon a time some meddling research scientists decided to see how important bright red epaulets were to the males. They captured a few, colored their epaulets black, and released them back into their marsh. They immediately lost their territories and the females ignored their courting maneuvers. No breeding for them! Upon hearing this woeful tale, one birder asked me if the scientists restored the red to the epaulets so the males could regain their territories and all would again be right with the world. Sorry to say, I don’t know for sure, but knowing how these things went decades ago, I suspect not.

One of the male Red-winged Blackbirds had a white head, what is frequently called partially leucistic (rather than albino). Leucism doesn’t seem to be an inherited trait and appears uncommonly in many different species. [I’ve seen leucistic robins and hummingbirds elsewhere.] Another bird had a light speckling of white (right photo below, look very closely).

Also in the reeds, and rather annoyingly well-hidden were the Scaly-breasted Munias, a very pretty little bird which I always enjoy seeing. They’re colorful and have a nice song, which is why they’ve been domesticated as cage birds for many decades – perhaps centuries – with the inevitable escaping from confinement and flight to the local wildlands. People who keep birds in cages or around their homes like to give their feathered companions names, and I suspect this species Lonchura punctulata has the most English names of any species I’ve ever heard of: Spice Finch, Spice Munia, Nutmeg Finch, Nutmeg Mannikin, Nutmeg Munia, Ricebird, Spotted Manikin, Spotted Munia, Checkered Munia, Scaled Munia, Scaly-breasted Mannikin, Scaly-breasted Munia. That’s twelve and I probably missed some. It also has names in at least 62 other languages, from Asturian to Esperanto to Ukrainian. [Esperanto! Imagine that.] Definitely a world-traveler.

Scaly-breasted Munia (info link), by whatever name, naturally range from eastern Afghanistan to eastern China and south through Indonesia to east of the Wallace Line. With human help, they’re just about everywhere, and have been in SoCal since the 1980’s. We’ve seen them on trips to Huntington Beach Central Park for several decades.

We didn’t have many warbler species (two), but we had a lot of Yellow-rumped Warblers in every plumage variation you might expect (or fear). When I began birding, I remember Roger Tory Peterson making many useful comments in the introduction to his ground-breaking field guides: e.g. keep a life list, the first 300 species you see are “trash birds,” learn well your common local birds so when something unusual appears, you’ll know it’s unusual and will mutter to yourself, “My, my, that looks different! I’d better get a good look.” All sound advice.

And that’s why I tell birders that the Yellow-rumped Warbler is about as variable as any of the warblers you’ll ever see. You can see a group of ten and they could easily all like potentially different species. And in another month or 500 miles away, they’ll all look different from today and here. A good bird to learn. This one below had an unusual amount of black on the face. Photographer Chris Tosdevin thought it might be a “possible juvenile side molt.”

Chris thought the bird below to be a Yellow Warbler when he photographed it. They can look quite unlike their summer selves in the winter. It also seems to have an eye-ring, which is usually subdued in this species.

We couldn’t tell if there were twenty Cassin’s Kingbirds or only one who got around. A lot. I never saw more than one at a time. It certainly was everywhere, forcing everyone to keep re-identifying it over and over (and over) again. White chin, dark gray neck and breast, no white outer tail-feathers.

Blue-gray Gnatcatchers seem to love Madrona. We had at least eight, and I see that in 2016 we had thirteen, which seems a lot for an area completely surrounded by suburbia and no hilly chaparral in sight. This turned out to be a lifer for one of the birders.

I was looking forward to seeing the Pin-tailed Whydahs, another escaped cage bird that’s been expanding its SoCal range for at least the past few years, but which I had somehow missed. I’d seen them in Sub-Saharan Africa, where they range widely, but that was thirty years ago. All the ones we saw today – the best count was 18 – looked like the two pictured below with thick bright red bill, streaky head and back and mostly white chest & belly. They’re too recent an escapee to be in my NGS field guide (2011) 6th edition, but a few people found them on their phone app, once we figured out how to spell it (that extra “h”). We narrowed them down to male or female, non-breeding, which isn’t particularly narrow.

In breeding plumage the males have red bills and females usually have “blackish” bills. In non-breeding plumage the male bills are still red, but females can have red or blackish-red. All the birds I saw had bright solid-red bills, but they could be of either sex.

They hail from sub-Saharan Africa where, once the desert stops, they start, almost all the way to Cape Town. The site linked to below this photo has lots of info, plus song recordings.

We certainly did not see any males like the one above, who – in addition to his long pin-tail – appears to be standing in mid-air, which is a good trick, sure to impress any female watching.

But that was not the end of the oddities. There were Northern Flickers of two persuasions. Most were of the expected western Red-shafted subspecies, but at least one (quite possibly two) were of the eastern Yellow-shafted subspecies. Sometime you get only a hint, as in the photo below, where all you get indicating Yellow-shafted is the brownish face and the tiny tiny glimpse of red on the nape. There seems to be no black whisker-mark (aka moustachial stripe).

However, in the photo below, the yellow shouts at you, unmistakably.

These two species were considered separate species until roughly 30 years ago when they were discovered interbreeding in (I believe) Nebraska. Apparently the two populations became widely separated at some point in geological time (perhaps during or following an ice-age) and their plumages diverged. When Europeans arrived, spread across the Great Plains and began planting trees around their homes, the eastern and western woodpeckers spread towards each other across the otherwise-treeless plain, eventually meeting each other mid-continent. Although they looked different, it wasn’t enough of a difference to inhibit their mating with one another. Following the widely-accepted “biological concept of speciation,” if two forms of an animal mate and bear fertile offspring, they’re the same species, whatever their appearance. Charles Darwin considered subspecies to indicate a species in the process of diverging into two but not quite there, and the only diagram in his book On the Origin of Species illustrates this. Given sufficient time and continued geographical separation, the Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted could well have each become “good species.”

Hummers of two species were scattered about the grounds, conveniently perching on bare twig-ends, easy to spot.

And sparrows of various persuasions were out and about. Near the vernal pools the chorus of Song Sparrows was nearly deafening at the start of our walk.

It may look like a saddle-without-a-horse, but the photo below is of a tree (or shelf) fungus. Note the fence lizard considerately situating itself for size comparison.

When we returned to our cars, we found a large lunch-tent in the middle of the parking lot serving plates of pizza. We assumed this was for the benefit of the work crews and boy scouts who were doing actual useful work in the marsh, and not for birders loafing their way around the grounds, so we restrained ourselves (so far as I know) from helping ourselves.

As always, many thanks to our photographers: Ray Juncosa, Chris Tosdevin and Karen Woo.