On Thursday morning, Marty Freeland was wandering around off Ranch Road near Moss Beach, imitating bird calls. The Stanford University senior studies ornithology and takes a special interest in birds that become vagrants, showing up well outside their normal ranges and migratory paths. He started birding with his family at age 3 and had envisioned himself finding a “mega rare” vagrant more times than he could count. But he hadn’t necessarily believed it would happen.

That Thursday morning, though, Freeland noticed an unusual bird darting around in a willow tree. It had a torpedo-shaped body that was roughly the size of a large lime, and a strip of feathers above the eye resembling an eyebrow, which he recognized as belonging to an Old World warbler. Immediately, he knew what that meant: He was looking at a bird that had never been recorded in the Bay Area. 

“My hands were shaking, and I was stuttering and all that, but managed to get photos and get the word out,” Freeland told SFGATE. By that, he meant messaging fellow Bay Area birders through a “Rare Bird Alert” group chat on Telegram, where live updates are provided on rare bird sightings.

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Yellow-browed Warbler (Phylloscopus inornatus) on a branch in nature in Thailand.

Because certain warblers are some of the hardest birds in the world to tell apart, there was some debate in the group at first about what species Freeland had found. But after he captured audio of the bird’s distinctive “tsu-weet” call, most everyone agreed: It had to be a yellow-browed.

The bird had likely traveled more than 5,000 miles from its breeding grounds in Siberian boreal forests, known as the taiga. The rest of its kind were headed to Southeast Asia for the winter, but somehow it had gotten lost. It was only the second time in history that someone had found a confirmed yellow-browed warbler in the Lower 48 states. And Freeland was right: This was the only confirmed sighting in the Bay Area ever.

“For one to end up on the wrong side of the Pacific is truly astounding and insane, and it barely ever happens,” Freeland told SFGATE. “So for anyone who wants to see a yellow-browed warbler, this was the moment.” 

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