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
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