Ojai Naturalist

Do you ever feel like you are being watched?

We are just a little more than three months into Baby Season, and our center is overflowing with young raptors needing help. So far this year, we have already received 367 orphaned and displaced babies and young juveniles in desperate need of care - with more arriving every day! And that does not include the adult patients who have arrived with severe injuries and illnesses that require specialized medical intervention.

Please consider donating to our Baby Season Campaign to help give these vulnerable creatures a second chance at life! We are so thankful to our supporters - we couldn't do this vital work without you!

https://ojairaptorcenter.networkforgood.com/projects/220958-2024-baby-season-campaign

Find More Birds with These 8 Suggestions for Your Birding Routine From scanning to studying to sitting still, these easy tweaks can help you find more birds in every season.

!Migration Alert! BirdCast is predicting more than 300 MILLION birds will be migrating across the U.S. for each of the next three nights. Sadly, birds can be disoriented by light pollution, contributing to the hundreds of millions of birds estimated to die in building collisions in the U.S. every year. Turn off nonessential lights from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. nightly, and make glass safer for birds by day. Learn more about keeping migrating birds safe: bit.ly/LightsOutForBirds Please share to help get the word out!

Seven Simple Actions to Help Birds Here are the seven simple things you can do to help birds

Our Question of the Week is when will spring migration reach its peak? This is one of the best times of year to be a birder, because peak spring migration is approaching across much of the United States. You may already be enjoying the return of warblers, hummingbirds, orioles, and more—and that traffic will only increase over the next few weeks! With billions of birds on the move every night, this is also an important time to turn off nonessential lights at night, and to make your windows safer for birds. Use this map to check your peak migration period—and find more information about Lights Out and window safety here: https://mailchi.mp/cornell/release-lights-out-for-birds-1335461?e=f0b505020c

Bird ID Skills: How to Learn Bird Songs and Calls You can only see straight ahead, but you can hear in all directions at once. Learning bird songs is a great way to identify birds hidden by dense foliage, faraway birds, birds at night, and birds that look identical to each other. In fact, when biologists count birds in the field, the great majority

ADOPT-A-CONDOR
Meet Kodama (646) and Amigo (204). This pair successfully hatched Jade (1204) in remote Big Sur, CA, in 2023 as well as other wild offspring in past nesting seasons. Symbolically adopt this pair, their offspring, Jade, or other Big Sur flock members, helping us to restore the California Condor to the wild, fostering success stories like this one!

Symbolic condor adoptions are currently available at the $125, $75 and $25 level and come with your own, personal condor adoption kit! Condor adoption kits make great gifts and are a wonderful way to contribute to the conservation of this majestic species!

Symbolically Adopt-A-Condor: https://www.ventanaws.org/adopt-a-condor.html

Photo of Amigo displaying to Kodama by: Tim Huntington - webnectar photography
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Who needs candy in their eggs this weekend when you can have baby condors!

That's right, we were able to confirm TWO more nests for the Southern California wild flock making this a very merry spring season indeed. While we love this beautiful close-up of a protective mom, the two nests we recently confirmed were done so using remote technology. Utilizing GPS data, our biologists were able to track two condor pairs that showed potential nesting activity. After careful analysis of their GPS behavioral patterns, our team concluded that these two pairs are very likely nesting and we will continue to monitor their progress. These nests are in remote areas of the Sespe Wilderness and we are excited by the continued range expansion of this flock into their historic habitat.

And yes...we are VERY egg-cited, egg-static, and eggs-hilarated by this egg-citing news! (never assume we'll let an opportunity for a good egg pun go by us, we never yolk about a good egg pun)

Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Five Incredible Ways Birds Change Their Bodies for Spring and Fall Migration To power perilous journeys, birds undergo extreme feats like doubling their body weight and rearranging or even consuming their internal organs.

Biologists confirmed the first condor egg within the park for 2024!

The parents are a new pair, condors 868 and 931, and they've chosen a nest cavity in a place that no condors have used before. Condor 868 is a 6-year-old male who was first released at Pinnacles back in 2018 and 931 is a 5-year-old female released by Ventana Wildlife Society at their San Simeon release pen in 2019. Their egg has a long road ahead of it before hatch and will need to be kept warm and protected at all hours of the day. Luckily, condors are great at sharing parental duties! Biologists expect to see each parent take turns incubating the egg for two to four days at a time. While one parent is incubating, the other is out foraging and socializing with other condors in the area. Park biologists will be closely monitoring 868 and 931 to see if this newly established couple's nest succeeds this year.

There is still time for more condors to lay eggs this year and park staff are hopeful that 2024 might be the first year with four condor nests in the park at once! We will keep you updated as the condor nesting seasons unfolds.

[Condor 868 standing in a nest cavity with an egg behind him.]
Photo Credit: NPS Photo / Gavin Emmons

California condor 943, a male who's getting very close to being classified as an adult, briefly chases well established female condor 569 Phoebe the Forager around the skies above the park a couple of weeks ago.

I don't pretend to understand quite what social dynamic is playing out here, but it was another example of the complex social structure of the flock in action.

Field of View Is Important in Birdwatching Binoculars. Here's Why The two most important specifications for binoculars are the magnification and objective lens size (that's the "8" and the "42" in "8x42," respectively). But it's also worth paying attention to Field of View. Whereas magnification and objective lens determine how big and bright your image will be, f