By Charles Hood
As an addendum to the great reporting on this site the California deserts, I wanted to add a note pointing out that California City and Silver Saddle Resort are famous as birding sites. Regular birdwatching keeps relatively normal hours and one usually goes to relatively attractive places. In regular birdwatching, one might go on vacation to the Everglades; in contrast, regular birdwatchers do not go out of their way to visit California City.
Birders are not regular birdwatchers, and birders, on average, love California City—at least in migration, and especially when a rarity shows up. Compared to birdwatchers, birders are the type A, list-keeping, drive-all-night side of the spectrum. If an unusual sighting turns up, forget work, they will drive from San Francisco to the Baker Sewage Ponds to see it. (Then turn around and drive right back.)
Birders keep lists and the lists are insatiable: there is always more more more to chase, to see, to add to one’s total. The typical birder has a life list (everything seen world-wide, from eagles to emus to emerald hummingbirds), but then on top of that, he or she has a yard list (what has been seen from your own property), a county list, a state list, and a year list. These are all specific numeric totals: either you saw it or you didn’t, and it either is on your list or it is not. Keeping lists allows for rankings. Listing thus is competitive, though in a congenial way: information is shared freely and nobody tries to scare off a bird so nobody else can see it.
Birders live in a world of constant flux, constant hope, constant readiness. The birds permit this since they move around so much. How migration in California works is that (a) it is year-round, so southbound shorebirds are already turning up by late June, having just flown in from the Arctic tundra, while in July the mountain hummingbirds cross the deserts, heading back to the tropics. In this sense, “Fall Migration” lasts from early summer to mid-winter. And by then already in January some hummingbirds are ready to come north and great horned owls are hooting for mates.
At the same time, (b), a few migrants are always turning up someplace they do not normally belong. Tropical birds may get pushed north by late-summer monsoons, or sometimes the left-right switch in a warbler’s brain gets reversed, and instead of following the Atlantic Coast to Cuba, the errant bird finds itself in the Mojave Desert, thinking, “I knew I should have stopped in Nebraska and asked for directions.”
These lost souls are called vagrants, and to a birder, finding a good vagrant is better than finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. It is an intellectual challenge, as one sorts out the plumage details; it is an ego boost (if you are the finder and can alert others); and seeing a new bird means your list gets pushed an inch higher up the flagpole. Seeing all the regular birds in California is relatively easy; even horned puffins are not that hard to find if you have the right directions. The vagrants, though—they are the list builders. You can’t predict when they will come, but some places are more likely than others to produce good vagrants. And Silver Saddle Resort—usually just called “Galileo” after the nearby hilltop—is a prime vagrant territory, especially in fall. You have lawns and trees and lakes, desert shrub and weedy ditches. For a thrush from Novia Scotia, exhausted after crossing desert after desert from the Rockies to Kern County, Silver Saddle looks like a small and perfect piece of heaven. It is going to drop down and try to rest and feed and hope it doesn’t get snatched away midair by a Cooper’s hawk… which is also on migration, and also aware what the semiotics of trees and water promise.
Year after year, the records accumulate, leading to total numbers that may surprise you. Galileo has a bird list of 324 species. This includes five species of goose, four species of seagull, five kinds of owls, and a whopping forty species of warblers, one of which came from Siberia. Nearby California City Central Park has a big list too. In fact, there have been more species of birds seen in California City than in all of Central Park in Manhattan. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Woody Allen.
These days the internet allows one to know instantly what is being seen and by whom. In the long-ago days of messages written on paper plates and thumbtacked to notice boards, one left updates in various markets in California City or places like the Visitor Center in Death Valley. In the 1980s, payphones allowed access to the “bird box”—a central message service—and briefly, there was a pager system. You would get a call, letting you know there was a ruddy ground-dove in Death Valley, and did you want to ride shotgun? You betcha, and we can hit Galileo on the way back.
There generally has been full access for birders and day-trippers to Galileo. Rules varied; sometimes you could park at the petting zoo and sometimes not, and usually, you signed a liability waiver at the front desk. You were not supposed to peer into some of the motel units. Be careful around the skeet range if there is live firing. But on average, access was unrestricted.
That of course has changed. As of this update, the official California state bird list is 676, which represents the largest total in the United States—higher even than Alaska or Texas. Long as that list is, people always make guesses about what will be the next new bird. Whenever someplace like Galileo is off-limits during peak vagrant season, more than one person looks covetously at the trees and lawns just on the other side of the fence. Bird number 677 could be just a hundred meters away… and for now, none of us can get in to look for it.
Charles Hood is the author of A Californian’s Guide to the Birds Among Us (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2013); he stopped working on his state list when it reached 500.