To hopefully put this to bed, Band-tailed Pigeons are fairly common throughout the interior of Orange County, most commonly in the Santa Ana Mountains and in the immediate foothill communities from my area (Rancho Santa Margarita and Mission Viejo) up the western side of the Santa Ana Mountains. They are virtually impossible to miss if you go to O'Neill Regional Park, and with the Arroyo Trabuco providing a strip of natural wooded habitat running alongside/parallel to Felipe/Olympiad, it makes sense for band-tails to be seen at the area in question. I have seen them at my feeders or from my house overlooking the Arroyo Trabuco many times. There is also a weird population at Disneyland for some reason, which I double-taked on the first time I saw a bunch of band-tails flying around at Downtown Disney. They do wander outside the breeding season and may venture to the coast in fall/winter but during the breeding season are expected more in the interior communities and mountains and would be very rare anywhere in coastal OC...with the exception that there is an outlier breeding population at UCI, where I have photographed chicks in a nest, which also extends into the surrounding community including Turtle Rock/south Irvine and upper Newport Beach. Our first known record of this breeding population was when five obvious hatch year band-tails showed up in a residential yard in Turtle Rock on 30 May 2019.
-Ryan
   
    
     
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