At about 1 p.m. today i rolled up to a field in Ocean Beach, San Diego, for my regular Saturday pick-up softball game. There were already a few people there throwing balls back and forth, and in the outfield were two guys lying down behind cameras with large telephoto lenses.
A little later, as we started the game, they moved off a bit, but were soon joined by at least 20-30 other people, all decked out with cameras or binoculars or telescopes of one sort of another. When my team was in the field, i jogged out into left field, and all the folks with the gear seemed to be looking straight at me.
It turned out, though, that they were focused on a small bird that was pecking in the grass about 20 yards to my right. All i could really see was that it looked a sort of whitish-gray, and was not very big. Not being a bird-watcher, i turned back to the game, but i was curious about what sort of bird could draw what was, by now, a rather large crowd of obvious enthusiasts. In between innings, i wandered over to the group, which had moved away from the softball field a little in careful pursuit of their quarry, and asked a couple of them what was causing all the commotion.
Apparently, the small creature that got them all excited was a Snow Bunting, and they said that this was, as far as any of them knew, the first recorded sighting of the species in this part of California.
As the name suggests, the Snow Bunting prefers much colder climes, spending much of its time way up above the Arctic Circle, and the Range Map on the linked page shows that the closest they normally get to San Diego is the north-east corner of Nevada.
By the time we played a few games of softball and had some food, it was almost 7 p.m., and there were still a few die-hard photographers snapping pictures of the little guy. I didn’t ask what the bird’s likely fate is, or whether it’s a bad sign that it’s so far away from home. Anyway, thought the bird-dopers might be interested.
