I had so much fun talking with Kimball Garrett on this episode. Kimball is a rich source of history, birding information, and great perspective for me. I hope you enjoy the episode. We talk about L.A. County birding. For perspective here is a link to Kimball’s eBird profile where you can check out his recent birding. (see the comment below by Kimball re eBird vs. the actual accepted LA County lists. eBird encourages birders to submit findings of escapees and other non-listable birds seen in the field. This is good for their database, but is annoying to some of us who use eBird as our record keeping tool for our lists.) Here is where you can find him on the L.A. Natural History Museum webpage.
Kimball was a primary author on the book he mentions just briefly on Birds of Southern California at the ABA affiliated Buteo Books.
I mention a fabulous pelagic trip I took out of San Diego. Here is a link to the source for that trip.
Several of my previous guests are friends of Kimball or are mentioned on the episode. Here are some links to those episodes.
John Sterling from Episode #10 recommmended Kimball as a guest and was a member of the group of young California birders we discuss briefly.
I talk about the passion David Irons has for bird status and distrubution. He was a great guest on Episode #58.
Bruce LaBar, another of the young California generation of birders was my guest on Episode #3.
Thanks for reading and listening. Good Birding. Good Day!
Just a clarification about county list totals. As Ed noted, “eBird lists” reflect many species (e.g. unestablished non-native species) which are not on more “official” avifaunal lists. So the Los Angeles County list is actually only at 528 species, including ten established introduced species that have been accepted to the state list by the California Bird Records Committee. My personal Los Angeles County list is somewhere down in the 480s or so (who’s counting?) once you expunge all of the escapees and non-established non-natives that are on my eBird lists. [I believe it is important to enter these non-established birds into eBird for the purposes of tracking potentially establishing species, but as birders have been pointing out for a long time, eBird needs to simultaneously encourage this practice but also come up with a way (now long-promised) to keep them off the reported eBird totals.]
I expected that the numbers included some exotic species that are not “listable.” Still impressive numbers. Thanks again. Ed