Once is Not Enough
by Clyde Witt
In February, Susan and I braved the sunshine and warm temperatures of southern California to bird a new spot. Someone had to go; we decided to make the sacrifice. Called the Carrizo Plain and in part protected by the Nature Conservancy, it’s been described as America’s Serengeti. That’s a stretch. The Wilds in central Ohio is more like the Serengeti.
Carrizo is, however, magical; like nowhere else. We were dazzled by a cloud of mountain bluebirds too many to count. Literally hundreds. We stopped the car in the middle of the road and let the birds descend around us. The huge mixed flock contained American pipits, lark sparrows and house finches in red and orange variations. Color dripped from the few fence posts and strands of rusting barbed wire that recorded a time gone by when cattle roamed this place. Burrowing owls popped up next to the road as we drove by. The soda lake within this 50-mile-long birding Mecca was lined with hundreds of American avocets.
A major draw at Carrizo Plains for us -- and many other birders though we saw few of them -- was the California condor. By late afternoon we had about given up hope of seeing this 20-pound bird with its 9.5-foot wingspan. As dusk descended we opted to drive over to a spot where the San Andreas Fault is visible. Fortunately, Susan was driving – always safest when we’re birding. I was debating rolling up the window or letting the warm air continue to blow through my hair when a huge black shape came up from the ground a couple hundred yards to our right. With the calm of a person spotting an American Bison crossing the road, I screamed, stop! As an experienced birder/driver, Susan knows that means now -- not why.
It’s still unclear if the car had actually stopped rolling as we scampered up a nearby hill, our binoculars focused on the telltale white patches under the bird’s wings, finger-like primaries on the ends of extended flat wings, unmistakable huge yellow beak and the brilliant white patch of upper tail coverts. Whoa, there!
We looked at each other, our brains processing the data we had and suspected. We realized we had a juvenile golden eagle. Our hearts restarted their normal pumping functions. Hey, a good bird is what it is. And we now have another reason to go back.