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Welcome Bird
March 8, 2010

Friday's March Edness Where Is It (WII) was a real humdinger. It was a picture of a hummingbird, and it was hard to locate. In fact only 3 people knew where the bird flies. It turns out that this hummingbird is something that pretty much everyone in Santa Barbara, as well thousands of others who come here for Halloween and Floatopia, have seen. But this particular rara avis is easy missed, because it is part of a bigger picture … and the picture is on a sign … and the sign is at the entrance to Isla Vista. The brown sign with white letters says, "Welcome to Isla Vista".

If you check out this very famous sign, you will see that the bird is up in a tree. At the bottom of the tree there is a green and yellow clumpy thing that could either be a bunch of flowers or some psychedelic mushrooms. Below the tree roots is a crustacean, or perhaps a bug. In reference to an Op-Ed piece on Edhat this weekend, there are no cars on the sign, therefore there would be no sign re-painting cost if vehicles were removed from Isla Vista.

The tree in the sign is the "Isla Vista Tree", which used to be at Sea Lookout Park before it fell into the ocean during an El Nino storm on January 28, 1983.

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