Southern California provides birders with a large diversity of habitat types – including coastal estuaries, chaparral, higher elevation pine forests, desert, Pacific Ocean islands – resulting in well over 400 regularly-occurring species of birds. On a typical September trip, you can expect to see between 175 and 200 species of birds, including most of the region's target species.

Many birds of Southern California would be difficult or impossible to see anywhere else, so a visit here provides a birder with the best chance to add many of these species to a life list.

On this trip, we will especially seek out the endemic Yellow-billed Magpie and Island Scrub-Jay, as well as the near-endemic California Gnatcatcher, Nuttall's Woodpecker, Oak Titmouse and Wrentit. We even have a chance to see a California Condor in the wild, and Yellow-footed Gulls on the Salton Sea.

We will travel from Los Angeles north along the Pacific coast, take a boat trip to the Channel Islands, go over 7,500 feet in elevation at Mount Pinos, over 200 feet below sea level at the Salton Sea, then back to Los Angeles. Join us as we tour one of the most wild and beautiful regions of the United States!