Long Beach, CA - 2/16/2024 to 2/18/2024

     After our short stay in Las Vegas, we flew back to San Diego on Friday and drove north to Long Beach in Los Angeles County where we finished out our 10-day west coast vacation.  My daughter was attending the three-day Cali Vibes music festival from Friday through Sunday, which was the main reason for our trip. Our Airbnb was only a few blocks from the beach and only about a 15-minute drive from the music festival.  We pretty much stayed local for Friday and Saturday.  I did not get out to any of the better eBird hotspots around Long Beach.  They were a little too far for me to leave my wife behind while my daughter was at the festival.  I got to know the neighborhood and beach area as that is where I did most of my walking.  There was a park about a half mile or so away that I walked to several times.
Left, Friday sunset at Long Beach, CA.  Right, RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach.  © S. Weiss
The Queen Mary now offers restaurants, a museum and hotel for tourists.

The beach, neighborhood and park provided me with some birding.  At the beach I saw such birds as western grebe, whimbrel, marbled godwit, Heerman’s gull and eared grebes.  The neighborhood provided many black phoebes, Allen/rufous hummingbirds, Swinhoe’s white-eyes, many crows, a few bushtits, Audubon’s yellow-rumped warblers and a California scrub-jay.  Bixby Park offered many of the same birds, plus orange-crowned warblers and my last new life species, mitred parakeets.  The parakeets were, like most parrot species, loud and raucous.  They were often heard earlier in the day flying about overhead, but I don’t recall hearing them at all later in the afternoon.  It took me two days before I was to get one to stay put in a tree so I could get a photo.
Left, Allen's hummingbird at Colorado Lagoon.  Right, mitred parakeet at Bixby Park.
 © S. Weiss


Left, California scrub-jay.  Right, Audubon's yellow-rumped warbler.  © S. Weiss

Eared grebes.  © S. Weiss

A very friendly fox squirrel that ran up and greeted me at Bixby Park.  © S. Weiss

On our last full day in California, we took a short trip back to Huntington Beach.  I dropped my wife and daughter off near the beach so they could visit the shops and I went to Huntington Central Park.  The park is one of the top eBird hotspots in Orange County.  Several good birds had been reported there in the previous days and I wanted to try my best to find a couple of them.  The problems were that the park is very big, over 340 acres, and I had never been there before.  I didn’t have much time and I didn’t really have a plan to maximize my time there.  I was probably only there but a half hour when my daughter called to say they were ready to be picked up back at the beach.  I couldn’t take too much more time searching for those good birds because we had to get back to Long Beach for the last day of the music festival.  Some of the more notable birds I did see in about 45 minutes were:  Eurasian collared-dove, white-throated swifts, Allen’ and Anna’s hummingbirds, long-billed dowitchers, Cassin’s kingbirds, white-eyes, lesser goldfinch, western bluebirds and cinnamon teal.
The famous Huntington Beach pier.  © S. Weiss

Left, Allen's hummingbird.  Right, western bluebird.  © S. Weiss

Left, male cinnamon teal.  Right, cinnamon teal pair.  © S. Weiss

When we first arrived at our Airbnb on Friday afternoon, I put out a small hummingbird feeder that I brought with me on the trip.  I brought the feeder; the landlord provided the sugar and water.  In an area loaded with hummingbirds, all you need to do is supply them with a little nectar.  I hung it from a bird of paradise plant across from our apartment entrance.   If you put it out, they will come.  I spent the last hour or so of California daylight sitting on the porch watching a hummingbird come and go at the feeder.  The sad part about leaving was now that the little bird had found a nectar source, I had to take the feeder back with me.  
Allen's/rufous hummingbirds enjoying the feeder I set out for them.  © S. Weiss




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