Date: 7/21/26 6:59 pm From: Florence Sanchez via groups.io <sanchezucsb11...> Subject: [sbcobirding] Good birding at Santa Maria river mouth
I made the trek this morning and it was well worth hauling my scope a long way over soft sand (and a gimpy knee) to get to the estuary mouth. The big show was the large tern flock. Although they were in full "tern behavior" mode today , never staying in one place for very long, I was lucky enough to pick up the Common Tern reported previously when some of the flock touched down near me. And several Least Terns foraging were fun to watch.
Shorebirds tended to hug the far shore, but there were lots of them to go thorugh and though I didn't find the REd Knot that Jamie discovered earlier, I found a spiffy adult Ruddy Turnstone to make up for it. Though it's early for Long-billed Dowitchers, it did appear that there might have been two of them mixed in with the flock of about 15 Short-billed Dowitchers (red on the underside all the way down through the base of the tail). It was also gorgeous weather.
Afterwards, I stopped at Jack O' Connell Park, which was being mowed, so I checked out the Guadalupe Sewage treatment Ponds, where nothing much was going on. I did, however, have a nice White-tailed Kite circling overhead.
My final stop was Ocean Park, where I was able to bird in shirt sleeves for one of the very few times in all my visits there. A small but persistent flock of small shorebirds kept returning to the mud patch below the edge of the parking lot (Semi-palmated Plovers, Kildeer, Western Sandpipers, and a few Least Sandpipers) but I could pull out nothing else there. The rest of the estuary was pretty quiet. I saw the continuing Osprey too.
Florence Sanchez
