Date: 7/6/25 7:41 pm From: Conor McMahon via groups.io <conormcmahon22...> Subject: [sbcobirding] Birding this Weekend - Baby Birds at Refugio, Elings, Ellwood
Hi guys,
On Friday I birded a bit at the lower portions of Refugio Road, mostly trying to document breeding riparian birds. There's lots of babies out there! I found breeding evidence for:
Red-shouldered Hawk Cooper's Hawk Black-chinned Hummingbird Bewick's Wren House Finch Song Sparrow Spotted Towhee Common Yellowthroat Yellow Warbler Black-headed Grosbeak
Other nice birds included a couple Western Wood-Pewees, Chestnut-backed Chickadees, and singing Wilson's Warblers and Warbling Vireos. A few young Bewick's Wrens seemed like they were still learning how to get their song right - a bit weak, garbled, and squeaky.
Yesterday (Saturday) I birded a bit at Elings. Not a ton of note to report, but it was nice to see a Shrike hanging out at the restoration area on the mesa. I assume this is probably a post-breeding disperser (those start showing up even in late June).
This morning I birded around the Ellwood area, then made a quick stop by Devereux. Here too I had lots of baby birds, including:
Snowy Plover Great Egret Red-tailed Hawk Western Flycatcher Cassin's Kingbird California Scrub-Jay House Finch Lark Sparrow Dark-eyed Junco Song Sparrow California Towhee Hooded Oriole Bullock's Oriole Brown-headed Cowbird (fed by Wrentit) Orange-crowned Warbler
So that's 22 species of breeding records between Friday and Sunday.
On both trips, I was specifically trying to get recordings of begging calls from as many fledglings as I could - I ended up with 15 species of babies recorded. I think many young bird vocalizations are less well-documented than folks might realize. For example, here are comparisons between the total number of audio recordings on the Macaulay Library + Xeno Canto for several birds, plus the number of recordings of just juvenile birds for that species:
Black-chinned Hummingbird - 623 vs. 14 (14%) California Towhee - 1366 vs. 19 (5%) Spotted Towhee - 8,304 vs. 29 (7%) Song Sparrow - 20,251 vs. 193 (2%)
Above, the number in parentheses is the percent of ALL the baby bird call recordings for that species which are from *just me this weekend*. So it's really easy to make a substantial contribution in this space - I encourage people to try it! Even a cell phone can sometimes get decent recordings of begging fledglings, because they're often less wary vs. adults. I use a little shotgun mic that attaches to my cell phone and just record with the Merlin app.
If you do, make sure you tag the media in the Macaulay Library / Xeno-Canto with the appropriate life stage so it's discoverable. Also it's worth taking some text notes about the life stage of the bird because several seem to pass through a few phases of different sounds as they grow up (e.g. a nestling might sound different from a fledgling still begging for food, which is different from a visibly immature but independent bird, etc). Steve's BirdTalk is an excellent tool to encourage taking more thorough notes in the field.
As a motivating example, here's a search for Phainopepla, showing only 1 total juvenile recording!
