Our next group outing will be at Toro Canyon Park. It’s a quiet location where we should be able to hear lots of oak woodland and chaparral birds and see how the Merlin app’s new Sound ID feature does at identifying them. Location: Toro Canyon County Park, 576 Toro Canyon Park. Date/time: Saturday, August 21, 2021, 8:00…

For our next online meeting we’ll talk about birding by ear and the new “Sound ID” feature of the Merlin bird identification app. We’ll also discuss the ethics of using recorded playback to attract birds. It should be a fun topic! Special guest: Hugh Ranson. The meeting will take place via Zoom and YouTube livestream…

My apologies, Carpinteria Birdwatchers members. I’ve been distracted (by birdwatching, among other things) and overlooked the rapid approach of tomorrow’s third Thursday of the month, when we normally have our monthly Zoom meeting. Since I don’t have a topic prepared I’ve made the decision to cancel this month’s meeting. We’ll take a break in July,…

As we discussed in our latest Zoom meeting (Carp Snowy Plovers and the CLSF: Carpinteria Birdwatchers meeting for Thursday, June 24), we’re going to resume monthly group outing. The first such outing will take place next Saturday, July 3. Location: Carpinteria State Beach, including the snowy plover nest site east of Carpinteria Creek Date/time: Saturday,…

If you’ve been following my updates to this post you’ll know that I’ve spent most of my birding time over the past month watching the family of snowy plovers near the mouth of Carpinteria Creek. The eggs have hatched, the female bird has departed, and the male bird and the three chicks are still going…

Note: This page covers events from 2019 through 2021. For later developments with the Carpinteria snowy plovers, see this post: The snowy plovers are back! I wanted to give an update on the latest snowy plover news, and I thought I’d put it in the form of a timeline that I can update going forward….

Late yesterday afternoon Tom Beland texted me to let me know that the snowy plover nest we’ve been watching at Carpinteria State Beach had hatched. Three baby plovers were roaming around the vicinity of the nest site and taking shelter under the adult male bird. Unless I’m mistaken this is the first successful hatching of…

As of yesterday the snowy plover nest near the mouth of Carpinteria Creek is still going strong, with the female bird incubating during the day and the male bird presumably around somewhere, though I haven’t seen him on my last few (brief) visits. But he’s good at disappearing, then popping up right underfoot when I’m…

Although Snowy Plovers previously bred along Carpinteria beaches, they had ceased to do so by 1960. In 2013 Adrian O’Loghlen found an adult with two fledglings on the beach just west of Carpinteria, but that had been the only documented breeding record in the last 60 years.* Until now! Two weeks ago, on May 10,…

Dave Ledig is a Carpinterian who is also project leader for the California Condor recovery program with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. During a conversation last Friday he told me that he and his wife Julie had recently observed a pair of Black Oystercatchers nesting on the beach near the harbor seal pupping site…