San Diego is one of the most biodiverse birding regions in North America, with more than 500 recorded species — and its annual Bird Festival draws crowds from around the country. One of its most popular (and ambitious) events is the "100 or More" challenge: a daylong sprint to identify at least 100 different birds.
In this episode, producer Anthony Wallace follows the action across scenic lakes, rugged foothills, city reservoirs and coastal wetlands to see how this classic hobby has taken on new energy.
Along the way, we meet passionate birders — both seasoned listers and recent enthusiasts — learn many mind-blowing bird facts and explore how birds inspire everything from healing to obsession to joy.
Anthony's top 4 reasons to love birding:
- Every bird has a story.
- Bird migration is mind-blowing.
- It opens up your ears — you'll start noticing sounds you never paid attention to.
- Bird behavior is entertaining and mesmerizing: bizarre, dramatic and constantly unfolding.
Guests:
- Jen Hajj, San Diego Bird Festival coordinator for the San Diego Bird Alliance
- Rick Grove, birder and wedding officiant
- "100 Birds or More" field trip participants and guides, including Dorothy Arnold, Samantha Richter, Mark Dayton and Jehudy Carballo
Bird species (in order of mention throughout the episode):
- Lilac-crowned amazon (Audubon)
- Tricolored blackbird (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Great-tailed grackle (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Song sparrow (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Black phoebe (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Phainopepla (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Neotropic cormorant (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Woodpecker (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Townsend's warbler (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Orange-crowned warbler (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Wilson's warbler (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Red-shouldered hawk (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Allen's hummingbird (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Black-crowned night heron (Audubon / All About Birds)
- California towhee (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Cooper's hawk (Audubon / All About Birds)
- California scrub-jay (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Oak titmouse (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Gadwall (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Western grebe (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Say's phoebe (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Parakeet (Britannica)
- Cliff swallow (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Hooded oriole (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Eastern phoebe (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Common swift (Audubon / Birds of the World)
- Iceland gull (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Thick-billed kingbird (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Yellow-crowned night heron (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Little blue heron (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Reddish egret (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Tricolored heron (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Anna's hummingbird (Audubon / All About Birds)
Catherine Werth/San Diego Bird AllianceAn Anna's hummingbird with bright pink throat feathers is shown in this undated photo. - Lark sparrow (Audubon / All About Birds)
- American crow (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Common raven (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Clark's grebe (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Laughing falcon (Birds of the World)
- American coot (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Least sandpiper (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Whimbrel (Audubon / All About Birds)
- Elegant tern (Audubon / All About Birds)
Birding terms to know:
- Listers - Birders who keep track of every species they've seen.
- Big Year - A challenge to spot as many bird species as possible in a single year.
- Vagrants - Birds spotted outside the regions where they're typically found.
- Rushing - A synchronized mating dance where birds like Western or Clark's grebes run side by side across the water's surface.
Also mentioned in this episode:
- eBird | One of the top birding apps to log sightings, find birding locations and track trends across regions
- Merlin Bird ID | Go-to app for birders to identify species by photo or sound, powered by Cornell Lab experts
- "The Residence" | Netflix murder mystery where the detective uses birding skills to spot clues others miss
- Michael Jordan | NBA legend and six-time champion — his name's become shorthand for being the best
- Honda Accord and Ford Mustang | One’s an everyday car, the other a head-turner — a way to explain the gap between something common and something extraordinary
- Nancy Christensen | Local birder and one of California's top listers
- Pokémon Go | Popular mobile game that gets players outside to collect virtual creatures — similar to how birders track species
- "The Big Year" | 2011 comedy starring Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black as birders racing across North America to spot the most species in a calendar year — the movie's big year record is 750 species and you could get over halfway there just in San Diego
- Tijuana River Estuary | Cross-border birding hotspot with incredible biodiversity
- Shih Tzu | A toy breed whose name means “lion dog” — small but spirited
Sources:
- Local Birding Resources (San Diego Bird Alliance)
- "Big year for two local birders as they set county record" (Ernie Cowan, Union Tribune, 2024)
- "The Birds Are Not on Lockdown, and More People Are Watching Them" (Jacey Fortin, The New York Times, 2020)
- "Soaring to New Heights: Recapping the 2025 San Diego Bird Festival" (San Diego Bird Alliance, 2025)
- "Predicting co-distribution patterns of parrots and woody plants under global changes: The case of the Lilac-crowned Amazon and Neotropical dry forests" (María de Lourdes Nuñez Landa, Juan Carlos Montero Castro, Tiberio César Monterrubio-Rico, Sabina I. Lara-Cabrera and David A. Prieto-Torres, Journal for Nature Conservation, 2023)
- "San Diego's parrots have returned. How did they get here in the first place?" (Danielle Dawson, FOX 5/KUSI, 2024)
- "What is poaching?" (The International Fund for Animal Welfare, 2024)
- "Parrot Illegal Trade Decreases in Mexico 2022" (Juan Carlos Cantú Guzmán, María Elena Sánchez Saldaña, Emer García De la Puente and Jesús Manuel Pimentel Ontiveros, Defenders of Wildlife, 2022)
- "Help Study LA's Parrots" (Jacob Margolis, LAist, 2024)
- "The Naturalized Parrots of San Diego County" (Lesley Handa, Sketches San Diego Audubon, 2020)
- Interesting Facts on Hummingbirds (UC Davis Hummingbird Health and Conservation Program / School of Veterinary Medicine)
- "Hummingbird Hearts Beat 10 Times Faster Than Yours" (Bob Sundstrom, BirdNote, 2021)
- "The Hummingbird in Mexican Culture" (Vanessa Hernandez Urraca, 2022)
- "Hummingbirds, the champions of the sky" (Elizeth Cinto Mejía, W.K. Kellogg Biological Station Bird Sanctuary, 2022)
- "When Birds Get Lost, Space Storms May Be to Blame" (Rebecca Heisman, Audubon magazine, 2023)
- "The Common Swift Is the New Record Holder for Longest Uninterrupted Flight" (Jenna O'Donnell, Audubon, 2016)
- "Editorial: Vagrancy, exploratory behavior and colonization by birds: Escape from extinction?" (Richard Reed Veit, Lisa Louise Manne, Lucinda C. Zawadzki, Marlen Acosta Alamo and Robert William Henry, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolutionary Ecology, 2022)
- "AviList: A Unified Global Checklist of the World's Birds is Now Available" (AviList Core Team, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2025)
- "With an Orange-Tufted Spiderhunter, Birder Breaks Record for Sightings" (Joe Trezza, The New York Times, 2024)
- "Nature's Greatest Dancers" (BBC One)
From KPBS Public Media, The Finest is a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Pandora, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode 10: Birding Transcript
Julia Dixon Evans: Birding is hot right now. Birding apps like eBird and Merlin are topping the reference charts right beside the Bible and the dictionary. Even the recent Netflix hit "The Residence" features a lead character who's deep into birding. Uzo Aduba of "Orange Is the New Black" fame plays Detective Cordelia Cupp who uses her birdwatching instincts to crack cases.
And here in San Diego, we live in a world-class birding destination with more than 500 species recorded here, San Diego is often called The Birdiest County in the country. It's a hobby that I'll admit might sound a little slow or maybe even boring to the uninitiated. Watching birds? That's it? But for this episode, we dove into the serene and sometimes competitive subculture and found there's definitely something to it.
Birds, it turns out, are doing a lot of interesting things all day — things we usually tune out entirely. But people who are birders really fall in love with birds.
Jen Hajj: Their beauty, the colors that they come in, the way they smell. They've got that kind of powdery, dusty kind of smell. It just has a little hint of poop to it, but it's not a bad smell of poop.
Evans: This is Jen Hajj, coordinator of the San Diego Bird Festival. She wasn't always into birds. They found her after she was laid off from her job in chemistry. She was living in Utah at the time.
Hajj: So I got a stupid job at the zoo. I worked as a cashier. I wasn't planning on doing anything more than that until I recovered. You know, being laid off is very traumatic. My kiosk was right across the duck pond and there was this giant willow tree. This was in Salt Lake City, so it gets cold there. In the wintertime, nobody comes. I was here in my little cashier booth, which was connected to the nature store. I read every book in that store. I looked at that tree and I looked at the ducks in the pond and the pelicans that were in the pond. And yeah, it was serene. And the birds — and the people in that industry — just healed me.
Anthony Wallace: How did birds heal you?
Hajj: Just by being who they are, come on. You know, the softness of their feathers and their sounds, the way that they put everything forward. You know, they might be on death's door, but they are still alert and bright and doing everything they can to say, I'm alert, I'm alive, I'm here, and they bring it. It meant a lot to me, and that I could do that too.
Evans: Jen started working with the San Diego Bird Alliance, formerly the Audubon Society, and eventually began running the San Diego Bird Festival. In the 10 years she's been at the helm, she told us the festival has continued to grow.
When she first got into birding in her 30s, she said she always tended to be the youngest person in any group. That's changed. During the COVID lockdowns, a new generation of birders emerged: People stuck at home with nothing to do but watch the birds outside their windows and in their backyards.
In 2025, the festival drew a record setting 1,700 attendees. About a quarter of them traveled here specifically for it. In the birding world, it's considered a bucket list festival, a golden opportunity to see dozens of new species in just a few days.
Hajj: And that's very appealing to somebody who wants to list. So there's this group of birders — they're serious birders — and they call themselves listers.
Wallace: Is there a competition element? I've heard of challenges where in a certain period of time everyone has to find as many…
Hajj: Yeah, there's the annual Big Year competition that people do where they're trying to see the most birds in a single year. At the Bird Festival, we have a field trip that we call the "100 or More" field trip, which our goal for that trip is to see 100 species or more in a single day.
Evans: A mad dash across the county to see 100 birds in just a few hours? That got my producer Anthony intrigued.
Wallace: I think it might be cool to go on one of the "100 or More" days.
Hajj: Oh, I'd love to have you come along. It's pretty amazing.
Evans: Today on The Finest, Anthony takes us on an adventure to find a lot of birds doing some pretty wild things. Along the way, we'll also meet some humans who are so hooked on this Planet Earth-level drama unfolding in the skies, beaches and trees of San Diego that they've structured their lives around watching it.
From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Wallace: Before my "100 Birds or More" field trip, my experience with birding was zero. I knew pigeons, ducks, bald eagles and vultures, and I can't say I'd ever looked at any of them through binoculars. I quickly learned that serious birding starts very early. I never wake up in the 5s, so this was kind of a big deal for me. I got up while it was still dark, grabbed my microphone and binoculars, and headed to the Marina Village Conference Center in Mission Bay. Already, a couple hundred excited attendees were gathered getting coffee and name tags. I found my way onto one of the many buses waiting to take us across the county to see some birds. My group was led by Rick Grove. He's kind of the Michael Jordan of birding in San Diego right now.
Rick Grove: I've been in San Diego 12 years. I retired as assistant superintendent for a school district a year and a half ago, so I'm a full-time birder and part-time wedding officiant, and been with the festival for about 10 years now and love doing this trip.
Wallace: Rick's very humble about it, but he's in the running to win San Diego's 2025 Big Year competition, a race to spot the most bird species in the county over the course of a year. And he was already trying to add to his list before we'd even reached our first birding spot.
Grove: We’re gonna take a little bit longer route to our first spot with the hopes of coming across some lilac-crowned parrots on a flyover. I still need lilac-crowned for my year list, so I'm counting on you.
Wallace: Over the course of my big all-day expedition, I found four major reasons to love birding. The first one, every bird has a story. Take the lilac-crowned parrot, the one we were looking for from the bus. It's originally from Mexico, and in recent years, its population has declined dramatically due to habitat loss and poaching for the pet trade. It's now endangered with only about 5,000 left in the wild, but San Diego has become a refuge for them.
Parrots likely arrived here in the 1940s when they escaped a local pet shop. Today, they thrive in urban areas, feeding on ornamental trees. And ornithologists say they have no negative impact on the local plants and animals. They fly around in little family groups with up to four chicks and they are very loud. And we did see one with the group out the bus window, our first bird of the day — 99 birds to go.
Our first official stop was Lindo Lake in Lakeside. It was crisp, cool and sunny at 7 a.m., and we didn't even make it out of the parking lot before everyone had their binoculars and scopes out staring into the trees. I tried to follow along, but honestly I had no idea what was going on.
Grove: So the tricolored blackbird, you know, white shoulder, not yellow, not your orange.
Wallace: Everyone was getting really excited about something called the tricolored blackbird. I tried to spot it, but they all looked like birds to me.
Is that one one of them or is that a larger?
Birder: That's a great-tailed grackle up in this next tree. A larger, longer tail.
Wallace: So the blackbirds just left?
Birder: They did leave. Yeah.
Wallace: There's one.
Birder: That's a yellow-rumped warbler that just went to the left there.
Wallace: Now I know that mistaking a plain old yellow-rumped warbler or a great-tailed grackle for a tricolored blackbird is like mistaking a Honda Accord for a rare, vintage Mustang.
But the vibes were great — even if I couldn't keep up. People would freeze mid-sentence at the sound of a chirp or point excitedly at a barely-visible blob in a tree. All day, my head was spinning from the sheer number of bird species mentioned. So you can get a taste, here's a compilation of just some of them.
Grove: Song Sparrow, obviously you hear…Black phoebe just flew in at nine o'clock… The male phainopepla is still at the top of this right tree…
Birder: Neotropics, the farthest left. He's got wings outspread…
Birder: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah…
Birder: We've got a woodpecker…
Grove: There's a bright male yellow-rumped and a townsend's, and there's an orange-crowned warbler in there as well in the back…
Birder: That was Wilson's?
Grove: Townsend's…
Birder: It's a red-shouldered hawk…
Wallace: OK, red-shouldered. OK, cool.
Grove: Beautiful male Allen's…
Wallace: What's that?
Birder: Black-crowned night heron…
Grove: California towhee up under the oak tree…
Birder: That's the Cooper's Hawk…
Birder: I heard a California scrub-jay…
Birder: Titmouse, T-I-T-A…
Birder: The close ducks are gadwall. There are western grebes…
Grove: Say's phoebe again is perched at like 10 o'clock…
Wallace: The words just go over my head.
Birder: Yeah, OK. There you go.
Wallace: Too many bird names today for my brain to keep up.
One thing became very clear: All these birds and this growing list of bird names were making everyone in my group very happy.
Birder: Oh boy, looks like a parakeet. So beautiful.
Birder: Look at that grin on your face.
Birder: Yeah, I'm very happy.
Birder: Good luck. It's good luck.
Wallace: Whenever I could, I pestered our guide Rick for some bird facts while he scanned the skies, and about 10 times that day he blew my mind with his encyclopedic knowledge. Down near the water at Lindo Lake, he told me about a colony of cliff swallows that's so precise with its migration that it arrives in town every year on the same day.
Grove: Cliff swallows, that colony converges about March 17 in Carlsbad.
Wallace: That's crazy that it's the exact same day.
Grove: It is amazing. I used to have hooded orioles that would arrive on the same day in my yard. I've moved, so I don't know if they still do. But the fidelity they have to where they come to breed is just astonishing.
Wallace: Yeah, just like their sense of direction and time.
Grove: It's astonishing. There's an Allen's hummingbird again sitting on top of the tule, another nice male. See that green back? That generally is reliable for Allen's.
Wallace: Just about every conversation with Rick was cut off like this by a sudden bird sighting.
And Allen's hummingbirds have an almost aquamarine-colored back. These tiny birds weigh about one-tenth of an ounce. Some of them spend summers as far north as Oregon and fly their tiny bodies all the way to central Mexico in the winter. This one could have been on his way back up north for the summer. And once we spotted him, Dorothy — another member of our group — sprang into action with her camera.
What did you get there?
Dorothy Arnold: The Allen's eating a bug. Let's see if I could pull it up for you.
Wallace: Oh my god.
Arnold: Wait, wait. It's in his mouth. This is 30 frames a second.
Wallace: You can really only see what hummingbirds are doing with a super high-speed camera like Dorothy's. They flap their wings up to 80 times per second. Their hearts beat up to 20 times per second. That's a heart rate of 1,200 beats per minute. To them, we probably look like koalas moving in slow motion.
Arnold: They're fast and fierce. And they're one of the hardest birds to photograph, so it's a super challenge. So I have them dueling and fighting one another because they fight — they're territorial. The Aztecs used to call them little warriors 'cause they're kind of like that even though they're tiny.
Grove: I hate to crack a whip, but we got a lot of stops we gotta make today if we're gonna get through your number, we gotta move.
Wallace: We saw something like 50 birds at Lindo Lake — a great start. Our next stop was nearby El Monte County Park at the base of El Cajon Mountain. It was quiet and green with hardly anybody around to drown out the bird sounds.
And here, Rick was laser-focused on a single elusive bird that was rumored to be in the area.
Grove: There was an eastern phoebe not reported since January. Anybody finds me that eastern phoebe, you get free beer. That eastern phoebe only one person has in the county so far this year, and it ain't me.
Wallace: When I spoke to one of the younger birders in our group, I started to understand why Rick was so determined to find the eastern phoebe.
What's your name?
Samantha Richter: Samantha.
Wallace: Samantha?
Richter: Yes.
Wallace: Good to meet you.
Richter: You as well.
Wallace: How long have you been birding?
Richter: Probably a year and a half. It's kind of addictive in a way, especially with all the tools — eBird and Merlin — you wanna get to 100 species.
Wallace: So the addictive part is getting new birds, building your list?
Richter: Yeah. Yeah. It'll hopefully go up and continue each year. Like Rick right now is number one. He has the most species in San Diego, logged on his eBird.
Wallace: Wow. For this year?
Richter: Yes, for this year.
Wallace: OK.
Richter: And I think the record.
Wallace: So he is the champion
Richter: Yes, at this moment in time. Yeah.
Wallace: He is in the lead. OK.
Richter: Yes. And I think the, like in San Diego, it's above 400 is the record. Yeah.
Wallace: I wonder if he's going for the record, probably.
Richter: I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. That would be a question for him.
Wallace: After about an hour of wandering, I noticed a group in a clearing excitedly looking at a tree. This was the big one.
Grove: This is an eastern phoebe. This is the only one in the county this winter, and it's only been seen once this year. And I've been here a half dozen times looking for this bird.
Wallace: This is your first time seeing it?
Grove: Yeah. Nancy Christensen saw it here in January and I've been chasing this little devil since. This guy's got a dark cap…
Wallace: Oh, I see it.
Grove: … and kind of a faint yellow under the throat and the belly.
Wallace: Oh, cool.
Grove: Very cool.
Wallace: So what's your count on the year then?
Grove: I think that's 282, I think.
Wallace: Samantha told me that you're in the lead.
Grove: Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything.
Wallace: Does it matter to you?
Grove: No, no, not being in the lead. It's about seeing as many as I can, you know, seeing what, what I could do in a year.
Wallace: Would you like to break the record?
Grove: That doesn't mean anything to me. The record wouldn't mean anything. Two of my good friends are the current record holders.
Wallace: Oh, really?
Grove: It's just not something I think about.
Wallace: But if you broke it, it would just mean that you saw more birds.
Grove: It would mean I got really lucky. I spent a lot of time outside and I had a lot of help. That's all the record would mean.
Wallace: So at 282 species, Rick is well over halfway to the one year record, which is 409. And he's bashful about his number one ranking this year, but you can probably tell just from the audio of him in action: He is a master at spotting and identifying birds both by sight and sound.
The eastern phoebe itself is physically unremarkable: small, gray and, I guess, kind of cute. But what makes it so special here and difficult to find is that this is not its natural habitat. It's what birders call a vagrant, a bird that — for some unknown reason — migrates somewhere totally different from the rest of its species.
This is my second big takeaway about birding: Bird migration is mind-blowing.
Grove: Yeah, this bird does not belong here. It's an eastern phoebe, so Eastern U.S. East of the Rockies primarily. Yeah.
Wallace: So is it a migratory bird?
Grove: Yeah, it's migratory and it just went the wrong way for winter. It didn't go far enough south. It went west instead. Bird migration is, as much as we know, still a big mystery.
Birder: Is this the only one in San Diego?
Grove: Yeah, this year.
Wallace: So it's just by itself.
Grove: Mm-hmm. All right, let's hit the bus.
[Music]
Evans: OK, Anthony, let's pause, debrief for a second. You're about halfway through your birding adventure at this point. What were you thinking?
Wallace: Yeah, so I think I started out more interested in the people — the birders — and the birding part was just entirely overwhelming. I just could not keep track of the birds or really see the right ones at all. But I think over the course of the day, I started getting more drawn to the birds themselves and interested in them. The migration — learning about the migration was one of the things that really captivated me and got me interested. The things that some of these birds can do, for example, some facts that I have…
Evans: Love it. Bring it.
Wallace: The common swift can stay in the air for 10 months straight with never landing.
Evans: That’s incredible.
Wallace: And there's actually one bird called the Icelandic gull. On the Audubon website, they track individual birds and you can see their journey — and they tracked one that flew from, basically from near the North Pole. It was up there in September, and all the way down near San Diego by December.
Evans: Wow. All right, now tell us about this eastern phoebe.
Wallace: Yeah, so this eastern phoebe was just in the wrong place completely. And it's literally the only single eastern phoebe in San Diego County. There's literally one of them.
Evans: And how do we know that there's only one?
Wallace: I think it's just from birders. Birders are so thorough. There's so many of them. They're all scouring the whole county, taking pictures, telling each other where they find these things. There's only been one spotted this year, and it's been in this same area every time, so it really seems like it's literally just this one individual bird. And that is one of the most incredible things I learned from Rick about these vagrants, is they often will return to the exact same place every year.
Grove: There was a thick-billed kingbird, which is a Southwestern specialty. You've gotta get into like Southeastern Arizona to see those typically. And we had one that would come back to the same little green belt in Chula Vista. I think it was 14 consecutive winters, just like clockwork. Same tree. It moved around a little bit, but it was just amazing.
Evans: Wow. OK, so these vagrants actually know what they're doing.
Wallace: Yes, they're not just kind of aimlessly wandering. And actually there's been some new research into vagrants. Vagrants have been kind of a mystery for a long time. Previously people had thought that vagrants had some kind of problem, like their navigation system was broken. They're confused. But now, there's this new way of looking at them as explorers, where they're really performing an important function for their species, where they're basically going and looking for new habitats.
Evans: Like a scout.
Wallace: Yeah. Like a scout to test, will this work for us? Because always, the climate and ecology is shifting and changing. So it's important, but especially now it's happening faster with climate change. And that's another interesting thing that I learned is that bird habitats are dynamic. They change quite a bit. And one of our guides, Mark, he's been birding in San Diego since the '80s, and he's seen the shifting dynamics of certain birds coming and going through San Diego.
Mark Dayton: I've seen a lot of trends in birds in general, like population shifts and things like where we used to never get yellow-crowned night herons, little blue herons, reddish egret, tricolored heron. You would never see that here, and then all of a sudden start coming in one by one. They start seeing one, and then now the yellow-crowned night herons have a breeding population and now the little blue herons have a breeding population. I remember when there was no great-tailed grackles here. They were something that was south and east of here, and all of a sudden they started showing up in the county and now they're everywhere.
Evans: That's just cool. So vagrants are not technically lost?
Wallace: No, they're not. And yeah, you heard Mark, there's a pattern. One shows up and then a couple more and then they decide, all right, this place works. And yeah, Rick did correct me when I used the term lost.
Grove: Lost suggests that it didn't come here intentionally. It isn't the normal migratory path. We don't know why they're here. When a bird is not where it's expected, we don't know why. The stories of some of these birds that travel six days without stopping, shutting down one half of their brain at a time, one hemisphere at a time. There is nothing as amazing, I don't think, in the animal kingdom as bird migration.
Evans: OK, tell me more about Rick. I already love him, and you spent the entire day together. So yeah, what'd you think of him at first?
Wallace: He's an awesome guy and a great guide. I found it just mind-blowing how he was able to pick all these distinct birds out of the sky. But yeah, he's very humble. You can tell that he kind of resisted bragging at all about his bird count. Although it was very impressive to me. I just thought it was very interesting how well he was doing in pursuing the record. Getting to 400 birds in a year, it really does take an outrageous amount of birding, just an extreme dedication.
Grove: This year I've been out all but three days. I've seen most of the sunrises this year. Yeah, from the desert to the sea.
Evans: I guess I also just really love the idea of listing. Tell me more about that.
Wallace: Yeah. I think listing is like the element of birding that kind of reminds me of Pokémon, where you're going out in the world and trying to capture all these different…
Evans: … cute little things.
Wallace: Yeah. Yeah. Cute, cool, interesting little things. And there's rare ones that are extra special and yeah, you have your collection that you can look at and show off, keep track of. I mean the apps are amazing — we can go on right now and look at everything Rick has seen recently.
But yeah, listing it can be very intense I think. But Rick, as we've heard, is very chill about it and he emphasizes that the birding community in San Diego is very collaborative. He made a point to say that it is not like the Owen Wilson movie about birding, in which they're very competitive, sabotaging each other. I think it's called "The Big Year."
In reality, it's much more of a chill vibe. But there's certainly listers that do take it to an extreme, and we'll hear about some of them.
Evans: All right, let's get back to the birding.
Wallace: One of our guides, Jehudy Carballo — who goes by Jay — is from Costa Rica and he leads birding trips there. He told me about some extreme listers.
Jehudy Carballo: I remember from the most extreme case was three guys from England. They were gonna be there for a week and all we had booked was me and a rental car. And basically, they were going for 11 species. That's all they needed because their life list was already in the thousands. And they had been to Costa Rica before, and so they just were missing those 11 that they needed.
Wallace: And it was worth a trip just for 11.
Carballo: Exactly. Basically what they told me is like, we don't care if we have to camp or sleep in the car or if we have to go and pay the most expensive room in the Four Seasons, if that's what we get the bird, we don't care. Get the birds. We got nine out of 11 and they were not happy.
Wallace: Not very relaxing.
Carballo: Exactly that's a lot of stress.
Wallace: Are you a lister?
Carballo: Yeah, I am. I mean, like I have to because I'm a guide.
Wallace: Do you know what your life list number is?
Carballo: 1,900-something — getting close to 2,000.
Wallace: For context, it's estimated that there are about 11,000 bird species on earth. So Jay has seen almost 20% of them. The number one birder in the world has a life list of 10,000. But even with all the rare birds Jay's seen, his favorite birding moment in San Diego was seeing a common one. The Allen's hummingbird that we saw earlier has an orangish neck, but the Anna's hummingbird, it's more of a bright pink.
Carballo: I think the first time I saw an Anna's hummingbird that I learned was super common. That happens a lot. A lot of the good birds are just common, they are kind of underrated. We have over 50 species of hummingbirds in Costa Rica, but when I remember we're by the Tijuana River Estuary and there was one Anna's hummingbird, a male sitting really close, catching the light at the right angle. So it was just glowing. The whole thing was, the head was. Yeah. But every day out, it is always a good day. It's an amazing world. You can do birding no matter where you are. And then once you get in that world, it can be dangerous because then you wanna see more. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wallace: Birding can be competitive, which can be fun. But after talking with my new birding friends, I realized it can also be a practice in mindfulness and it can open up a new way of seeing and appreciating the world around you. That brings me to the third big thing I learned about birding: It opens up your ears.
Richter: I mean, birding is so much about hearing too. So you can sit and close your eyes and just listen and knowing the calls and using that sense, not just sight to see.
Wallace: What are these sounds mostly right now?
Grove: This is lark sparrow. Obviously we have crows over here if anybody missed that earlier.
Birder: We have crows, not ravens.
Grove: To me the raven sounds more like a toad. It's a deeper, more guttural croak. Whereas the crow, which you hear there, to me sounds like an annoying lap dog. It's like your neighbor's Shih Tzu [imitates crow calls.]
See? Can't you picture your neighbor's Shih Tzu when you hear that?
Birder: Yes, yeah. That's a great way to remember.
Wallace: We began making our way back west towards the coast. At Lake Murray, we watched floating water birds…
Birder: Here's a Clark's swimming to the right with a western.
Birder: Thank you. So perfect.
Wallace: … including the Clark's grebe, which is world famous for one special move.
Grove: They get up on their feet and [imitates water sounds] with their head, their necks like this [imitates water sounds]. I'm glad this is audio only.
Wallace: So they rise up outta the water?
Grove: It's called rushing. They dance basically.
Wallace: Sounds like synchronized swimming.
Grove: Yeah, that's what it looks like.
Wallace: It's got a long, bright white snake-like neck and red eyes that glowed through the binoculars. When it does its mating dance, called rushing, it literally walks on water. The BBC even came here recently to film it.
Birder: It's like a rush to watch rush.
Wallace: So you've seen that?
Arnold: Oh yeah. I've literally sat on the edge of the lake, I was telling him, with my 600 lens, which is really zoomed in. And when you look at the photos, you realize that they do it in total synchrony. Their feet are in exactly the same position. It's just kind of wild.
Wallace: My fourth big birding takeaway is probably the main one that really won me over: Watching bird behavior is entertaining and mesmerizing. It is bizarre, dramatic and constant. It's really cool to see big animals at the zoo or in the wild, but they really do just lay around a lot of the time. Birds live fast. They're pretty much always doing something: fighting, fleeing from threats, courting mates, diving into the water and, most interesting for me, hunting and eating.
Jay told me about a snake-hunting falcon in Costa Rica that bites its prey's head off and swallows it whole. But we saw some pretty cool stuff ourselves here in San Diego.
Birder: Oh, cormorant's got a fish.
Birder: Oh cool.
Birder: Good sized fish.
Birder: Wow. That went down fast.
Wallace: It swallowed it whole.
Birder: It's sushi.
Birder: I just swallowed a quarter of my body weight.
Wallace: Must have a flexible neck.
Grove: Yeah, it's amazing watching some of the birds like herons and all that gulp down really big prey: rabbits, things like that. You know, it's like, oh gosh.
Wallace: I walked up to the edge of the lake and zeroed in on a black duck-like bird with blood red eyes and a white beak, making a strange sound.
Do you know what that one is right there?
Birder: It's a coot. I think it's called American Coot. And if you listen to 'em, they kind of make a coot, coot.
Wallace: I like the sound.
Birder: Yeah, it is. They're quite interesting. Sounds like you're squeezing a little stuffed toy.
Wallace: Before this day, basically all birds floating in water were ducks to me, but I'm a birder now. This American coot is extremely common. There's 7 million of them, according to the Audubon Society, but this particular one transfixed me, making its weird little sound and looking for lunch.
This coot is really busy swimming around really fast and sticking its beak in the water for probably food.
A coot.
Grove: Oh yeah, we're heading back to the bus.
Wallace: Oh, okay.
Birder: Coots are quite common, but they're really kind of cool.
Wallace: The San Diego River mudflats near Ocean Beach and Robb Field was our last stop — a chance to get some ocean birds. By now, we were well on our way to our triple digit bird count goal.
Grove: I am gonna guess we're at about 92. We won't go back till we get 100. I'm not showing my face.
Wallace: It was a whole new world by the ocean. We saw species like least sandpipers and whimbrels that had traveled all the way from the Arctic Circle, like way Northern Canada.
Grove: We're making progress here. We've picked up a few more.
Wallace: And we even saw a couple birds we couldn't have predicted.
Grove: Tricolored heron, everybody.
Birder: What do you got?
Grove: Tricolored heron.
Wallace: It's just right there?
Grove: Right there, yes. It's a beaut. That's a bird you think of being from Louisiana and that area. There's two birds up on…
Birder: Yeah, you're right.
Grove: So we may have the tricolored and the reddish…
Birder: I think we do
Grove: … in the same frame. So the one in the water to the left is reddish egret. And then on the right side is tricolored, the heron. They're gonna be right next to each other. Reddish on the left. Tricolored on the right. That's a shock.
Wallace: The reddish egret, like the tricolored heron, is also normally found in the Southeastern U.S. Apparently, these two out of towners were hanging out together.
Grove: Ah, it's doing its dance down there in the, that wide part there.
Wallace: Where's the dance?
Grove: If you step to your right, you'll see. It spreads its wings. Yeah, it kind of forms an umbrella. Some fish come into the shadow, right.
Wallace: Drawing the fish into the shade?
Grove: That's part of the strategy. Yeah, yeah.
Wallace: Oh, that's crazy.
The tricolored and the reddish, both with their bright bills and long necks, were doing this dramatic hunting dance together. They pranced around with their wings outstretched and snapped into the water to catch the fish they were herding with their umbrella maneuver.
Richter: Both hunting at the same time, look at them.
Birder: It's like a ballet almost.
Wallace: My god. It's getting a lot of fish.
Grove: Yeah, it's working.
Wallace: Two vagrants, their family and friends presumably still in Louisiana, who mysteriously came to San Diego doing their hunting thing together. All the while, people rode their bikes and ran along the path next to us, headphones on, oblivious to the drama unfolding before them. That's me most of the time. I live right by here and run here often.
Grove: All right, who's ready for beer time?
Birder: I am.
Grove: We're actually late. We're supposed to be back right now.
Birder: Oh, it's 3:15.
Wallace: Did you see any new ones for the year after those two?
Grove: Yeah, these elegant terns right here — that was a new bird for the year for me.
Wallace: So three.
Grove: Uh-huh, yeah, yeah. Good day. There's not a lot of three-bird days at this point of the year.
Wallace: I'm curious to see how many you end up the year with.
Grove: Oh, OK. Well, I'm hoping for 400. I mean, that's my goal.
Wallace: Altogether, we crushed our goal of 100 or more birds. We saw 141 birds that day. Rick added three to his year list. As of press time, he has 339 on his year list and has fallen into fourth place. He may not care if he wins or breaks the record, but I am invested and will be following along on the eBird app.
But that one day of birding did a lot more for me than make me a spectator of the 2025 San Diego County birding race. Now, when I take a walk by my house, sometimes I take my earbuds out, listen and look in the trees.
[Music and bird calls]
Evans: A special thanks to Jen Hajj, San Diego Bird Alliance, the San Diego Bird Festival, Rick Grove and all the guides and participants on Anthony's "100 or More" field trip — and to the eastern phoebe, tricolored heron and reddish egret, who bravely flew all the way to San Diego.
You can find pictures of the birds we mentioned and Anthony's "A day in the life of a birder" video diary and more at our website at KPBS.org/TheFinest.
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners discover the show. And best of all, if you can think of anyone in your life that might like The Finest, please share it with them.
Next week on The Finest, the Spanish mission system had a devastating impact on the Kumeyaay and other Indigenous people in Southern California, but it did not wipe out their culture altogether. And today, 250 years later, we're in the midst of an Indigenous cultural revival. We talked to one man who's part of it: a San Diego State professor and Kumeyaay tribal member who worked on a comic book to correct widespread misconceptions and proudly share the Kumeyaay story with a new generation.
Ethan Banegas: Oftentimes, history is written as if we are victims, we are passive. What I like about this page, in general, is this is us creating and fighting for our own future. So I think that's why this comic is a real game changer for people like me growing up in today's world.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.