Hundreds of people from the west coast are converging on Davis after a heavy equipment operator with a passion for birds made a rare find.

Todd Easterla, 46, of Rancho Cordova, spotted a Common Ringed Plover at the City of Davis Wetlands on Friday. Easterla said it is the first sighting of the bird in California.

In addition, it is the fourth sighting of a Common Ringed Plover in the lower 48 states, the other three being on the east coast.

Near dark on Friday, Easterla was at the wetlands performing a bird survey, when he heard a distinctive call.

"I knew the call was different," he said. "So I look around and saw one bird sitting by itself."

He said "Oh, my gosh," to himself and ran for his camera. He took pictures of the bird and started making phone calls to fellow birders to confirm the markings on the plover.

Easterla, the son of a university ornithology professor, knows his birds well. He's active in the birding community and adept at spotting and identifying a wide range of birds.

He knew the call of the bird had sounded different than the species of plover usually seen in Davis. Then, when he saw the pictures he took, he was pretty positive he had his bird.

Still, he went home, hoping he really had seen and heard what he though he had. The next morning his friends got out to the wetlands ahead of him.

One called Easterla at home and told him that the birders gathered at the wetlands were sure it was a Common Ringed Plover. He shot out to the wetlands to join them.

His fellow birders were ecstatic.

"I got my eyes on the bird and heard the call," said Easterla. "You have to hear the call and see the webbing between the toes to separate it from the other species, the Semipalmated Plover. The inner toe has no webbing, while the Semi-Palmated has the web. That's hard to see."

Phone calls and internet postings drew hundreds of people over the weekend from as far away as Southern California, Washington and Oregon who were eager to add the bird to lifetime birding lists.

"It was mass chaos with people running around," said Easterla.

Why Davis?

"You know, it's probably lost in migration," he said. "There's not a lot of wetlands now. It spots this one and it is like a magnet. There are huge mudflats right now and there not many places like that in the northern part of the valley. It's like an oasis."

Easterla said it is hard to know how long the bird may stick around. He noted that there are Peregrine falcons in the area.

"It's food for the Peregrine," he said. "They will come down at 200 mph and try to take them out. That tends to make (smaller birds) fly away. So that could send it south."

The adult bird is migrating and will molt when it gets to its wintering ground, perhaps in South America this year, Easterla said. The bird normally winters in sunny Africa.

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