Monthly Archives: August 2026

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Ruslan Balagansky
San Diego (Mira Mesa), CA

On Monday morning, a flock of 65 (carefully counted) Pinyon Jays returned to the usual original area at the top end of Big Laguna Meadow:

The Chino Farms property on the border between Del Mar and Fairbanks Ranch and Rancho Santa Fe, at the corner of Via de la Valle and Calzada del Bosque has a huge amount of good weedy grass habitat this year. Immense and widespread. Heck, there’s actually too much! This is the area that over the past number of years has had a track record in the fall of producing bobolinks and dickcissels and rare buntings and sparrows. One needs a scope to scan the weed tops and post tops and best to come in the morning when birds are more apt to sit up. As usual, the best vantage points are along Calzada del Bosque, just east of the first set of temporary greenhouses and then also from the southwest corner of the property along Via de La Valle where there’s a good sized dirt pull out. Be VERY CAREFUL of all the traffic along both roads, which is especially busy during commuting hours on weekdays.

For those of you keeping an Inland San Diego County list… There is currently, 9:30 a.m. Thursday, a Red Phalarope swimming around toward the north end of Lake Morena, up in the mountains. This species is only a casual visitor well Inland, and is extremely rare at best even on the larger lakes a little bit Inland from the coast. It is swimming around by itself, whereas along the shoreline there’s a total of seven Red-necked Phalaropes along with a few small groups of Leasts and Westerns and Greater yellowlegs. Fairly rare up here in the mountains there are also four Long-billed Curlews present today. Given that the phalarope is near the north side of the lake and one can only access and scope the lake from the south side, that means the bird is a long way off and just barely identifiable with a scope. I’ve taken a bunch of photos with my super zoom camera at absolute maximum power and we’ll see how horribly pixelated they end up! Also a small group of fall-arrival Eared Grebes.

As an e-bird reviewer, I have seen a fair number of reports of misidentified shorebirds in the past week or so. Some involve the usual problem of reports of Lesser yellowlegs that are really Greater yellowlegs. And in the last 36 hours there have been multiple reports of Solitary Sandpiper that are or are likely yellowlegs. Typically there are photos involved, but sometimes details about the plumage or habitat choice also strongly suggest the species is something else. As some of you have heard me say locally on repeated occasions, if one wishes to find and/or correctly identify some of our rarer early fall shorebirds, one needs to be able to properly AGE them first. If one does not know how to age a peep, for example, finding or identifying properly a Semipalmated Sandpiper becomes extremely difficult. In the case of almost all of our rare shorebirds now that we are in August, a huge percent of them are juveniles. So birders are encouraged to learn what the juvenile plumages of these species look like and that if one is scanning through a large flock of birds, that one should be able to tell the juveniles apart from the adults and use that as a starting point.

Michael and I have a solitary sandpiper just west of field 8 in the channel all by himself. Looks like he’s halfway between breeding and non-breeding he still got a little bit of bi-color bill. 

Apologies. At home now looking at photos and it was not a Solitary
Sandpiper. Got thrown by a thick white eye ring on a Yellowlegs.

Lisa Ruby
Sabre Springs

There is currently a Solitary Sandpiper snoozing on the front edge of the mud flat area with the plants. It’s standing by some plants. 

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Lisa Ruby
Sabre Springs