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Welcome to El Dorado Audubon!

A California Chapter of the National Audubon Society serving the communities of Artesia, Avalon, Bellflower, Carson, Cypress, Hawaiian Gardens, La Palma, Lakewood, Long Beach, Los Alamitos, Paramount, Rossmoor, San Pedro, Seal Beach, Signal Hill, Sunset Beach, and Wilmington.

Mission

Photo 2The mission of the El Dorado Audubon Society is the conservation of native birds and their habitats. The society provides leadership in conservation and educates its members and the community, so that they may appreciate birds and participate in the society's conservation efforts.

August Events

From Donna Bray, 2008-2009 Chapter President

                Summer Board/ Planning Meeting Announcement

It is a little over a month away, but please save the date. On Sunday, August 10th you are invited to attend El Dorado Audubon Chapter’s Summer Board Meeting. This is not exclusively for the voting Board members. This is open to any member who is an active volunteer, or who wishes to be. You are welcome and encouraged to attend.

It will be held at El Dorado Park, in Area II, find us by taking Snake Road and looking for the group. People with binoculars are a good clue. Birding and gathering will occur at 8:00, and a call to order by 8:30 a.m. Plan on spending several hours; bring a sack lunch, beverage, and a folding chair of some sort. A sweater if it’s shady and cool, or a hat and sunscreen if sunny (both may occur on the same day). A clipboard or a way to organize paper is useful. Don’t forget your calendar. We will be doing our new budget, and that involves planning and prioritizing. We are fortunate to have some new volunteers in the last year or so, but we do have some glaring needs. We will review what is going well, and how we want to strengthen it.

If you have questions, please contact me at donnabray@charter.net, with a relevant subject line.

From Clarann Levakis, Nature Center Liason

How to Spend Your Summer Vacation


El Dorado Audubon is coming to the end of this administrative year. Like many other groups, we do not meet publicly or conduct field trips during July and August. If you are relatively new to birding, you may not want to go two months without going out with people who can find and identify the birds. I have a suggestion if you are a beginning birder trying to improve your birding skills and increase your knowledge of our local avifauna. (Please don't be offended by the label "beginning birder". It generally
takes considerable time and effort to move out of this stage. I should know: I was a beginning birder for ten years before I was able to invest the time and effort needed to proceed to the next level.)

You can help yourself become a more accomplished birder, and often learn more than you might by just going out with a birding group where people identify the birds, but don't teach you how to do the same. My suggestion is to adopt a local area to bird on a regular basis. Once a week is an optimal schedule, or as close to that as possible. Many experienced birders follow this practice. They sometimes refer to their adopted area as their "patch".

You need to visit your patch regularly and often, and try to identify every bird on every visit. Most people keep dated lists for their visits, and may include how many of each species they see. I also recommend taking notes and making some kind of drawing of any bird you cannot identify. You may want to write down a verbal description of the bird, but a drawing is even better.
You can label the various parts of the bird by color and note such things as relative size of the bird, and proportions such as tail length, bill thickness, etc. If you are cursed like I am with no artistic gifts, you may be embarrassed by the amateur nature of your efforts. The important thing is that you include as much detail as possible so that you can find the bird in your field guide later. Remember, we often have only a few minutes at most
to view a bird. Its best to spend that time actually documenting the birds features than taking the time to look it up in you field guide, which you can always do once the bird is no longer in sight. Try to note any distinctive behaviors such as wing flicking, tail wagging, etc. If you are able to do so, take notes on any vocalizations the bird uses. Its also often useful to note where you see an unusual or less common bird. The chances are
you will find that individual in or near the same spot on subsequent visits. This is because many species are quite site-tenacious. This is one reason expert birders seem to find and identify birds so quickly. The beginner thinks the ace birder has a phenomenal eye (which they may indeed have) but much of their ease and skill comes from looking for the bird in or near the
same spot each time.

Make sure you try to identify every bird you see, even the starlings, House Sparrows, crows, Rock Pigeons, House Finches Mourning Doves, etc. Exercising this self discipline will eventually "hardwire" a kind of visual template in your brain of the common species. Over time, you will really know all of the common species in your patch. The value of this is that you will immediately notice any unusual bird that comes into the area.

I've suggested you follow this process through the summer, but it will be much more useful if you can make your regular visits for a full year. This will teach you seasonal variations in plumage, and help you learn which birds are year-round residents, winter residents, summer breeders and migrants only passing through. You may notice that fall migrants are not exactly the same birds as spring migrants. Migration routes vary somewhat in our area for spring and fall.

What area should you choose for your patch? Of course our Nature Center is a great place to bird. Or for convenience you might choose a good park in your neighborhood. May I suggest you also consider Gum Grove Park in Seal Beach? This location will allow you to see a variety of passerines (these are our songbirds), raptors, waterfowl, waders and a few shorebirds. (Most people
find shorebirds challenging. You can concentrate on learning them at a special wetland site such as Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, or Bolsa Chica.)

Take the time to really study your field guide away from your patch. The key to really learning birds is to bird in the field, study the guide, bird in the field, study the guide, etc. One last tip: whatever field guide you use, learn the taxonomic order of birds. This is almost always the order the species are presented in the field guide. Nothing will slow you down more than having to turn to the index to look for the bird by page number. At
least learn basics, e.g., swifts come before swallows, crows come before flycatchers, waterfowl come before raptors.

Please take normal precautions in the field. Try to bird with a partner,stay aware of your surroundings, etc. You may not risk being eaten by a crocodile (something that reportedly happened to one hapless birder), but an encounter with a rattle snake (or a human "snake") is something to avoid.

By all means continue to go out with experienced birders who will not only find and identify birds but also teach you how to do the same. They can give you valuable knowledge such as feeding behavior, preferred habitats, etc. I hope you will also adopt a birding location of your own. We need as many educated eyes and ears as possible out there documenting birds if we are to
conserve local habitats and maintain local bird diversity and abundance.
Above all: have fun!

From John Hlavac, Newsletter Editor

Summer Vacation

Our summer vacation is coming!! El Dorado Audubon will be taking the summer off. This will be the last issue of the California Least Tern until the September issue lands in your mailbox. Many of the chapter's activities, such as the monthly meeting, will take a little hiatus until September. The monthly bird walks in the Nature Center
may or may not go, check the chapter's website for updates.
The Gum Grove bird walks will only be on July 12 and August 9.
For the intrepid birder, there's that fine Sierra birding outing
over the Fourth of July holiday led by Donna Bray. The bluebird
boxes will continue to be monitored. The monthly refuge tours of the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge will continue unabated on 26 JUL and 30 AUG. The Eyes on The Colony project will be working hard at preserving the bird colonies for which this publication is named at the Seal Beach NWR. As of this writing there is a crying need for more volunteers. If you have any extra time, consider investing some of it in the conservation of our local birds.

 

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