SF Bird Club November Newsletter

November Bird Walk

This month we're going to hit Blue Heron Lake and Strawberry Hill in GGP.

We will meet on the saturday morning of november 21st. Head to the partiful link to rsvp.

Spotlight Bird: American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos)

The pair of American white pelicans were a standout from our walk so they will be our spotlight bird for the month.

Fun American White Pelican Facts:

• As you can see in the range map, they spend their winters near the coasts, including by us, and their summers more inland. The bar chart for sf shown below doesn't match this quite as cleanly. SF is not a frequent stopping place for them so I wonder how much of these sightings are flybys?

  

• They are in the same genus, Pelecanus, as the brown pelicans. In fact all extant (living) pelicans are members of this genus. The family Pelecanidae does contains two other genera, Eopelecanus and Miopelecanus, but these are fossil/extinct genera.
• Unlike the brown pelicans you're probably more familiar with, the white pelicans do not dive from the air to catch their prey. If you went to our group walk then you may have noticed them feeding. They were swimming on the surface and taking turns dipping their heads under water and scooping up their food. They mostly eat small fish but also other stuff like crayfish.

  

• Two more fun facts about their feeding behaviors:
  1. they sometimes hunt in groups by coralling the fish
  2. they sometimes perform what is known as kleptoparasitism which means what it sounds like, they steal food.. This note from the Florida Ornithological Society specifically talks about them stealing from DC cormorants. Crissy Field has both DCs and the white pelicans so it would be fun to witness kleptoparasitism!
• Any time I read about migration or bird flight it all sounds pretty magic. You'll often hear about birds being guided by magnetic fields or things like that. According to a study called "American White Pelican Soaring Flight Times and Altitudes Relative to Changes in Thermal Depth and Intensity", scientists found that how high the warm air goes will determine where the pelicans fly and this can vary by the distance of flight. So on a long flight they would be more in the middle of that thermal air zone so they can glide for longer times. On shorter flights where they don't need to glide for as long they'll be lower in the zone.
• I don't know much about their history in San Francisco. I know they are more common visitors to some lakes or bodies of water in surrounding counties, but in SF they trigger rare bird alerts. The pair we saw has been here for over a month now.

Last Month in Birding

Continuing on with the monthly bird commentary.

Species Splits

On our bird walk we discussed the recent species splits and lumps that happened in mid october. Some of these impact the birds we see in SF. A good example is the willet we saw on our walk. Formerly this was just a willet but now it is a prarie willet. Its name comes from the fact that it breeds inland in the praries and grasslands.

Another example which I brought up was the great egret we saw on our walk. I had heard it was split between the American egret for the Americas, and the great white egret for the rest of the world, but I had noticed eBird didn't update the taxonomy. Apparently it is because the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced the split, but eBird follows the global AviList and because this particular species split is more global in nature it needs input from the other regional authorities, so they are holding off on that split for now.

If you want to read more on this here are some helpful links:

• the AOS press release
• the AOS proposals with the reasonings behind each change
• the eBird pages on the 2026 taxonomic updates: one and two

Rare Bird Alerts

I first mentioned the rare bird alerts last month as a way to read up on trends even if you don't plan on chasing them down. I also mentioned the increased frequency of montane species fleeing the mountains for the coasts. That has continued with appearances of evening grosbeaks, Clark's nutcrackers, and others. Dom shared this post about the recent trend.

In a semi-related note, the Lewis’s woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) is not quite a montane species, and they do head lower from the mid mountain areas in the winters, but visiting the coasts and places like SF is still considered rare. We had a recent visitor to the oak woodlands corner of GGP which I was able to visit for two days.

A couple of my observations from my two visits: I watched it get chased around for ~30 seconds by a crow. I also watched it hunting in flycatcher-like manner. Among other woodpeckers, this flycatching behavior is particularly associated with the Lewis's.

Closeout

That's all; happy birding