By Carol Babeli, Los Angeles Audubon Development Director
March 17, 2020, Long Beach, CA
Swinhoe’s White-eye (Z.simplex)
Like all of us, I am spending these days at home gazing outside and wondering when this nightmare will end. My home office window looks out onto my garden which is filled with citrus trees, bladderpod, salvia, verbena de la mina, mullein, milkweed and punctuated with a few stately calla lilies and fragrant jasmine. Missing are the aromas from the nearby restaurants that used to fill the air by 10am every morning - tortillas and carnitas frying, the fresh herbal smells from the Thai restaurant, and breakfast being prepared at the local cafe.
But, I’m one of the lucky ones I guess. I’ve worked from home for the past 7 years so my routine hasn’t changed as dramatically as others. I keep busy writing grants and managing cancellations that have piled up. My husband is an at-home writer and we are hunkered down with a refrigerator full of beer that I’m storing from a cancelled event (not drinking but tempting!) and still healthy.
To pass the time and take a break from the news, I decided to dust off my fancy DSLR camera. It’s been very lonely since the onset of the iPhone. It’s just so easy to take photos with little effort that I’d forgotten the joy of photography as an art form. Big camera in hand, I felt compelled to find an artsy subject so I headed over to the calla lilies, the morning raindrops just so on the curve of the petal. HaHa, nothing frame-worthy but I needed to re-learn the feel of the camera. I recently hung two bird feeders in my garden and a group of lesser goldfinch and house finches have finally discovered the chow. I snapped on my zoom lens and captured the sunlight illuminating the colorful glow of their feathers as they clung to the feeder.
But there was a small bird that really captured my attention, darting around the lemon trees, hard to get a focus on it. I got a few blurry shots, then tried to identify it. I looked in a couple of my field guides on local birds, but nothing. The dominant white eye-ring really stood out. I reached out to the expert - Kimball Garrett. He quickly identified it as Swinhoe’s White-eye (Z.simplex). Kimball said that the white-eyes are proliferating in Orange County and south and southeastern Los Angeles County. It is now one of the commonest birds in parks and residential areas in much of W. Orange County and the species is being found from Long Beach west to San Pedro and Torrance. The birds, native to SE Asia, are here because of the pet trade, escapees that are now thriving.
They are lovely little birds - welcome to Long Beach White-eyes!