What’s on during the 2025 San Diego Bird Festival

Introduction

This tour is designed to perfectly complement the San Diego Bird Festival, visiting Southern California hotspots and seeing California birds that that are different from those that you may see at the festival. This includes birds like the endangered California Condor, the endemic corvids Yellow-billed Magpie and Island Scrub Jay, generally rare birds like LeConte’s Thrasher, established exotic species like Red-whiskered Bulbul and Yellow-chevroned Parakeet, and some seabirds that you are unlikely to see if you are not joining a pelagic tour during the festival.

The tour starts and ends at the official festival hotel, making for a seamless transition from tour to festival. It maintains a comfortable pace without being rushed and participants will enjoy birding in a variety of habitats around some less-visited parts of Southern California.

Details

Starts: The Dana on Mission Bay in San Diego at 11am on Saturday, February 22.

Ends: The Dana on Mission Bay in San Diego at 3pm on Wednesday, February 26.

Minimum: 4 participants | Maximum: 7 participants

Tour leader: Steve Huggins from Red Hill Birding

Price: $2095 per person based on sharing a room. $2470 in a single room.

Price includes: Transportation in a group vehicle starting and ending at The Dana on Mission Bay, the official hotel of the San Diego Bird Festival; an expert Red Hill Birding guide; four nights’ accommodations; all meals from Lunch on Feb. 22 through lunch on Feb 26; a boat trip with Island Packers to Santa Cruz Island; entrance fee to the Huntington Gardens and all other entrance fees during the tour; a $100 donation to San Diego Bird Alliance.

Daily Itinerary

Nights of Feb. 22 & 23 in Taft | Nights of Feb. 24 & 25 in Ventura

Saturday, Feb 22. Night: Taft. We will gather at 11am at The Dana on Mission Bay, the official San Diego Bird Festival Hotel. After introductions, we will load up and head north. Our first stop will be the beautiful Huntington Gardens (entrance fee included in the tour price). We will get our first taste of SoCal birding, with common birds like California Scrub-Jay, Bushtit, and Acorn Woodpecker. We hope to find Red-whiskered Bulbul and Yellow-chevroned Parakeet here, both non-native species that are established in the LA area, but don’t occur around San Diego. We could also come across less common birds here like Townsend’s Warbler and Hutton’s Vireo. After wrapping up, we will set off over the mountains, dropping down in the Central Valley and ending up in the town of Taft for the night.

Sunday, Feb 23. Night: Taft. We will start the morning is the arid scrub habitat near Taft. We have two main birding goals here, to find the rare LeConte’s Thrasher and the California specialty Bell’s Sparrow. They are both elusive birds, especially the thrasher, but with a morning dedicated to looking for them we stand a good chance to find both. Our other major birding target for the day is to find California Condor. One of the original “hack sites” is at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in the foothills nearby, and as the temperature warms the afternoon air, condors get up and ride the thermals. We hope to be in the right place to catch them!

Monday, Feb 24. Night: Ventura. We will depart Taft after breakfast and make our way west through the coastal mountains and into the coastal slope. On our way to Ventura, we will look for a few other birds that can’t be found around San Diego. First will be Chestnut-backed Chickadee, here at the southern end of its Pacifica Coast range. They often travel in mixed flocks with various warblers, vireos, and other small songbirds. We will also put in a good effort to find Yellow-billed Magpie, a species that occurs in California and nowhere else in the world. This is also the southern end of its range, where flocks roam the vineyards and pastures. No doubt we will find many other great birds while looking for these, perhaps including Ferruginous Hawk, Western Bluebird, Nuttall’s Woodpecker, Oak Titmouse, and perhaps even Tri-colored Blackbird and Lawrence’s Goldfinch, two of the more difficult California specialties to track down.

Tuesday, Feb 25. Night: Ventura. Today will be unique—we will board a boat and head out to Santa Cruz Island, the only place in the world that is home of Island Scrub-Jay. Fortunately, it’s pretty common, so we have a great chance to see it. Santa Cruz is also home to the adorable Island Fox, and its not unusual to find those as well. It’s possible to find seabirds on the boat trip to and from the island, including jaegers, Common Murre, Rhinoceros Auklet, Pacific Loon, Black-vented Shearwater, and, with lots of luck, Scripps’s Murrelet. If we have time before or after the boat trip, we will check the rocky shoreline for shorebirds like Black Turnstone, Wandering Tattler, Surfbird, and Black Oystercatcher, and will search through gull flocks for Heermann’s, Short-billed, and Glaucous-winged Gulls as well as Royal Tern.

Wednesday, Feb 26. Return to San Diego for the start of the San Diego Bird Festival. We will have most of the day to make our way along the coast from Ventura to San Diego. We will make a few birding stops en route, looking for birds that we haven’t seen yet. This may mean stopping to view the coast for shorebirds, terns, and gulls; stopping in parks looking for passerines and exotic parrots; or following reports to the latest rarities. We will have you back to check in to The Dana, the official festival hotel, by about 3pm.