The Morro Bay Bird Festival is coming up in January. For the 2025 edition, the first in which I’ll be participating, I’ll be co-leading two field trips: one to a vineyard in Orcutt, in San Luis Obispo’s “south county,” and one to Santa Rita lake in Templeton, closer to home here in north county.
This weekend I drove down to Orcutt to meet up with my coleader and with J.P. Wolff, the owner of the winery at Wolff Vineyards, to scout the area. The drive out was beautiful, with the November chill of Atascadero (twenty-eight degrees at my house as I was leaving!) giving way to a warmish autumn morning on the southern side of the Santa Lucias.
The vineyard is nestled in the Edna Valley just to the east of San Luis Obispo, right up against the foothills of the Santa Lucias. In fact, the northern edge of the property is on a prominent hill, one of the many volcanic plugs dotting the area. (The “nine sisters” of SLO are the more famous volcanic plugs around here, but according to this Wikipedia article, there are supposedly twenty-three.) Next time I visit the area, I’ll need to bring my landscape photography mindset; today I was so focused on birds that I have literally no scenic shots. Still, here’s a screenshot of a topo map showing the layout:
There’s a little pond at the base of the westernmost of the two hills, and it is a beauty. Although it doesn’t look it right now, presumably due to the lack of rainfall so far this year, West Corral de Piedra Creek, which borders the western side of the property, the main tributary to Pismo Creek. That makes it important as a steelhead trout spawning ground in wet years, at least. It provides some great habitat (at least on the vineyard side), with plenty of willows, coyote bushes, and even some California coffeeberry and toyon here and there. When that creek is flowing, I’m sure the birds are plentiful.
On today’s dry-season trip, most of the birds were in the vineyard (scores of White-crowned Sparrows and Starlings), along with few Red-tailed Hawks soaring around, a couple of American Kestrels, some Turkey Vultures, and at one point even a Cooper’s Hawk. The birdiest spot, though, was that pond. J.P. Wolff reserves it for wildlife rather than trying to use it as a water source for the vines. Today it had several Sora, a few Cinnamon Teal, some coots, quite a few red-winged blackbirds and yellow-rumped warblers, and even a black-crowned night-heron and a common yellowthroat. I’m looking forward to seeing what it will have in a few months!
Here’s a little gallery of what I saw today:
