Hey tweets, I just got back from a quick trip to Camp Pendleton near San
Diego to wish my son well on his sojourn to Iraq (sigh). He had the weekend
free, so I flew down to say farewell. I knew that Monday would be a hard
day, so I gave myself a little time to do some birding out in nature.

Nature is brutal, as we all know, but beautiful too. It always reminds me
that the ugliness that we certainly are capable of is not the only thing in
the world, and certainly not the thing we should fix our minds on.

Not that I'm the kind of New Ager who thinks that all we need do is
visualize world peace (or visualize world peas, as one bumper sticker
spoofed), and world peace (or peas) will somehow happen. On the other hand,
if we don't visualize a better world, then how can we have one at all?

I'm a firm believer in the Mr. Rogers philosophy: the neighborhood you live
in is the neighborhood you make, so go out and make it the best, most
beautiful one you possibly can.

Nothing embodies this philosophy better than the habitat around San Diego.
Most of it has been chopped up into high rises and new homes, and more of
nature is disappearing every day. But if you drive out toward Mt. Palomar
and its world-class observatory, surprisingly soon you get into a lush
paradise of semi-arid desert that is simply stuffed with life. This habitat
is as God (or Darwin) intended, but my point is that it is preserved because
of the conscious, deliberate efforts of people like you and me.

Take the Wilderness Garden nature area, for example. The entrance and the
name make you think that it's a kind of horticultural museum, all planted to
show off exhibits of the wild. On the contrary, when you get down into the
parking lot, you discover instead that the park is a piece of real
wilderness set aside in an urbanizing region that has been willing to
tolerate the presence of numerous rattlesnakes, the occasional bobcat and
coyote, and the rarer puma. There's no one at the park to lead you by the
hand and point out, Disney-fashion, the nature of nature. There's just a
couple of signs saying rather bluntly that this park is full of nature, some
of which can be quite dangerous. On your head be it.

I took my head only a short way down the trail, realizing that I had not
come prepared to face quite so much nature all at once. I hadn't even
brought any water with me, and the sun was beating down like a brass drum on
my head. So I spent most of my time sitting at a couple of picnic tables
placed strategically under shady trees. From these vantage points, I watched
the following:

.. two wrentits foraging in a tree, picking up bug larvae and keeping tabs on
each other (and yes, they did look like that darn picture of a bushtit on
the master birder final exam, only bigger)
.. two lesser goldfinches arguing about who got to sit on one branch of a
nearby tree, as though it made all the difference in the world - and in
their world, probably it did.
.. a California towhee picking up seeds in the tall grass, hopping closer and
closer to my feet as I sat as still as I could. I was hoping that it would
forage right beside me, and maybe it would have except that a western
scrub-jay at the last minute gave it a piece of its mind on the subject of
fraternizing, so it flew away.
.. a female phainopepla insisting that although it could fly perfectly well,
it could not bend its head down to pick up a bug on a branch right at its
feet but rather had to have its mate hurry to and fro finding bugs for it.
.. numerous acorn woodpeckers cackling at each other and not too happy to see
a Nuttall's woodpecker show up to get in on the action.
.. white-throated swifts fluttering by overhead so fast I could hardly find
time to place my binocs on them before they were gone, to be replaced by
equally busy violet-green swallows.
.. turkey vultures soaring overhead looking for whatever they could find,
with me hoping it would not be me, much to their disappointment.
.. one oak titmouse making as much noise as a pre-opera crowd at McCaw Hall
but surprisingly hard to see.

And I was in this paradise for a mere 30 minutes, kicking myself. Why or why
had I wasted most of the day touring an observatory, for Pete's sake, when I
could have been looking for Lawrence's goldfinch at the Garden Wilderness
nature area? Well, the observatory was interesting, and the grounds
furnished a lazuli bunting, a really bold lark sparrow and a couple of
singing olive-sided flycatchers. But still....

Here's everything I saw on my two-and-a-half-day trip:

western grebe
brown pelican
double-crested cormorant
great blue heron
mallard
turkey vulture
Cooper's hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
killdeer
western gull
elegant tern
least tern
rock pigeon
mourning dove
white-winged dove
greater roadrunner
white-throated swift
Anna's hummingbird
acorn woodpecker
northern flicker
Nuttall's woodpecker
olive-sided flycatcher
Say's phoebe
western kingbird
Steller's jay
western scrub-jay
American crow
common raven
horned lark
violet-green swallow
wrentit
oak titmouse
mountain chickadee
white-breasted nuthatch
house wren
western bluebird
mountain bluebird
American robin
European starling
phainopepla
western tanager
California towhee
spotted towhee
song sparrow
lark sparrow
dark-eyed junco
lazuli bunting
red-winged blackbird
Brewer's blackbird
Bullock's oriole
house finch
lesser goldfinch
house sparrow - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com