Over the weekend M and I participated in the annual shorebird survey in Morro Bay. This is an ongoing effort with annual surveys since 2003. (There was an earlier series of surveys in Morro Bay from April 1998 to August 1994 but I know even less about them than I do about the current series, which I was a part of for the first time this year.)
The survey is cosponsored by the Morro Coast Audubon Society and California Audubon, and it’s coordinated by Point Blue Conservation Science. They put the data from this survey into the Pacific Flyway Shorebird Survey database. The Pacific Flyway includes important bird locations along the Pacific coast of North and South America. The map below shows some of them; the entire thing is interactive and searchable:
Scaled circles in the map indicate the average number of birds counted at that the sampling unit across all surveys without accounting for variation in the size of sampling units. These data summaries should not be considered a rigorous assessment, but rather general indicators of abundance and distribution of individual species and taxa. Only shorebirds and raptors are always recorded across all survey locations, so data from other taxa should be considered incomplete.
There are 15 survey sections in Morro Bay; ours was sector 8, the southeastern tidal marsh and mudflats visible from the Elfin Forest in Los Osos and the intersection of Turri Road and South Bay Boulevard (but watch out for that sliver of sector 12 between South Bay Blvd. and sector 8 proper!):
The typical protocol is to have one observer and one recorder, but since there were quite a few volunteers this year, our team turned out to be stacked six deep! We had the luxury of two observers with scopes, two recorders with clipboards, and our leaders coordinated the area so that we weren’t overlapping counts, but since we were all in one group, we could easily confer to resolve troublesome IDs of the always-too-distant birds. Having “extra” volunteers on hand enables us to train more observers for future surveys.
Because the survey is timed for consistent results across years, this year’s survey took place from noon to 2 p.m., so the lighting conditions for bird photography were less than ideal. I brought my camera in addition to my spotting scope, but I probably took only a half dozen photos, none of which were particularly aesthetically pleasing. (Normally I’ll come home with 600 or more to sort through.)
Our main vantage point was Bush Lupine view in Elfin Forest, but we also spent some time at Siena’s View, and we wandered west to Pasadena Point and east to South Bay Blvd to get a vantage point on the otherwise invisible corners of the sector. Here is a selection from some of M’s snapshots of the afternoon:
I haven’t yet seen the official tally from our sector, let alone the results of the entire survey effort, but from my recollection of the count sheet, we had huge numbers of peeps: Western Sandpipers predominated, but there were a fair number of Least Sandpipers as well. Roughly 2:1 Westerns:Leasts, and over 1500 total. We had hundreds of Willets and scores of Marbled Godwits, along with a smattering of Long-billed Curlews and a reasonably large chunk of Black-bellied Plovers. We also had a few raptors (three Turkey Vultures, two Cooper’s Hawks, and two Bald Eagles).
All told, a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon!