Blue elderberry feeds nesting birds
June 13, 2026
The air carries the sweet, musty scent of elderflower through the oak woodlands near Montecito. If you step outside now, breathe deeply and listen for the steady tapping of woodpeckers against bark, the quick calls of titmice moving through branches overhead.Blue elderberry stands reach fifteen feet here, their broad clusters of cream-colored flowers just beginning to darken into small green berries. The transition happens gradually through summer's peak. Some flower heads still hold open blooms while others show the first purple blush of ripening fruit. This timing serves the birds perfectly. Acorn Woodpeckers arrive at the elderberry in pairs, their red caps bright against the pale flowers. They work methodically through the clusters, taking both the protein-rich pollen and the early developing berries. The birds need this concentrated nutrition now. They are feeding nestlings, making multiple trips each hour back to cavities they have excavated in nearby oaks.Oak Titmice move differently through the same elderberry. These small gray birds hang upside down from the flower clusters, their bodies no bigger than your fist. They pick at insects that come to feed on the elderberry nectar, and they take the flowers themselves. A single elderberry bush can support several titmouse families through the most demanding weeks of summer breeding. The birds cache some of the berries as they ripen, wedging them into bark crevices for later retrieval. California Scrub-Jays also depend on elderberry now, though they approach more boldly, stripping entire clusters of ripe berries and carrying them back to their territories. The jays can swallow dozens of berries in a feeding session, processing the fruit quickly and moving on.Elderberry produces this abundance because summer's long days and warm nights accelerate both photosynthesis and fruit development. The plant channels energy into reproduction during the season when its bird partners need food most urgently. This synchronization has shaped both the elderberry's flowering schedule and the birds' breeding cycles. The relationship runs deeper than simple feeding. Birds that eat elderberry berries disperse the seeds in their droppings, often miles from the parent plant. The seeds that pass through bird digestive systems germinate at higher rates than those that fall directly beneath the bush. Oak Titmice and Acorn Woodpeckers create new elderberry groves throughout the oak woodlands, extending the habitat that will support future generations of both plants and birds.Close your eyes and listen for the soft rustle of leaves as birds move through the elderberry canopy. The sound is constant now in peak summer, a quiet testimony to the energy flowing between plant and animal in these long, warm days.
Brown pelicans hunting the nearshore waters
July 1, 2026
Stand at the water's edge near Montecito and watch the surface. The Pacific is flat and bright in mid-summer, and if you wait long enough, a brown pelican will fold its wings and drop. The bird hits the water at an angle, bill first, and the whole body follows into a brief explosion of white. A second later it bobs back up, tilts its head to drain the pouch, and swallows.Brown pelicans are here in numbers right now, and what drives that is fish. After the breeding season ends on the Channel Islands, pelicans disperse along the coast in all directions, and the nearshore waters off Santa Barbara County are a reliable mid-summer feeding ground. The birds work in loose groups, sometimes in a line, sometimes scattered across a quarter mile of surface. When one dives, others nearby often follow, which is not coincidence. A diving pelican pushes fish downward, and the disturbance can compress a school from below while the surface birds hit from above. The fish that matter most here are northern anchovies and Pacific sardines, both small, oily, schooling species that move through shallow coastal water in dense aggregations. A single dive can yield several fish at once. The pelican's pouch holds roughly three times the volume of its stomach, so it can take a large haul, drain the water, and swallow the catch whole.The relationship between pelicans and these schooling fish is not one the pelicans control entirely. Anchovy and sardine populations cycle with sea surface temperatures and upwelling patterns, and in years when those fish run thin, pelican condition drops noticeably. Breeding success on the islands tracks fish availability with a short lag. Right now, in mid-summer, upwelling along the California coast is pushing cold, nutrient-rich water toward the surface, and that supports the plankton that anchovies feed on, which in turn concentrates the anchovies in the nearshore zone where pelicans can reach them. The pelicans are, in a sense, reading the oceanography. They locate fish by sight, scanning the surface from several meters up, and they target schools near the top of the water column. Their plunge dive is shallow by seabird standards, rarely more than a meter below the surface, which means they depend on fish being up high, not running deep.Heermann's gulls are almost always nearby when pelicans are actively feeding. These are not casual bystanders. The gulls land on the water close to a pelican that has just surfaced and attempt to steal fish directly from the pouch before the pelican can drain and swallow. The pelican typically turns away or raises its bill, but the harassment is persistent. Heermann's gulls breed almost entirely on a single island off Baja California, then disperse north along the Pacific coast in summer, arriving here in numbers at roughly the same time the pelicans are most actively foraging. The overlap is consistent enough that the two species are rarely seen far apart in this season.
