My Journey and the Bay Birding Challenge
Harmony Yu
I’m Harmony Yu, a 13-year-old girl who loves nature. I have a rabbit named Spot, I go to eighth grade, and I plan on participating in the Bay Birding Challenge this year.
Ever since I learned to read at age 4, I’ve always preferred nature books. It took me until second grade to read any fiction books at all, and even then, they were books with animals as the main characters, like Pax or the Warriors cats series.
Over the pandemic, I found that learning over Zoom was not effective at all. For an avid marine biology lover, going for more than two days without being able to see sharks in person was unbearable. I needed another way to learn about them and understand them better, so I decided to learn biology on Khan Academy. After all, if I were to become a biologist like I had hoped, I would need those skills, and I couldn’t wait to start as soon as possible. In my ample free time, I managed to finish high school biology within the school year. Hiking was a luxury back then, since everyone was quaking in their boots at the mention of COVID. Despite having Seek on my phone, there were only so many things I could identify around me, since I didn’t have a camera (yet!). Besides, I had already memorized most of the plants around the house and a few birds. Only my rabbits, Spot and Venus (RIP Venus, she died of pneumonia in June 2023), and feeding peanuts to the wildlife outside, gave me nonhuman animal interactionssomething interesting to interact with.
After taking an online course about creative writing, another weapon against boredom, I decided to try writing a book myself. My parents promised me to publish it if I could actually do it, not expecting anything beyond a frivolous ramble. Surprising everyone (including myself), my first book, Blizzard in a Rainforest, came out in the summer of 2021, advocating against illegal pet trafficking from the point of view of a Ssnow Lleopard that had gotten cubnapped, shipped off to a rainforest, and left to fend for herself in a completely foreign environment.
Emboldened by my success, I decided to write Bubble Up in a Kelp Forest the following year, which was about otters’ vital role in marine ecosystems. Having recently been reading up on otters, I figured I needed to write something. I was horrified at otters’ mass slaughter for their luxurious coats as well as the no-otter zone in Ssouthern California to “protect the urchin industry,” which had actually ended up destroying ecosystems. I tried my best to incorporate facts about otters into the story, but despite my efforts, there was still a ton of information I couldn’t squeeze in. It was the first of my books to have a section at the end telling the facts behind the story.
By sixth grade, my intense love for marine animals gave way to birds. Discovering the Cal Falcons cam, I devotedly spent hours each day watching their antics. From this, the seed for my third book, Wings Above the Campanile, was planted. I attended Mary Malec’s talk about the falcons at UC Berkeley’s homecoming. She predominantly talked about Nox, the fourth chick and the runt of the brood; he had broken his wing and recently gotten released from intensive rehabilitation. However, he later succumbed to pneumonia. I was not expecting her to have already read my book, and even less prepared for her to introduce me and my book to everyone there. Even though I knew that Annie was an old falcon and she’d been through a lot in her ten-year lifetime, it was still devastating when she and her current mate, Archie, disappeared this year, most likely to bird flu.
Doodles I drew on the back of my school worksheets when missing Annie, which now has a place at the bottom of Campanile.
A sketch of Nox in my science notebook
The newest book is called Wings of Wonder, and it stemmed from my concern about migrating birds and the various dangers they face. I tried my best to capture everything that a migrating warbler might come across in three different birds’ viewpoints – a Townsend’s Warbler, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, and a Blackburnian Warbler. An excerpt from this book won me a Silver Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing contest, encouraging me to keep up my efforts to educate my peers about birds.
You may have noticed the transition from mammals to birds, starting from my third book. This change was inspired by Wingspan, a popular board game about birds. I instantly fell in love with it and came into contact with what would be my nemesis bird for the next year, the Cedar Waxwing. In my attempts to find one in the backyard, which seemed like it would be perfect for a flock, I abducted my dad’s big heavy camera and its telephoto lens to take pictures of everything that slowed down for more than a second. Seeing this, my parents got me my best Christmas present ever in 2022: my own camera. After all, who would trust a clumsy eleven-year-old with a big metal contraption? Not my dad, that’s for sure – he wanted his camera intact, and with my proclivity to lose and break things, it was a very sensible move. I immediately set it to work documenting the diverse species in my yard, whether it was a Fox Squirrel trying (and failing) to steal nuts from the Acorn Woodpecker family’s granary, or a neighbor’s cat pouncing on a Western Fence Lizard. Throughout this whole process, Merlin really helped me identify the melange of calls I was confronted with every morning. Most weekend mornings, I’d go outside in the frigid airmornings with a warm jacket and my camera, watching the birds for hours on end and ignoring my parents’ worries about catching a cold. I got the idea to start keeping track of all the birds in the yard in a spreadsheet, and to my disbelief, it slowly piled up to a total of 55.
When we went to Yellowstone in the summer of 2023, I was lucky enough to capture frolicking “red dogs” (baby bison) and playful bear cubs as well as the stunning hot springs and forests. Thanks to my cabin being practically next to Old Faithful, I could see it erupt every morning as the Violet-green Swallows chirped and swooped after gnats. I’d barely have noticed them, let alone remembered and cherished them, without the attention to detail that photography taught me.
Being an avid reader, I never voraciously stopped hunting for new knowledge on birds. The interesting posts by Nick Lund led me to Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon, which is a monthly webcomic about naturalism that’s focused on birds. Her book A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching has always been one of my favorites. Joshua Barkman’s False Knees, which is an incredibly beautifully-drawn webcomic about nature, also stood out to me. His comics have won many webcomic awards. Being inspired by these amazing nature lovers, I hope to become a science communicator like them when I grow up. Being able to teach the world about all the amazing wildlife around us with photos, art, and writing seems like it would be a perfect job.
A certificate I got after reporting a banded falcon. Only a few days later, this particular individual showed up on the Cal Falcons nest cam!
eBird was an amazing tool I began using last year which guided me to birding trips that were meant to locate specific uncommon birds that I hadn’t seen yet, like Snow Geese, Red-necked Grebes, Bald Eagles, and even a White-winged Scoter that had wandered into my path. My favorite birding spots were Valle Vista Staging Area and Arrowhead Marsh, since they have many birds that would be hard to find in other places. At school, I was thrilled when I discovered we had a birdwatching unit in science, and for our Take Action Projects where we were to write a report and make a trifold poster about a science-related issue, I chose to write about wetlands like Arrowhead, telling a story in the form of a comic about a Ridgway’s Rail concerned about the destruction of its home. The project also included making a video, and my video was one of the fourteen best videos selected in the entire seventh grade.
My project, on which I collaborated with a friend.
Another one of my seventh grade science projects
That summer, there was a school trip to Costa Rica. I seized the opportunity to go to one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots, and I brought along a journal to list out all the species I saw and my camera (of course!) to document them. Despite not being allowed to bring my phone to identify birds, our trip was lucky enough to have a naturalist to lead us, and she had a field guide to help me identify all the birds we saw. The total was more than 100 and brought my life list up to about 300. One of the places we stayed at had an open-air breakfast area with fruit feeders outside, which were packed with colorful tanagers, electric-blue honeycreepers, and striking little euphonias.
That day, I got a striking photo of a male and female Scarlet-rumped Tanager fighting. I also got another of a Lesson’s Motmot that had wandered inside onto a chair and started staring and hooting at me, and the dark background made it almost look as if it were taken in a studio. Both those photos also got Silver Keys from the aforementioned Scholastic Art and Writing Contest.
We also went to a Hummingbird Café with over ten species of hummingbirds flocking to the feeders, including a breathtaking Violet Sabrewing.
Please ignore the fact that my handwriting is atrocious as I wrote them on the bus in Costa Rica.
Eighth grade came with extra homework. I couldn’t spend long hours in the backyard anymore, but that didn’t stop me from birding. I started to meet new people throughout my birding journeys to find rarities like Townsend’s Solitaires, Burrowing Owls, Black Scoters, and Black Skimmers. At Meeker Slough, while searching for the skimmers, I met Derek Heins, and I want to thank him for making this blog post possible!
As I mentioned earlier, I’m doing the Bay Birding Challenge this year with my parents, who are the only people I know who are willing to follow and support me through this whole journey. After all, not all teenagers are obsessed with TikTok trends, but nature will always outlast these fleeting distractions. I doubt I’m going to get the most species, or even come close, but I hope this can be a chance for me to get out there, see some cool birds, and have fun! Maybe I’ll even meet some of you while I’m out there!!
p.s. please check out more about my fundraising page here!