AES, from wetlands to wetlands
Birdman of AES: Redondo native David Moody has identified over 130 bird species on the site of the decommissioned power plant
by Garth Meyer
Four years ago, then-Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand asked David Moody to gather bird information about the AES power plant site for leverage in a possible deal for the city to acquire the land.
Moody has led bird tours in at the South Bay for 20 years.
“I try to do good science,” he said.
He trained as a biologist at Pepperdine University. But when the state stopped hiring biologists following passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, Moody became an X-ray technician at Harbor General Hospital.
“Birding became a hobby,” he said. “I have a huge Excel file.”
Mayor Brand passed away, and so have any immediate plans for the city to buy the power plant, whose owner is in bankruptcy.
But Moody still bird watches at the site three days a week from the third floor roof of the neighboring Redondo Information Technology Center.
“I usually stop at McDonald’s, pick up a coffee and go to my perch,” he said.
While up there he listens for “bird voices.”
“When you hear the unfamiliar, you have to coax it out to find out what it is. Most of (the birds there) are local yokels.”
He contributes to “eBird,” a website maintained by Cornell University, dedicated to real-time bird observations. The site shows bird activity areas on Google Maps, the information stored on 13 computer servers at the Ithaca, N.Y. campus.
Are AES bird counts affected by the declining use of the plant in recent years, before it was shut down permanently last December?
“Hard to say,” Moody said.
He has counted 136 bird species at the AES site.
Saturday
On Saturday morning, July 27, Moody was at his perch on the roof of the Technology Center.
“First thing, scan tops and ledges (of the power plant) for peregrine falcons. When I hear things, I stop,” he said. “That was a Canada (goose) that just honked.”
When he got out of his car, he noted the temperature and, once on top of the building, the visibility.
“How far can I see? Dominator Point, eight miles away on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Flat Rock is a little over six miles,” Moody said of the relatively clear morning.
“Dominator Point” refers to where a Greek freighter ran aground in fog off of Palos Verdes in 1961.
Moody watches the seven ponds on the AES site.
“We get a little hungry in the morning. Birds have a metabolism four times as fast as ours,” he said, as he scanned the 51 acres with binoculars. “Hatch year. Born this year. They’re teenagers.”
What is he looking at, or for?
“Some of it’s just Gestalt,” he said. “Just kind of like ‘feel.’ “First you have to see everything that’s there. Then you see if different birds move through.”
A TCK, TCK TCK sound came from the young willow trees three stories down.
“That’s a common yellow throat,” Moody said. “These are resident birds. Canadas have become resident birds in the last 20 years. They have become pretty much park ducks.”
He spotted a baby-blue billed (actual) duck in the middle of a square pond.
“A ruddy duck,” he said.
At the edge of the same pond, toward the decommissioned plant, a big brown bird stood on a low pipe.
“Juvenile black-crown night-heron,” Moody said. “He’s fluffed out. He’s either thermo-regulating, like he’s wearing a down jacket, or preening. He just bathed and is drying. Birds get goosebumps like us.”
“I mostly birdwatch for the entertainment value.”
Near the end of the Saturday session, on the berm of another pond, a feral cat ran by a group of western gulls – to minimal reaction.
“The last time you were standing in front of Mike Tyson, you didn’t turn around and try to pi– him off,” Moody said.
Some of the AES site’s square ponds were built over the top of an ancient saltwater lake.
In 2012, after a 10-year plant shutdown plan was announced, AES applied to build a new plant on the Redondo waterfront site. Residents responded by sending hundreds of letters to the state energy commission opposing it. In 2015, the Coastal Commission declared six acres of the plant as wetlands and AES pulled their application.
Back to last Saturday: Moody heard something else and swung his Swarovski binoculars. A parrot or a parakeet flying over the Green Street Car Wash sign, on the northeast side of the plant.
“Parakeets. They have reclassified them. They are technically parakeets.”
Moody started birdwatching right out of college. He spends 45 minutes a session now for the AES project, usually, at the top of the building where people store campers, boats and cars.
Past a black, mid-’70s Lincoln Continental, from a north end-corner of the roof, Moody spotted a large heron, on the highest wing of a giant powerlines tower.
The four-foot tall heron soon flew off, first toward Hermosa Beach. Then it turned and approached AES.
“He’s going to drop right here, he’s going to drop right here,” Moody said, of the two ponds just behind the building.
The bird slowed and descended, looked like he thought about it, then rose and kept flying. It landed on the top of the Salvation Army building outside the fence.
Discovery
In June, at Dominguez Park in Redondo Beach, a friend of Moody’s, Tom Miko, verified the first Los Angeles County record of an Eastern Peewee (a flycatcher) bird.
“The Rockies, the Mississippi River, are a formidable wall to migration,” Moody said. “There are different flyways of migrating birds. The Peewee probably was flying north from Mexico (on a path) to Nebraska, or the mixed deciduous woods of the Great Lakes or Quebec, but we had two high-pressure systems, turning clockwise, and (the bird’s) path was deflected west at about 35 miles an hour. Somewhere over the Chihuahuan or Sonoran deserts, the thing went with the flow, so to say. It ended up deflected over to the coast.”
When the news got out, Kimball Garrett, former L.A. County Museum curator for birds and mammals, went to Dominguez Park, along with 50 to 60 other people to check it out.
How do they know the bird is still going to be there?
“They don’t,” Moody said. “It gets crazy. People get obsessed.”
“It stayed for two days.”
Some birds, blown by wind or not, also fly out over the ocean without realizing they have gone too far to get back.
“It happens all the time. All the time. They’re out, they want to start looking for food, there’s no branch to land on. They become food,” Moody said. “I was on a boat a hundred miles out to sea and an Eastern Warbler lands on the deck. Frantic, hopping around the boat.”
He has not gone to his building perch at night.
“I do have several records of bats in the area, the last was 10 years ago,” Moody said.
“There’s a lot of the place (AES site) you can’t see,” he notes, referring to the far side of berms lining the ponds.
On Friday, July 26, Moody headed to the Las Padres Mountains.
Looking for birds?
“One in particular, yes,” he said, guardedly.
So is the number of birds at AES increasing?
“We don’t know what it was. All the data is gone. We’re starting from 3-4 years ago,” Moody said.
“We’ve got 136 species. In 3-4 years, in my data, we can make some judgments seasonally…”
Assignment
“On a given day, what species are here?” Mayor Brand asked Moody when he first talked to him about the AES project. “In what numbers?”
“That’s easy,” Moody answered.
He is the Christmas Bird Count compiler for the Audubon Society, leading the yearly survey of a 15-mile diameter, from the Hermosa Beach Pier, Los Angeles River and “halfway out into L.A. Harbor, clear back to Dominguez Hills University.”
Moody sends people on boats out to count, too.
Brand “hired” him on a volunteer basis and they talked to the Information Technology building owner for access.
“So now I’m standing’ up here with binoculars and a scope and I’m looking at birds,” Moody said.
Has the number increased?
“You’re going to see more species if you have more data. I need repeatable data,” he said. “A more consistent observation.”
He counted 119 species in his first year, during 238 visits; and 96 species during 169 visits in his second year. Last year it was 91 species in 89 visits. This year, he has put in 61 sessions so far, for 77 species.
“It’s data untapped. It’s hard to say if they are increasing. After five years, we can make some suppositions about populations and extrapolate trends,” Moody said. “You’re looking for trends.”
He went to his perch five times a week in the first year.
“July, August, April, May is breeding time. December, January for hummingbirds,” he said. “It’s pretty lackluster right now. Migrants are gone. The teenagers are roaming, the population becomes relatively stagnant. In migration, things change every day, or every hour.”
Moody was a longtime Redondo Beach resident, before moving just across the line into Torrance.
His grandfather was mayor of Redondo Beach. His father was the Redondo Beach Postmaster.
Moody has been on the power plant site on the ground before, 50 years ago, in the ‘70s, when he worked as a lifeguard at Seaside Lagoon.
He focuses now on four of the AES ponds. The other three contain pumped seawater.
“I believe they disabled the recirculating pump,” he said.
After Mayor Brand died in February, new Mayor Jim Light reported in his May 9 State of the City address that the decommissioned plant is undergoing a “safing” (safe mode) process.
It was disconnected from its 220 kilovolt (high tower) power lines, its natural gas lines capped, and some hazardous liquids removed.
One of the liquids was tanks of ammonia, used to cleanse emissions. The work is part of a six-month process by AES to seal the plant.
Can Moody get on the AES site now?
“No, I cannot get on the site. One, they have dangerous chemicals. Two, it’s a power plant. You could be a target for terrorists,” he said. “It’s just easier to say, ’No,’ we don’t allow anyone but employees.’ (But) I’ll sign the waivers if I could just get on there once a month.”
The types of birds at the site he puts in four categories: resident birds, resident breeders, birds in migration, (spring or fall); and winter birds – those that spend the winter here, flying only as far south as this part of California.
Resident birds also move around.
“People walk on the breakwater and pelicans, gulls, a cloud of them come here (to AES),” Moody said.
“You’ve got flats, vegetation, dead trees, natural willows. AES transfers water from pond to pond, a good part is saltwater, a natural spring is there too. Saltwater killed 10 trees this year.”
So what was that bird in the Las Padres Mountains?
It was a tropical parula, Moody said, which “belongs in Mexico, below the deserts in northern Mexico. Really far away.”
He did not find one.
“We may have got to the wrong spot. It was futile,” he said.
As for AES, the count continues.
“Mallards have bred here. Yellowthroats, swallows have bred here,” Moody said. “There’s water. aquatic birds, salt birds. Everything will bathe or drink at some point.” ER