Cal Bears in birding action

By Ilana DeBare

Ten birding Bears! Four song-filled hours! Sixty-four species!

But alas, no victory.

The Berkeley birding team organized by Golden Gate Bird Alliance fell eleven species short of their cross-bay rivals on Sunday morning, in the first-ever Cal-versus-Stanford birding competition.

The Stanford team spotted 75 species to Berkeley’s 64.  Berkeley may have been undone not so much by the Cardinal as by the humble sparrow.

“We had a lot of sparrows,” said Rob Furrow, a Santa Clara Valley Audubon member who led the Stanford team. “White-throated Sparrows, Grasshopper Sparrows, Lark Sparrows, Savannah Sparrows.”

The Cal-Stanford competition was organized as part of Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s annual Birdathon fundraising month. On the Berkeley side, it attracted ten participants with a wide range of connections to the university and an equally wide range of birding experience.

The Cal team included undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, faculty, and staff. One participant was a newcomer to birding who had to borrow a pair of binoculars. Others were veteran birders who had taken Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Master Birder class and could recognize unseen birds by their song.

The count started at 7 a.m., when the crowds of visitors from Cal Day on Saturday were a distant memory. The campus was silent – except for layers upon layers of bird song.

“That singing is a robin, right?” called out Kathy Durkin just after 7, as she and other team members stepped quietly through the U.C. Botanical Garden. “And that song’s a House Finch… and there’s a Golden-crowned Sparrow!”

Chris Carmichael, Associate Director of the Garden, used his year-round experience there to guide the team to spots favored by particular species. Meanwhile, Maureen Lahiff, a lecturer at the School of Public Health, led participants across the central part of campus. Erica Rutherford and John Colbert took the helm for other sections of campus along Strawberry Canyon.

Among the day’s highlights: A Red-shouldered Hawk perched over Strawberry Creek. Two Anna’s Hummingbird nests. A White-tailed Kite over the Botanical Garden. A Great Blue Heron flying past the Campanile – a common bird along the shoreline, but not so common on campus.

“It’s wonderful that we get birds from the size of an Anna’s Hummingbird to a Great Blue Heron,” said Lahiff. “You can come here — on an Audubon trip or on your own – and with even just an hour, find over a dozen species.”

Tiffany Wong, an undergraduate who is studying environmental science, said the morning made her more aware of the birds around her.  “I haven’t birded intensively like this, which was really cool,” she said. “Now I’m more aware of what birds could be here. I’ll be in less of a hurry to get to class.”

Jack Gedney, a 2012 graduate in Comparative Literature who now owns a Wild Birds Unlimited store in Marin County, said he too had his eyes opened. “Most of these I’d seen before, but you don’t get a lot of Song Sparrows and Purple Finches. We were doing this much more thoroughly than looking around in the odd minutes between classes.”

Suzanne Nelson, who works at Cal as Director of Sports Preformance Nutrition, said she often stops by the Botanical Garden at lunch hour to bird, but rarely gets to spend so much time there.

At work, she provides about 800 student athletes with the nutrition advice they need to take on Stanford in sports like football and soccer. But on Sunday, it was her turn to compete.

“You could say that mom’s out to beat the Cardinal, after supporting the kids,” she said.

Despite the loss to Stanford, team leader Lahiff saw the day as a success.

She was thrilled with the diversity of the team.  She was proud that they found more species in four hours than Audubon volunteers saw all day on campus during the Christmas Bird Count in December.

And she was already starting to think about a rematch next April.

“No matter what the score was, we’re all winners,” she said.

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It’s not too late to support the Cal team with a donation to Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Birdathon!  All proceeds benefit GGBA’ conservation and environmental education programs. Click here to learn more and donate. 

THANK YOU to Santa Clara Valley Audubon for launching this fun event with us, and to the U.C. Botanical Garden for allowing us to enter early and bird. And thank you to all of today’s Cal/GGBA participants: Maureen Lahiff, Chris Carmichael, John Colbert, Erica Rutherford, Melani King, Kathy Durkin, Suzanne Nelson, Tiffany Wong, Jack Gedney, Amanda Buster, and volunteer photographer Peter Maiden.

You can read more and see more photos of the Cal-Stanford Birdathon competition in this article by Carolyn Jones in the San Francisco Chronicle.