Figure 269. In California, the great majority of Red-throated Pipits are first-fall birds found in October, although records of this species extend from 9 September to 20 December. This one—with a smidgen of orange at the side of the upper breast suggesting that it may be an adult—was present from 8 to 25 November 2003 at San Joaquin Marsh in Irvine, Orange County (Bob Steele).

 

Figure 391. Following an unprecedented 1991 invasion that involved at least 79 individuals in 12 counties, the Committee ceased reviewing California records of the Red-throated Pipit. The species remains a scarce, but nearly annual, fall vagrant along the coast, with flocks and interior birds very rarely encountered. This late October 1981 photograph shows the first individual ever found at Pt. Loma in San Diego County (1981-087; Richard E. Webster).

 

Figure 392. California’s 204 accepted Red-throated Pipits through 1991, showing distribution primarily along the southern and central coasts, including 90 individuals from the Tijuana River valley in San Diego County.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RED-THROATED PIPIT Anthus cervinus (Pallas, 1811)

Accepted: 204 (89%)	Treated in Appendix H: no
Not accepted: 26	CBRC review: records through 1991
Not submitted/reviewed: 17	Large color image: see Figures

This pipit breeds from the northern coast of Scandinavia east across northern Eurasia to the Chukotskiy Peninsula, possibly to Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. The species also breeds locally/sporadically on Alaska’s western mainland (mostly on the western Seward Peninsula) and on St. Lawrence Island, and a single bird was collected in summer in northern Yukon (Sinclair et al. 2003). The winter range extends from northern Africa east to Southeast Asia and the East Indies. This bird is a regular migrant through the Bering Sea islands and western Aleutian Islands. Fall vagrants occur casually around the Gulf of Alaska and in southeastern Alaska, southern Yukon (Sinclair et al. 2003), and coastal British Columbia (20+ records including the continent’s latest: 22–28 December 1990 in Delta, near Vancouver). Washington and Oregon claim one fall record each (NAB 58:134), as does Arizona. Fall migrants occur rarely on the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. A specimen was collected on 26 January 1883 at San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur (Ridgway 1883), and more than a century later a second overwintering bird was documented at the same location 1–3 February 2005 and 17–22 Mar 2006 (NAB 59:329, 330; 60:289). Additional individuals that overwintered in the New World were recorded in Michoacán on 11 April 1988 and in Colima during March 1992 (Howell and Webb 1989, 1995). On the heels of a fall 2003 incursion of Red-throated Pipits along the Pacific coast, two birds were present from 28 to 30 April 2004 in coastal Oregon and another was recorded in coastal Washington on 7 May 2004 (NAB 58:425). Another spring vagrant was photographed on 7 May 2006 in central Baja California (NAB 60:448).

At least 17 Red-throated Pipits present between 12 and 27 October 1964 in the Tijuana River valley, San Diego County, were the first to be recorded in the contiguous United States. An adult female and a probable first-fall male were collected from this flock on 13 October (McCaskie1966a). After being found during only half the years between 1964 and 1977, the species went on to be recorded in 22 of the next 24 years through 1991, the last year of Committee review. The month of October accounts for 85% of the accepted individuals. The only record earlier than 19 September is of an apparent adult in Goleta, Santa Barbara County, 9–11 September 1981, and in the post-review period three have been recorded after 15 November: Irvine, Orange County, 8–25 November 2003 (fide D. R. Willick, Figure 269) and 22 November–20 December 2006 (fide D. R. Willick); and Pacific Beach, San Diego County, 19–27 November 2003 (fide G. McCaskie contra Unitt 2004 and NAB 58:145). California’s only record of a spring vagrant refers to a bird photographed on 26 April 2006 in Half Moon Bay, San Mateo County (NAB 60:434).

Both adults and juveniles molt on the breeding grounds (Cramp 1988), so all southbound Red-throated Pipits wear fresh plumage. A handful of accepted records—most from the early 1980s—involve birds that showed a reddish, orange, or conspicuous peachy-buff wash on the throat and/or head, and such birds may be safely aged as adults. First-fall birds lack reddish in the plumage, but some basic-plumaged adults do as well, and other age criteria are too subtle to be useful in the field. Thus, although most birds lacking color are probably in their first fall, we have made this determination only for specimens. Approximately 24 accepted records involve birds that offered little or no opportunity for on-the-ground study, and instead were seen in flight and heard giving the species’ characteristic speee call note. Most of the observers involved in these records had prior experience with this vocalization, and all were able to convincingly eliminate other species, especially the Eastern Yellow Wagtail (by noting the pipit’s relatively short tail, compact size, heavily streaked body, etc.). Several fly-by records are from Southeast Farallon Island, where the species has been detected almost every fall since 1985 (Richardson et al. 2003).

More than 70% of the CBRC-endorsed Red-throated Pipits—including 37 of the first 38 birds and all double-digit flocks—come from the state’s southern half, and only two individuals were accepted from the state’s northern third (Figure 392). Migrating Red-throated Pipits show a strong affinity for the coast. The CBRC accepted records of only eight birds from California’s interior—six from Furnace Creek Ranch in Inyo County and two from eastern Kern County—and all but two of these came during the 1991 influx discussed subsequently. Another seven or eight birds were found inland between 1992 and 2006, three or four of them associated with a 2003 influx.

About one-fourth of the accepted records involve multiple birds, and the species’ abundance has been found to vary considerably from year to year. Excluding the exceptional year of 1991 (see below), fall records averaged 4.4 ± 4.7SD individuals between 1964 and 1992. The flight of 1991 generated accepted records of 79 individuals in 12 counties, 19 of them somewhat early birds during the period of 20–30 September. An additional four birds were found that fall on the Baja California Peninsula (Howell and Pyle 1993). The similar 2003 flight involved reports of at least 73 birds in California and 29 on the Baja California Peninsula (NAB 58:139, 145, 149). In the years that followed these invasions, only two Red-throated Pipits were found in California in fall 1992 (NAB 47:146, 150), but in fall 2004 observers found as many as 18 birds in California and on the Baja California Peninsula (NAB 59:145, 150, 155). At least four of the fall 2004 records in California are of adults (fide G. McCaskie), leading some to postulate that these were second-year birds that overwintered in the New World, completed a successful migration cycle, and then headed south again along the same California route (NAB 59:155, Sullivan and Wood 2005). None of the 204 accepted records was treated as pertaining to a returning bird, but note that five from the Tijuana River valley involve adults seen between 1979 and 1982.

Accompanying the Red-throated Pipit “invasions” of 1991 and 2003 were seemingly correlated, but much smaller, flights of vagrant American Pipits showing characters of A. r. japonicus, a taxon sometimes referred to as the Siberian Pipit (but see Lehman 2005 regarding this subspecies’ unsettled taxonomy). In a thorough review of the “co-vagrancy” of these pipits to North America and the Baja California Peninsula, Sullivan (2004) offered evidence that most of the pipits that reached California from Asia in 2003 (and presumably other years) did so by crossing the Pacific Ocean, rather than by traveling down the coast. The main competing hypothesis—that considerable numbers of these birds pass undetected along the islands and coastline of the Pacific Northwest—fails to explain the dearth of fall records from Washington, Oregon, and California north of Pt. Reyes (but note that British Columbia claims more fall records than these other areas do, combined).

King (1981), Heard and Walbridge (1988), Mlodinow and O’Brien (1996), and Alström and Mild (2003) reviewed the field identification of the Olive-backed, Pechora, and Red-throated Pipits.