Overall, I enjoyed the experience of the day. Instead, I remained in the moment and watched the bird for a few more minutes before heading home back to my feeders. I didn't bother trying to get a photo with my smartphone the bird seemed skittish, and I wanted to minimize my presence as much as possible. It zoomed by in a whirl of blue, brown, and white and perched on the branch where it’d originally been spotted. Thankfully, a few moments later the bluetail flew directly over my head, giving me a clear, bare-eyed view. I'd had enough of chasing the bluetail, and I felt badly that we might have kept her from lunch. While the other birders lingered by the trees and chatted, I fell back to the center of the lawn. On previous afternoons it had been seen hunting for insects on the ground-but today, the crowd kept driving it up to the canopy, or so a frequent visitor told me. I didn’t have binoculars, so I used their directions to direct my gaze, finally landing a peek through the thick foliage.Īs the bird whizzed from tree to tree, the group followed. Everyone aimed their binoculars at the branches, and those who were quick enough to find it began describing its location. Sure enough, after two tense hours, one person whispered that she’d spied the bird up in a tree. But I tried to follow the pros and their cues, knowing they would alert me to any sign of the bluetail. I got distracted more than a few times, either by a flitting Hermit Thrush or an attention-seeking Black Phoebe. I’ll be honest, waiting around in silence in such a tight crowd wasn’t easy. We stationed ourselves on a long grassy path lined with leafy trees and a giant berry bush and waited for the Red-flanked Bluetail to appear. on January 18th, I joined 60 other birders in the large garden behind the library. Marschall told me that the bird had been popping up almost daily, and urge me to come over to have a look. But after getting a few more glimpses and finally nabbing a photo in January, she confirmed the surprising ID. Given its rarity, she first guessed that it was a funny-looking Hermit Thrush. I then reached out to Clark librarian and Audubon member Rebecca Marschall, who discovered the bluetail while birding near her office. The Los Angeles bluetail must be a female, I reasoned: Unlike males, she was mostly brown with streaks of blue on her tail. ) On eBird I was able to study photos of the species and compare them to ones taken at the library. (I got the tip through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new Facebook group, The Feeder Flock. First, I verified the presence and exact whereabouts of the bluetail using eBird checklists submitted by other visitors. And while individuals will sometimes turn up in Europe or Alaska, this was only the third known record in California.īefore making the trip, though, I researched logistics. The robin-like species is usually found in Southeast Asia in winter and Siberia during breeding season. The far-astray bluetail, first spotted on December 21, had settled into the easy-to-access, well-landscaped grounds of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. I already had my feelers out for newsworthy birds, thanks to the massive coverage of the Mandarin Duck in New York last October, and I wanted to experience an epic sighting in my own city. When I first learned on Twitter that a rare Red-flanked Bluetail had been spotted at a library in downtown Los Angeles, my interest was piqued. As a yard birder, I’d never felt the urge to jump in my car and drive dozens of miles just to set eyes on an obscure species.īut never say never.
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