Flying High at the Morro Bay Bird Fest (guest writer)

After an exhilarating time at the Great Salt Bird Festival in 2008, I kept my ears open for another opportunity to immerse myself in all things feathered and beaked. Living in landlocked Colorado, I am always hungry (thirsty?) for the water, so the Morro Bay Bird Festival seemed like an excellent match for me.

The toughest thing about bird festivals is choosing which events to attend. Staying with M and K in Los Osos (a few miles south of Morro Bay), I also wanted to balance time with birds with time with them. Since I’m new to the area, I decided to focus on getting to know Morro Bay.

With this in mind, Friday morning found me rejoicing in the the warm weather as I walked a portion of the Morro Bay shore line with a dozen others, some new to birding, others with decades of experience. This walk introduced me to three large wading birds: the long-billed curlew, the long-billed dowicher, and the marbled godwit. These birds find their food (aquatic invertebrates, mollusks, snails, larvae, worms, and leeches (yum!)) by probing their long bills into shallow water and mud. One website compares the dowitchers eating style to a sewing machine, as its bill drills up and down.

One way to distinguish the godwit from the curlew and dowitcher is that the godwit’s beak turns slightly up. “Up toward God,” I thought, even though I’m more of a “god is everywhere” type than a “God in Heaven” type. Thinking this was a pretty clever mnemonic, I soon heard several people make the “up towards God” comment. Easy cliché or great minds think alike?

Ambling southward (birders are rarely brisk, too much to look at), we stopped the Heron rookery near the natural history museum. This grove of eucalyptus and Cyprus trees is home to great blue herons, great and snowy egrets, and black crowned night herons (though I didn’t see any of those.) More recently, double-crested cormorants have moved in. Many of the trees were dead, unable to withstand the acidity in the droppings of these large birds

After walking past the marina, we wandered into the estuary. Tide out, we didn’t see many birds, but I was introduced to the salty, tasty, pickleweed plant. One of the bonuses of bird festivals is learning about the bigger picture, the ways that plants, animals, and geography are all interlinked.