By Miles
This Saturday morning LA Birders – Students held a field trip along the Willow Street stretch of the Los Angeles River, with 8 birders attending, including 6 students!
Once everyone arrived, we started to walk south along the river, which had more trees and bushes, but less muddy areas and shallow waters for the shorebirds. The growth of vegetation led to more Passerines, with other flybys and a few more waterfowls our list was quickly brought to more than 50 species.
On the way back, a couple of cormorants started to fly around and we started to try for a Neotropic and finally we got it resting on a rock in the water just south of Willow Street.
As there is still a lot of time left we started to scan through the peeps to see if we can find any rare ones. I started to take pictures for every peep as usual and got one peep that is as big as a Western but has different color patterns. After we used merlin and compared it with other photos, we decided it to be a Semipalmated Sandpiper. But later after checking with Dessi, we changed the identification to a big Least Sandpiper.
Even though the peep didn’t get confirmed, it was still a wonderful trip! After Charles went through the checklist he kept for the trip, we found that we are at 60 species (59 after deleting the sesa) !
