Date: 12/30/25 10:15 am From: Chris McCreedy via groups.io <cmccreedy...> Subject: [SanDiegoRegionBirding] 2025 South End Salton Sea Christmas Bird Count summary
The 2025 South End of the Salton Sea Christmas Bird Count took place on Tuesday, December 16. I am grateful to Raz Shafique-Sabir and the staff of the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge for hosting our count and for helping us to cover sections of the Refuge. I also want to thank Clarissa Diaz at Kiewit for escorting me through the Species Conservation Habitat (SCH) Project at the mouth of the New River. This is a restoration area that is off limits to the public - I was saddened to hear of previous instances of birders trespassing into the project area, and I wish to underscore that this area is currently completely off limits to the public.
We counted under ideal conditions, clear and calm, with temperatures ranging from the mid 40s at daybreak to the mid to upper 70s by the afternoon. We had 35 participants, the most since 2013, and I want to specifically thank Lesley Handa for coordinating the participation of nearly a dozen counters that covered Sections 7 and 8.
We tallied 131,748 birds representing 156 species, with 149 species on count day. This is the most species observed since 2015, correlating with Salton Sea's ongoing receding/decline. I once plotted count totals since 2000 back in 2023, drawing a regression line through the scatterplot at that point in time. The plot below puts our showing against other years in nice perspective:
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The SCH Project is working - Samuel Bressler and Clarissa and I counted nearly 23,000 birds there, adding a number of species to our total. The project seems to be catalyzing bird activity in other parts of the count circle as well, with Raz amassing an excellent gull count at the Red Hill Area/Alamo River delta, including 2 Western Gulls, 200 American Herring Gulls, over 1,000 California Gulls, over 2,000 Ring-billed Gulls, 100 Bonaparte's Gulls, and 3,000 gulls left unidentified.
Al DeMartini and Terry Brauner found the birds of the count - 2 Cave Swallows at the Calipatria Algae Farm in Section 3. Many of us twitched these in the afternoon, following our CBC lunch and species countdown. Two Cave Swallows soon became three, and then in following days, as other California birders twitched the swallows, three became 11, and then 11 eventually became 24 Cave Swallows by December 21, a magical event. Then Loren Wright, Dessi Sieburth, Logan Kahle, and Chris Dean reported count week Bank Swallow, Lapland Longspur, and Thick-billed Longspur from the site on December 17, species that we miss far more often than we make.
Christian Schwartz and Grigory Heaton had an excellent day covering Niland, with Christian finding a Summer Tanager, Tropical Kingbird, and Cassin's Kingbird, and Grigory finding an Indigo Bunting - all species that have only appeared in a handful of previous counts each. Grigory and Matt Brady (covering Calipatria) each found a Northern Parula, only our 4th count with the species and the first they have been reported on a count since 1989. Finally, Guy McCaskie and Chris Dean found a Laughing Gull in Section 5, the first time the species has been encountered on a count since 2011.
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