Salton Sea

Leaving behind the scenic California coast we headed east for a two-night stay in Brawley, situated near the southern end of the Salton Sea. Shortly before we reached Brawley we saw our first of many Greater Roadrunners and Burrowing Owls and also one of the least expected birds of the tour, a Zone-tailed Hawk.

Burrowing Owl – a close relation of the Little Owl, familiar to us in Europe.

The 35-mile long Salton Sea is the largest lake in California that owes its existence to an irrigation scheme started at the end of the 19th Century. In 1905, when heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell and breach an Imperial Valley dike it took nearly two years to control the river’s flow into the formerly dry Salton Sink and stop the flooding. The sudden influx of water and the lack of drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea. It became a desert oasis and a thriving tourist attraction but by the 1970s, as the sea grew heavy with salt, sewage and agricultural chemicals, disease outbreaks began to kill birds and fish and tourists stopped coming.




Cleaning up the lake became one of the issues championed by Sonny Bono during his two terms in Congress (1995-98). Who would have thought back in the 1960s when he was a successful singer, songwriter and actor, that following his premature death he would have a National Wildlife Refuge named after him as a result of his efforts to reverse the environmental problems of the Salton Sea?

Eared or Black-necked Grebe

Black-crowned Night Heron

Least Sandpiper

Great Egret

American White Pelicans

Western Sandpiper

The Salton Sea continues to be an outstanding location for birds and birders. Situated within the Pacific Flyway it provides important habitat for migrating and wintering birds. We had only a short time there but managed to see an excellent variety of shorebirds and wildfowl. As so often, it was large numbers of birds that impressed most – thousands of Snow and Ross’s Geese, Sandhill Cranes and White-faced Ibises.







We were to see many more Sandhill Cranes in Arizona…

Coastal Southern California

We’re just back from the USA, a trip that included a two-week Avian Adventures tour in California and Arizona. This was followed by a week on our own in Arizona with just a brief excursion into New Mexico. Almost throughout our stay we enjoyed clear blue skies and most days the temperature rose to at least 21º C. Early mornings were sometimes cold but we always knew that it would soon warm up.

We flew to Los Angeles and spent our first night in Newport Beach, about 45 miles to the south. Birding began the following morning (Christmas Eve) on the hotel car park where Western Bluebirds, Orange-crowned Warbler, Anna’s Hummingbird and Black Phoebe were very confiding and threatened to delay our departure. However, we were soon on our way to Upper Newport Bay where our visit coincided with one of the year’s highest tides and ideal conditions to see the area’s most notable bird, the “Light-footed” Clapper Rail. Not only did we see several of this restricted range subspecies but also Soras, a Virginia Rail and two American Bitterns, all of them forced out of the cordgrass by the rising water. It was an ideal place to start the tour and in no time at all we had seen 40 or more species – ducks, shorebirds, pelicans, raptors and more local specialities in the form of California Gnatcatcher and the beldingi subspecies of Savannah Sparrow.

Black-necked Stilt with dragonfly

Later, we spent some time at the nearby San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, an area of freshwater ponds that boasts 11 miles of nature trails. Here we had good close views of a variety of common ducks and shorebirds and saw our first Vermilion Flycatcher, always a crowd-pleaser. From there we headed to Dana Point where sadly we arrived a day too late to see the Masked Booby that had been hanging out there throughout the previous week. Those in our group who hadn’t previously seen one were just as impressed by a Pacific Loon.

Pacific Loon

Christmas Day was spent birding around San Diego, including the South Bay area, Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge and along Monument Road that leads to Border Field State Park. The South Bay area in particular was full of birds and again we were fortunate to have a high tide to push the hundreds of shorebirds into close view. Tijuana Slough provided the Little Blue Heron that we had hoped for, not a very common species in California, but along Monument Road, in fading light, we were frustrated in our attempts to see the many Wrentits that could be heard singing from the brushy hillside. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was here within sight of the border ‘fence’ that we had our first encounter with the US Border Patrol.

US Navy ship in the South Bay with rafts of ducks, mainly Redheads and Lesser Scaup.

Willet - the western race inornata.

Little Blue Heron

Before leaving the coast we spent a most enjoyable morning at La Jolla, an attractive little town just north of San Diego where we were able to get up close to Harbour Seals, Brown Pelicans, Brandt’s Cormorants, Heermann’s, Western and Ring-billed Gulls and Royal Terns. More distant were Western Grebes on the sea and Black-vented Shearwaters flying over it. Shorebirds included Black Turnstones, Hudsonian Whimbrel and Willets. We might have hoped for more but on a beautiful, warm and sunny morning in such a scenic area, no one was complaining!

Brown Pelican

Royal Tern

Harbour Seal - looking a bit puzzled!

Next, the Salton Sea…

Ethiopia - Part 5

The Awash region was undoubtedly among the most productive and enjoyable parts of Ethiopia that we visited. We stayed at Awash Falls Lodge, located within Awash National Park and at Bilen Lodge in the arid Afar country to the north-east.

An impressive variety of birds included the huge Somali Ostrich, the tiny Ashy Cisticola, the striking Rosy-patched Bush-shrike, the endemic Sombre Rock Chat, Harlequin Quail, Heuglin's Courser, Gillett's Lark and Eastern Grey Plantain-eater.

We saw more mammals here than anywhere else in the country, amongst them Grevy's Zebra, Soemmering’s Gazelle, Beisa Oryx, Gerenuk, Lesser Kudu and Salt’s Dikdik.

Pallid Harriers were seen commonly in a variety of habitats and finally one posed for a photograph! This is a species undergoing a steep population decline in Europe mainly as a result of the destruction and degradation of steppe grasslands through conversion to arable agriculture.

Lichtenstein's Sandgrouse - very confiding birds seen at Bilen Lodge. We also saw plenty of Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse.

Awash Falls - a more impressive sight than we expected.

Arabian Bustard - we also saw Buff-crested, Kori and White-bellied Bustards in this area.

Northern White-faced Owl - we saw six owl species in all, a dozen individual birds.

Secretarybird - its common name is popularly thought to refer to the crest of long quill-like feathers, lending the bird the appearance of a secretary with quill pens tucked behind his or her ear. More recently it has been suggested that "secretary" is derived from a French corruption of the Arabic saqr-et-tair or "hunter-bird." Whatever, it's a pretty strange bird!

Hooded Vulture - seen around most towns and villages and attracted to garbage everywhere!

We have another tour in Ethiopia planned for December 2012 with a slightly modified itinerary. Details are on the Avian Adventures website.

Ethiopia - Part 4

The Bale Mountains form a spectacular mountain range rising to more than 4,300 metres that are home to many of Ethiopia's endemic birds and mammals. It was a part of the country that we had particularly been looking forward to visiting.

It was unfortunate then that low cloud and rain were the main features of our time in the mountains! Although we did manage to see most of the key species, including an Ethiopian Wolf, the world's most endangered canid, opportunities for photography were very limited.

Rouget's Rail - endemic to Ethiopia and Eritrea and listed as 'Near Threatened' by BirdLife International. Habitat loss resulting from the ever-growing human population seems to be the main problem.

Abyssinian Owl - formerly treated as conspecific with Long-eared Owl. This very obliging bird was one of the highlights of the tour.

The Sanetti Plateau where Giant Lobelias are a feature of a remarkable Afro-alpine moorland landscape.

Mountain Nyala - its range is now restricted to the Bale Mountains.

The Sanetti Plateau supports the only know sub-Saharan breeding populations of three Palearctic species: Red-billed Chough, Golden Eagle and Ruddy Shelduck.

Abyssinian Ground Thrush - a secretive, ground-dwelling bird, treated by some authorities as conspecific with the Kivu Ground Thrush that we have seen in Uganda.

Abyssinian Ground-hornbill - a species seen frequently during the tour at lower elevation, this one, a male, was surprisingly in the grounds of our hotel in Goba at the base of the Bale escarpment.

We hope to return to the Bale Mountains one day and to see them bathed in sunshine!

Ethiopia - Part 3

South of Addis Ababa the main road passes through the Central Rift Valley and close to a succession of lakes that are of major importance for resident birds and for Palearctic and Afrotropical migrants.

Pied Kingfisher - common around most of the lakes.

Egyptian Geese - seen most days of the tour.

We were able to visit Lakes Cheleleka, Hora, Ziway, Langano and Awassa and made brief stops at others when we were travelling.

Although wetland birds were the main focus, the lakes are surrounded by bird-rich savannas and forest and the diversity of species was impressive.

Fields of vegetables at Lake Cheleleka come as a surprise to the first-time visitor expecting to find Ethiopia a country of famine and drought.

Fishing at Lake Awassa attracts pelicans, cormorants, egrets, gulls and terns.

Roosting Slender-tailed Nightjars were easy to find in the grounds of our hotel at Lake Langano.

One of several Greyish Eagle-Owls that we saw, this one was at Lake Langano.

This much bigger Verreaux's Eagle-Owl and its mate were being mobbed by Fan-tailed Ravens.

Greenshank, one of the many wader species wintering around the lakes.

African Pygmy-geese at Lake Ziway; they are attractive little birds but are they geese or ducks?

Western Reef Egrets are mainly coastal and this one at Lake Hora was the only one we saw. It had us thinking about those apparent hybrids we see around Tavira.

Superb Starling - common and widespread.

Masked Shrike, a species that we had seen before only in Lesvos. We saw 18 species of shrikes, bush-shrikes, boubous, etc in Ethiopia.

More from Ethiopia soon...