Birding the Industrial Park - Islands of Nature on the Concrete Savannah

By Mel Carriere

I guess you could say I am not a birding purist.  My love affair with Wild Birds didn't fledge in the jungles of Costa Rica or in the swamps of the Everglades.  Birds began to pique my interest right where I found them, in the city where I lived.  Years before I really started birding in earnest I remember sitting on my second hand apartment couch and looking out the window at a tree in which a flock of Starlings roosted.  The Starlings were ugly, sooty little things, but I marveled at them and wondered what they were.  I knew there was secret life in the trees even then, secret life that surrounds us on a daily basis but we rarely realize exists.

25 years later I am a little better off economically, but I am still not snooty about my birding.  True, these days I am more annoyed than awestruck by Starlings, but I still don't own a fancy pair of binoculars and I still take my birding right where I can find it, sometimes in the hardcore industrial heart of the city.

On Sundays I work a part time security job at a biotech firm in Northern San Diego.  The company is nestled deep within a canyon that is carpeted primarily by other Biotechs, but includes other types of businesses as well.  The beautiful thing about this concrete Savannah; which I call the Concrete Savannah, not jungle, because it is a mostly open place interspersed by trees, and about San Diego in general is that industrialized canyons of this type still serve as wildlife corridors.  There may be nothing but concrete, glass and asphalt down in the canyon bottom and up on the ridge top, but the canyon walls continue to function as a freeway for passing animals and embrace a sizable chunk of the Sage Scrub habitat that typifies the SoCal Coast.  As such it is not surprising to find a herd of deer grazing on the corporate lawn in the morning, or to look out the window and spy a pair of Bobcats frolicking by the picnic tables.

Birds abound in this environment.  The falling ping-pong ball song of the Wrentit bounces through the Canyonlands.  Haughtily crested Roadrunners scrounge for lizards in the thick brush.  Sometimes a California Thrasher can be seen scraping through the leaf litter like a Roadrunner wannabe, but will quickly leap high to a dried Yucca branch, from where it trumpets out its rambling, dissonant song.  Down below that dead stick, California Quail pine for the windy city (Chi-ca-go) from the safe depths of the Chamise, Sage and Sumac.

Rolling down from the steep hillsides the bird life assumes a more suburban flavor, but it does not thin out.  The deep canyon Nuttall's Woodpecker still noisily slums among the Eucalyptus branches here, but the Wrentits and California Gnatcatchers of the pure Sage Scrub are replaced by Towhees, Song Sparrows, and tail flicking Phoebes.  In some distant stand of ornamental Ficus trees some Kingbirds can be heard barking out their raucous, tyrannical orders, and in the ornamental Bottlebrush trees decorating the lot, Yellow-rumped Warblers forage among the gaudy spiked red blooms, looking as at home there as they might be on a distant conifer carpeted mountainside.

I make my rounds checking doors and reading meters mostly accompanied to the song of the ubiquitous Song Sparrows that foray out from their hiding places in the planted hedges.  There are no rarities or exotics down there in the canyon bottom Concrete Savannah, but a highly diverse assortment of winged life still clings tenaciously to whatever refuges it can find there among the glass buildings and the invasive, introduced trees that shade them, proving that no matter how hard he struggles to do so, man cannot completely pave over nature.


Photo on the left is my own poor work.

Photo on the right is attributed to: "Melospiza melodia -Battery Park, New Castle, Delaware, USA -singing-8" by Keith - Flickr: Doing what it does best (Melospiza melodia). Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Melospiza_melodia_-Battery_Park,_New_Castle,_Delaware,_USA_-singing-8.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Melospiza_melodia_-Battery_Park,_New_Castle,_Delaware,_USA_-singing-8.jpg

Fuzzy Yellow-Rumped Warblers on My Lawn - Why I Will Never Have Fake Grass

By Mel Carriere

Yes I love birds, so it is a shame that I am an awful photographer.  A lot of my inability to take good bird pictures comes from that you can't trust me with a good camera.  I tend to be very thoughtless with gadgets and delicate devices don't last long in my crude, careless hands.

Since I am a danger to quality optics, I try to make do with my cell phone camera, but it is next to useless when taking pictures of birds.  Even birds that are a few feet away come out blurry on my cell phone, as was the case with some Yellow-Rumped Warblers I was attempting to take photographs of from my car the other day.  I will let you judge for yourself.  On the left is the stock Wikipedia photo of an Audubon's Yellow-Rumped Warbler, taken by somebody Pterzian, who is apparently so excellent at his craft that he is not even required to use a last name like the rest of us.  It seems like all the great artists are allowed to get by with a single name; "Morrisey" of the Smiths comes immediately to mind.  We hear a Smiths tune and we say, "Oh that's Morrisey singing," not Steven Patrick Morrisey, which is his full god given name.  The same must hold true for this Pterzian fellow.  People in the know look at his bird pics and say in an awestruck tone of voice, "Oh, that's Pterzian."  But nobody would ever look at my fuzzy picture on the right and say "That's Carriere," unless the sentence was punctuated by a derisive snort.

Believe it or not, the bird on the left and the bird on the right are one and the same species, although it's even hard to tell there's a bird on the right.  All that can be discerned is a patch in the green lawn that doesn't quite fit in.  It could just be a picture of dead grass or maybe even a dried dog turd.

It could be that my lack of photographic skills is the very reason Setophaga coronata feels so safe on my lawn.  There is an ancient taboo against images that dates back through thousands of years of history and might extend to the secret superstitious world of birds too.  Images are said to steal the soul of the one being depicted.  If that is the case bird souls are perfectly safe around me because I am a complete failure at taking their pictures and thus stealing their souls.

This is one reason the Yellow-Rumped Warbler feels safe on my lawn.  The other reason could be because I don't have fake grass.  Fake plastic grass is a growing trend here in Southern California.  It saves on the water bill and takes away the annoying necessity of mowing the lawn, leaving the homeowner plenty of time to indulge in other pursuits such as bird photography except - whoops, there are no birds on the fake grass to photograph!

I look forward to the arrival of the Yellow-Rumped Warblers every year because I love to see them poking around for invertebrates on my very real, though somewhat untidy lawn.  On a cool winter's day they are always out there probing the damp greenery, the little flashes of yellow on their wings, sides, throat, crown and rump sometimes being the only signal to their presence, along with the sharp chirp that is their distinctively diagnostic fingerprint.

I am a lazy man to be certain, I do not like mowing the lawn at all, I can't convince my two sons to do it no matter how much money I offer to throw at them, so I could certainly benefit from fake grass.  But how could I deprive these fuzzy Yellow-Rumped Warblers of a place to eat?  They migrate from hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away and imagine if they underwent this grueling journey only to jab their beaks painfully against a hard piece of tasteless vinyl?

Thank you Yellow-Rumped Warblers for taking the time to make this annual pilgrimage to my lawn and providing me with morning entertainment.  Your souls are safe, and your little patch of greenery seething with tasty invertebrate life is safe too.



"Audubon's Warbler Setophaga auduboni" by Pterzian at en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Audubon%27s_Warbler_Setophaga_auduboni.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Audubon%27s_Warbler_Setophaga_auduboni.jpg

Magpie Jays are all in a day's work

By Mel Carriere

Living and working a stone's throw from the Mexican border has always been a mixed blessing of sorts.  There are a lot of things that can be had in Mexico a lot cheaper than they can be acquired stateside; for instance, my wife's Lasik surgery cost a fraction of what it would have in the United States.  As long as you can find a respectable doctor, dentist, auto mechanic or even plastic surgeon, Mexico can lighten the load on your pocket book.  On the down side, runoff from the Tijuana sewage system finds its way into the Tijuana River during rainstorms and surfers stay out of the water or risk winding up dead of a staph infection, as happened recently to a local boarder who didn't heed the warnings.

There are other strange anomalies that leak across the Mexican border, and among these are pet songbirds who fly the coop, take wing and establish colonies of escapees in the wild.  In Mexico there is a booming traffic in birds that would never find their way into cages in the United States because of our strict laws regarding the capture and sale of wild birds.  In Mexico, on the other hand, although these laws certainly exist they are widely ignored, and for this reason caged wild birds abound.  When my wife was growing up in Mexico she had a lot of weird pets, a veritable menagerie of exotic animals, and one of these was a Northern Cardinal.  She tells me the bird was extremely incompatible with captivity, had a bad attitude problem, refused to eat and eventually died.

Cardinals are among the birds held captive in Mexico that have escaped and established colonies just across the border in the Tijuana River Valley.  Another songbird that is nowhere close to its home range but has still managed to eke out a precarious living in the shadow of the cliffs of its native Mexico is the Mexican Magpie Jay, which seems to have established itself in the Tijuana River Valley and other San Diego County locales.

I saw my first Magpie Jays around 2005 in the Sweetwater River Valley in Chula Vista, California.  They were completely anomalous to what I knew to be the natural local avian fauna to be, and it took me a while to figure out what I was seeing.  From a distance their sweeping long tails at first gave me the head-scratching impression that I was seeing their namesake Magpie (which are not naturally occurring in San Diego), and indeed this bird is a member of that same Corvid family that the Magpies occupy.

But the Magpie Jay is not a native San Diegan either.  The home range of this Corvid is actually the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora and farther down the coast to Jalisco.  Philip Unitt's fantastic San Diego Bird Atlas has an impressive page-long write up of this exotic species, which he poetically describes as "A creature that could have sprung from the mind of Dr. Seuss..." Unitt informs us that the Magpie Jay has nested successfully in the Tijuana River Valley.  He also confirms the existence of the birds I saw near the Plaza Bonita shopping mall, which is somewhat of a relief because it means I wasn't slipped a hallucinogenic in my coffee that morning, as I had previously supposed.  

I am writing about Magpie Jays because I spotted a pair of these elegant Seussian sprites flying into a Eucalyptus Tree as I made my mail rounds through the Tijuana River Valley today.  I have one delivery in the river valley that requires an approximate ten minute detour, and as I was going back up toward Saturn boulevard on the way out I stopped to chat with a pair of birders who reported that they had not seen much of interest.  Shortly after bidding them farewell I spotted the two Magpie Jays gliding gracefully into the Eucalyptus, steering with those grotesquely elongated tails that don't seem to serve a functional purpose at all except to puff up the bird's vanity. I immediately did a U-turn, excitedly informed the birders about what I had seen, then resumed the drudgery of my appointed rounds.

All in a day's work for a mailman/birder working the Tijuana River Valley.  Despite the area's national reputation among avian aficionados, in the four months I have been on this route I have yet to see anything notable down there; a situation which I hope will soon change as spring approaches and bird migration begins.  Although the Magpie Jay's escapee status means it cannot contribute to the length of my life list, it is nonetheless a pleasantly weird anomaly to witness on a Saturday afternoon.

Photo from:  http://trnerr.org/where-can-i-find-the-mexican-magpie-jay/

Welcome to Birds by Mel - Eurasian Collared Doves Becoming Part of the SoCal Scenery

By Mel Carriere

You may not know this, but the mad mysterious mail blogger Mel Carriere, whose hard biting commentary can be found on The Postal Tsunami, The Truth Bomb, and on Hub Pages, is also a closet birder.  Yes, your humble Mailman slash author can sometimes be found wandering around the river valleys and estuaries of Southern California in the wee hours of the morning with a pair of cheap binoculars hanging around his neck.  His children have disowned him for it, derisively referring to him as a "furry."  His Father has disinherited him, calling him a "tree-hugger."  All the same, Mel's passion for all things avian cannot be suppressed.

Mel's interest in bird life can be directly linked to his employment and his employer.  Sometime in the late 1990s he spotted a White-tailed Kite coursing above a vacant lot, searching for scurrying voles in the dry grass below.  This raptor opened the flood gates.  Curiously enough, this vacant lot was the same place where Mel's Post Office now stands, so the Postal Service and birds were inextricably linked in Mel's destiny.

After this birding epiphany, Mel went out and bought a bird book.  This bird book was not good enough, so he purchased another, and then another.  Now Mel has an entire bookshelf filled with bird books, yet even so his curiosity with bird life cannot be satiated.

Mel Carriere is delighted to share his birding experiences with you here on Birds by Mel.  In addition to observing birds, Mel also likes to talk about himself in the third person, as if he is a big shot.  We hope you enjoy reading about the day to day birding encounters Mel experiences as he swings the satchel up and down America's neighborhoods.  Welcome!

This first installment of Birds by Mel will deal briefly with the Eurasian Collared-Dove, which has completed its Sea to Shining Sea march to the Pacific Ocean and is slowly becoming an every day sight and sound in American neighborhoods.

I just finished submitting an article to Bird Watcher's Digest that dealt with the Eurasian Collared-Dove.  Wish me luck.  I received a somewhat encouraging email back from the editor of that fine publication saying that he could not read my submission yet because of mounds and mounds of articles he has to slog through, but that he was looking forward to reading it.  Yaddah, yaddah,yaddah.  I've received a lot of emails like this during my frustrating attempts to market myself as a writer, but this particular editor actually included details in his email about the Eurasian Collared-Dove, so I know it wasn't just a cookie-cutter email he sends out to all the rejects.  Could there be hope?

In this Bird Watcher's Digest article submission I mentioned that although I have so far observed the Eurasian Collared-Dove twice on my route, I have yet to hear the bird.  In reality I probably have, but just didn't know it.  If one is not paying attention the Eurasian Collared-Dove can be easily mistaken for a Mourning Dove, but during my research for the article I compared the calls of the two birds and can now distinguish between the two.

So there I was throwing mail into a CBU on my route when I heard a repetitive three-note burst of cooing, and looked up in a tree across the street to see a pair of Eurasian Collared-Doves.  I tried to take a picture but my camera phone is woefully inadequate, so you will have to settle for this one above that I borrowed from Wikipedia.

The long and short of my article, which I will post here if it is rejected for publication, is that the Eurasian Collared-Dove has now completely invaded the mainland United States, with the exception of the northeast corner of the continent.  Since being introduced into the New World via the Bahamas in 1974, this species has conquered the continent in the continent in the relatively short span of 40 years.  I first spotted a flock of Collared-Doves about 120 miles east of San Diego in The Imperial Valley in 2008.  Five years later it has finally arrived here upon our Pacific Shores.

Thank you for embarking upon this maiden voyage of Birds By Mel.  There are always interesting things on the wing out there adorning the landscape, and I really look forward to sharing them with you here.  Future posts will undoubtedly be more detailed and interesting than this one was, but thanks for bearing with me.  Happy Birding!

Mel gladly attributes the creator of this fine photo of Eurasian Collared-Doves.  Since he is a crappy photographer, sometimes he has to borrow photos from those much more skilled than he is, including his lovely wife Martha, who took the photo of a Clark's Nutcracker you see in the header during a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.  At any rate, this fine picture of Eurasian Collared-Doves  can be attributed to:  "Streptopelia decaocto -balcony -two-8" by Horia Varlan - originally posted to Flickr as Eurasian Collared Doves preparing to take flight. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Streptopelia_decaocto_-balcony_-two-8.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Streptopelia_decaocto_-balcony_-two-8.jpg