Bear Divide Birding – D1

By Miles

    Today is the first Bear Divide day of the year. Although there weren’t that many birds, we did see a Rufous Hummingbird (flying through super fast like a bullet, couldn’t get any photo) and Swainson’s Hawk that we hoped would be flying over. 

    Bear Divide is a flat area in a valley within the Angeles National Forest. Because it is the only open area along the long migration route in the San Gabriel Mountains’ valley, the huge number of birds migrating through LA in spring are always easiest to observe at Bear Divide. According to some information in https://www.beardivide.org/: “Bear Divide is a narrow pass in the San Gabriel Mountains just outside of Los Angeles, that is home to spectacular dawn flights of migrating birds in the spring. With thousands of migrants funneling through a narrow divide, this is truly a unique biological phenomenon. In 2021, the Moore Lab of Zoology at Occidental College began a regular count to quantify the numbers and identities of birds migrating through Bear Divide. “

    Today is the first day of the bird count here and there are already some people arriving to observe the bird migration. Students and professors from OXY (Occidental College) and UCLA are also up there, using a special app on an iPad to record the birds migrating through. They said that the migration is pretty slow right now, but there will be a lot more in April and early May. 

    Swainson’s Hawk is a medium-sized raptor, about three and a half times the size of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, with a typical hawk shape, a long tail, and a thin body and wings. Its dark morph (the morph we saw this time) has an orangish-brown body, head, and underwing (excluding wing feathers). Its tail, wings, and back are dark brown and have white lines on the wing and tail feathers. Its face and breast are darker, while its throat and waist are lighter. It also has a yellow beak and feet. The light morph‘s back, wings, and tail are very dark brown with some reddish-brown mixed in and white lines on the wings and tail feathers. It has a white throat, eyebrow lines, belly, and underwing (excluding wing feathers). Its face and cap are gray, while the rest of its head and breast are reddish-brown. It also has a yellow beak and feet. Both light and dark morphs have dark eyes. They usually hunt insects, living in pairs in open areas and fields across the Americas, but they gather into large groups in some mountainous regions during migration.