This seems like a ridiculously common bird, but for the life of me (heh), I
can't find a record of having seen any.

Up at Fort Flagler this last weekend, as I sat quietly on the beach while my
kids constructed a fort from driftwood some hundred yards up the beach, a
small flock of leggy-sparrow-like birds flew up, landed a few feet from me,
gave me the hairy eyeball, and decided I was harmless, and started bobbing
around the shoreline. Literally -- I mean, sort of like a spotted sandpiper,
as if the wind were about to blow it over, even on a calm day.

All the field marks led me to a quick diagnosis of an American pipit, and
I'm shocked that I've never seen them before. These guys were so close I
didn't even NEED binocs: they were literally five feet away, rocking to and
fro.

Is this a reasonable sighting, or am I nutso?

Other than that, we had a nice time watching guillemots bobbing around
proudly with some sort of elongated brownish fish in their collective beak.
They're raising a batch of kids in hole-nests on the bluff above the beach
at Fort Flagler, which brings me to the "people" part of the story.

As I drowsed on the beach, a gaggle of kids arrived and started climbing on
the cliff face, atop which the guillemots were nesting. While they were
playing in the sand fallout at the bottom, I ignored it, but as they started
nearing the actual cliff face, I walked over and told them to come back
down, whereupon their mom raged at me about it; after all, there are no
signs saying NOT to. (she said: in fact, of course, there are such signs at
the park entrance.) She claimed there WERE no birds nesting up there. After
all, they weren't flying in and out of the holes (twenty feet from the
kids), were they?

Finally, she said, "they're kids. You can't blame them," and I said, "Of
course not. I don't blame THEM." But I'm afraid the intent of the remark was
lost on her and her astonishingly mountain-shaped husband.

The next day, the kids were gone, and the birds were, relieved, flying in
and out of the holes on the cliff. People. Don't talk to me about people.

-Josh Hayes, josh at blarg dot net