Heatherlea
It’s ‘lights, camera, look up’ for the Urban Birder, who reminisces about one of his favourite birding hotspots
Ihad a very different life before entering the birding world at large, under the guise of The Urban Birder. As a personal assistant to a director who made TV commercials and music videos, it meant that I was able to occasionally traipse around the world with him, staying in posh hotels and hanging around on sets.
One of his regular haunts was Los Angeles. We visited this megacity for 13 years, on an annual basis, for sometimes up to three months at a time. This fabled land of dreams, silicon and flashy cars soon began to feel like my second home.
Although life was breezy, being based in sun-dappled, salubrious
West Hollywood, with its vegan cafés filled with chain-coffee drinking, script-writing wannabes, countless gyms and expansive hillside properties, there was a far uglier side to the city – a feature that it shares with most other cities on the planet.
Not all LA’s streets are paved with gold, and Downtown was downright scary. It was where the underbelly of the city resided. It was also a site for good birding. I remember being taken there on a twitch to a rough park, by a retired casting director. Bert was a man after my own heart. Practically deaf, yet he could hear the faintest cry of a distant Yellow-rumped Warbler, or be aware of some other barely moving bird that I had no idea was there.
A classic example of his urban birding prowess was when he took me to observe a Red-breasted Sapsucker – a vagrant woodpecker – that he had miraculously discovered perched stock-still on a palm tree in the middle of a traffic island on the mega-busy Sunset Boulevard. That man certainly had The Force with him!
Anyway, on that fateful day in the dodgy Downtown park, Bert showed me a wintering Black-and-white Warbler he had previously discovered there. I watched this rare visitor to the west coast through trembling binoculars, aware of the drug exchanges going on all around me.
What many people don’t realise about LA is that it is a coastal city set in a desert. Far from being devoid of natural life, it’s a migration hotspot and its many parks and canyons are home to multitudes of birds, from California Quail and Redshouldered Hawks to Anna’s Hummingbirds and Band-tailed Pigeons. I was drawn to the coast, and in particular to Ballona Wetlands; a 1,087-acre mixture of saltwater, brackish and freshwater marshland, situated on the coast very close to LAX, the city’s main airport.
It has constantly fought off the threat of development throughout its history. The most recent of these battles was against Steven Spielberg, who wanted to build a studio on the site.