Bird

The following is a public service announcement, as columnists occasionally have a right to be when they're not trying to be funny or political. There is a cockatiel missing in Huntington Beach, and apparently a family in Newport Beach has found it. The bird's owners are trying to track down the finders, and the Huntington Central Park Equestrian Center is aiding them in the search. That's the gist of the story so far. Now, a missing cockatiel may sound like the fodder for a zany human interest story or to some, not a story at all. But like I said, we're running this column as a way to spread the word.

Deepa Bharath It was pretty much a booby trap for the injured bird that virtually limped ashore with a fish hook lodged in her stomach. Experts say the rare marine bird being nursed back to health at the Wetlands and Wildlife Center in Huntington Beach probably followed a fishing boat from La Jolla to Big Corona before making its way to dry land last week. They say it is a masked booby -- a close cousin of the blue-footed booby, a species commonly found in the Galapagos Islands.

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY Vic and I attended the annual Sea and Sage Audubon banquet at the Radisson in Irvine last Friday. This annual event helps support our local Audubon chapter, including Audubon House in Irvine and the 4,000-acre Starr Ranch Sanctuary, which is located next to Caspers Wilderness Park. Vic didn't find anything of interest at the silent auction table, so he moseyed over to the raffle table. Once his eyes lit on "The Birds of the Western Palearctic" on interactive DVD/ROM, he bought himself a long string of raffle tickets, hoping to win it. Presumably he knew that palearctic means pertaining to Europe, northern Asia, Middle East and North Africa.

An endangered brown pelican that nearly died from wing injuries that killed 10 others of its species took to the air Wednesday in Corona Del Mar after two weeks of rehabilitation. At Big Corona State Beach, those who cared for the bird set her free. Apparently eager to get back into the water, the bird leaped into the air and didn’t turn back. That’s not unexpected considering her behavior in rehab, said Debbie McGuire, wildlife director of the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, which nursed the pelican back to health.

Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray Cyberspace is humming over the recent sightings of boobies in Southern California. But there is a mystery surrounding them. Vic says he wants to make it perfectly clear that he's not writing this story. He swears that his interest in boobies is purely academic, since he teaches bird watching at two local colleges. Yeah, whatever. If you ask me, he seemed awfully excited by the peek that he got at one of these rare boobies.

Dave Brooks Bird enthusiasts enjoyed a rare treat this weekend when a bald eagle visited several natural areas along the Orange Coast. The predatory bird was spotted as far inland as the Upper Newport Bay and as far west as the Bolsa Chica Wetlands in Huntington Beach. The bird, tagged "K13," is said to be from a Catalina Island breeding program looking to reintroduce the national symbol back into the wild. Bald eagles were once found in great numbers along the Southern California coast and the Channel Islands, but massive residential and commercial development, along with the introduction of several pesticides, greatly reduced their numbers.

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY By the time the Santa Ana River reaches Huntington Beach, it has been channelized, urbanized and engineered into almost total submission. It's hard to really call it a river. The waterway, as it flows through our area, bears no hint of the lovely wilderness in which it originates. This past weekend, we visited its headwaters in the San Bernardino Mountains to see it cascade free and wild down granite boulders, flowing as a river should.

The monetary reward is $6,000. But surely there will be greater rewards for whoever helps authorities arrest those responsible for mutilating a pelican, which was found injured in Huntington Beach last week. The female brown pelican, following surgery at a Costa Mesa animal care facility, is doing OK, though there's no telling yet whether the bird's pouch, which almost certainly was intentionally slit, will stand up to normal wear. And this bird is lucky.

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY Many people get dressed up, go to dinner or a party and drink champagne to celebrate the start of a new year. Not us, at least not this year. We went to the city dump in Brownsville, Texas, to digiscope. This deserves a bit of explanation. First, digiscoping is the hottest thing in bird photography. It involves connecting a digital camera to a spotting telescope using an adaptor ring. This allows really close-up photography.

Another $1,000 reward is being offered for information about a mallard shot with an arrow after wildlife volunteers recently offered the same amount for an Egyptian goose that had been similarly injured. The mallard was rescued by two Good Samaritans on Jan. 10 in Costa Mesa and is recovering at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach. The people, who were not identified, rescued the bird from a flood control drain at California and Iowa streets. Costa Mesa animal control officials delivered the injured bird to All Creatures Care Cottage, an animal hospital in Costa Mesa, and later moved him to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach.

He didn't expect to be staring at his computer screen for hours on end, but Brian Pavloff caught himself doing just that. Pavloff, president of Variable Speed Solutions in Huntington Beach, had just finished working on a web camera project for the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Even before it started broadcasting live online on March 11, he couldn't help but stop and stare at his screen. "I never watch webcams in any length. And then after this project, all of a sudden I find it sitting next to me at night and I can't look away and I'm constantly going back to it," he said.

Vic and I just returned from a scouting trip to the Eastern Sierra. Vic will soon lead a spring birding trip there for Sea and Sage Audubon, along with co-leader Linda Oberholzer. We like to visit ahead of time to reacquaint ourselves with the area. While we were there, we noted signs of a rapidly changing planet. Some changes were good. Other changes, not so much. One of the good things was that there was more water in Owens Lake than we have ever seen. Owens Lake had dried into a saltpan decades ago when water from the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct to provide water to arid Southern California.

I bought myself an iPad 2 about three weeks ago and became instantly addicted. I should point out that Vic and I are long-time PC people, not Apple people. Well, we used to be anyway. Vic switched his desktop computer from a PC to Mac this year, so he's become a convert. But neither of us are iPhone people. We both have a Blackberry. For me, the Blackberry is just a tool. I use my Blackberry for email more than phone calls, but don't use apps on it to any great extent. The iPad 2 is a whole 'nother ball of wax. I loved my iPad from the minute I opened it and began swiping the touch screen.

Vic led a birding trip to Big Bear Lake recently for his senior citizen class in bird watching. I was more than happy to go with him because I love the San Bernardino Mountains. We drove up State Route 38 on a beautiful Friday morning, meeting the group at the Oaks Restaurant in Angelus Oaks for an early lunch. If you've never explored the dirt roads around the Angelus Oaks area, you're missing out on a treat. We took a sharp left off the highway at the first pullout beyond the Oaks Restaurant and bounced down the steep grade of Middle Control Road.

When Vic and I wrote about the house wrens in our front yard two weeks ago, we weren't sure if the nest was a real one or a dummy nest. As far as we can tell, the nest is real and the female is most likely incubating eggs at this point. We don't want to look into the box to check, though, for fear of disturbing her if she is incubating. If you remember, we mentioned that house wrens are polygynistic, meaning that the male may take more than one mate. But each female needs her own nest box for things to work out. Well, on the day that our column about wrens came out two weeks ago, a second female entered the scene.

The following is a public service announcement, as columnists occasionally have a right to be when they're not trying to be funny or political. There is a cockatiel missing in Huntington Beach, and apparently a family in Newport Beach has found it. The bird's owners are trying to track down the finders, and the Huntington Central Park Equestrian Center is aiding them in the search. That's the gist of the story so far. Now, a missing cockatiel may sound like the fodder for a zany human interest story or to some, not a story at all. But like I said, we're running this column as a way to spread the word.

The height of summer beach season at Bolsa Chica State Beach is also the height of nesting season at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. As you're probably aware, California least terns and Western snowy plovers like to nest on sandy beaches. But during the first part of the 20th century, their habitats were taken over by people with our parking lots and beach blankets. The populations of our locally nesting terns and plovers plummeted. The Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve was created in the early 1970s in large part to protect the endangered California least tern.

Ocean View School District Trustee John Briscoe, with no rhyme and little reason, states that he “can assure” us that the “topics” included in Maya Angelou’s 1970 National Book Award nominee, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” are “inappropriate for our young 8- to 13-year-olds to read without teacher or parent intervention” (“‘Caged’ not monitored well,” Community Commentary,...

A pelican is being nursed back to health in Huntington Beach after a 19-year-old man fishing on the Newport pier allegedly stomped on it. The bird, a 3-year-old male, has a horizontal hairline fracture along its beak from the incident, said Wildlife Director Debbie McGuire of the Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach. Daniel Richard Moreno, 19, a Perris resident, was fishing on the pier March 14 when the pelican swooped in to eat a fish he had caught that he set on the ground next to him, police said.