This month’s Carpinteria Birdwatchers Zoom meeting will take place a little later in the month than we’ve been having them. The meeting will be on the evening of Thursday, July 28, 2022, at 6:30 pm Pacific, and will feature special guest Jenny Slaughter. Jenny will talk about two topics: An update on the status of…
Group outing for June 18: Franklin Park
For this month’s meeting we’ll visit Franklin Park in Carpinteria. This small city park features a variety of trees and other vegetation, and is very popular with birds. When I looked in eBird I saw that there has never been a checklist submitted from the park during the month of June. We’ll fix that! 🙂…
Snowy Plovers and Wrens: Carpinteria Birdwatchers meeting for June 16
At this month’s Carpinteria Birdwatchers Zoom meeting we’ll cover two topics: the latest news on the historic nesting of snowy plovers at Carpinteria State Beach, and an overview of Santa Barbara County’s wrens. As part of the wren discussion we’ll also have a brief tutorial on Merlin Sound ID, a wonderful tool for identifying bird…
Troubling pelican mystery
Over the past week birdwatchers in the area have been noticing brown pelicans showing up in places they aren’t normally seen, like inland lakes. Now the following message has been sent out by the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network: Over the weekend, SBWCN experienced an unusually large influx of brown pelican patients. In just two…
Group outing for May 21: Snowy plovers at Carp State Beach!
For this month’s meeting we’ll visit the breeding snowy plovers at Carpinteria State Beach. This year there have been no fewer than five nesting attempts (so far), so there should be plenty of fun plover action. Location: Carpinteria State Beach, including the snowy plover nest site east of Carpinteria Creek Date/time: Saturday, May 21, 2022, 8:00 a.m….
Snowy plover developments as of May 9, 2022
Exciting things have been happening with the snowy plovers at Carpinteria State Beach. I’m going to do my best to summarize the current situation, but I haven’t visited the beach as often as I did for last summer’s nesting, so I’m a little fuzzy on some of the details. I’ll do my best to tighten…
Warblers, part 1: Carpinteria Birdwatchers meeting for May 19
I was surprised when I realized we’ve never had a meeting specifically on warblers. We’ve talked about individual species a few times, but never covered them as a group. For this month’s meeting we’ll correct that by discussing 9 of the most commonly seen warbler species in Santa Barbara County. (Part two, covering rarer warblers,…
Carpinteria Little Big Day results
Six different groups of birders participated in the first Carpinteria Little Big Day today. The team competition was won by the Surf-birds team, with 95 species tallied during the four hours of the competition. Team leader Peter Gaede and team members Hugh Ranson, Will Knowlton, and Jeremy Pohlman were honored at the online awards ceremony…
Snowy plover update: Two chicks and a second nest!
Carpinteria’s snowy plovers continue to make news. The nest established a little over a month ago by plover pa:yb and her mate has now produced two chicks! (I’m not sure what became of the third egg, but there appear to be only two baby plovers on the beach at this point.) The mother, as is…
No Group Outing for April
There will not be a Carpinteria Birdwatchers group outing in April. Instead, I encourage everyone to participate in the Carpinteria Little Big Day event on Saturday, April 23, either by forming a team for the 4-hour competition that will take place between 8 a.m. and noon, or by participating more casually and sharing your results…