Memories of Old Mine Road, Ranchita

Lewis's Woodpecker - Melanerpes lewis — *Lewis’s Woodpecker – Melanerpes lewis*

I will remember 2014 as the year I met Lewis’s Woodpeckers for the first time. My very first encounter was in August while visiting friends at June Lake in the Eastern Sierras. I enjoyed my visit to this Ranchita neighborhood on October 17 so much, I returned two days later for another dose.

My friend David from El Centro is a great explorer of cool places, and he’d mentioned some springs at Old Mine Road when we swapped stories during one of our meetings on Santa Rosa Mountain. Surface water in an otherwise dry area has proved to be a great place to meet and photograph birds for me, so I was eager to explore this new location.

Old Mine Road is a short road that departs from the Montezuma Pass road (Highway S-22) on its way to Borrego Springs lying at the bottom of the desert east of San Diego’s mountains. This gravel road ascends the southern flanks of the county’s highest peak — Hot Springs Mountain, standing prominently just 2½ miles west of the community of Ranchita.

Ranchita is situated in a transitional zone between the county’s mountain and desert ecologies. Residences on both sides of Old Mine Road border the road’s first half-mile, with large lots and horse properties, under a canopy of California Coastal Live Oak in a riparian valley. Beyond the homes, the road rises through chaparral to the higher ground where many years ago miners dug holes in the ground in search of mineral wealth (hence the name).

Here the brush-covered hillsides meet the steeper slopes of Hot Springs Mountain. Beyond, the primitive road drops into narrower, tree-lined canyons. Water seeps and trickles downhill, providing a reliable water source for wildlife. In such locations I have found rewarding opportunities to photograph birds, and this place did not disappoint.

2014 was an outbreak year for Lewis’s Woodpeckers in San Diego County, and I believe I was the first birder in San Diego to find them here at Old Mine Road. It was also an invasion year for Varied Thrushes, and I may have been the first to report my sighting at this location as well. Later, birders found the thrushes in Encinitas at the San Diego Botanic Gardens, which proved to be a better location for encountering those beautiful birds. But the woodpeckers were the story at Old Mine Road.

The birds I met at this location includes Lewis’s Woodpecker, California Scrub-Jay, Hermit Thrush, Band-Tailed Pigeon, White-Crowned Sparrow, Spotted Towhee, Golden-Crowned Sparrow, White-Breasted Nuthatch, Wrentit, California Towhee, Steller’s Jay, California Thrasher, Dark-Eyed Junco, and Fox Sparrow.