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Making it work on the South Coast

By Phila Rogers
I don’t think I could have written these words even two months ago because I was still unreconciled to my move to Santa Barbara. This is NOT my home, I would have told you. And then I would begin my rant. Where are the robins to sing up the dawn? Where are the chickadees chattering in the oaks, or the Great-horned Owls hooting at dusk from the eucalyptus?
Nothing was right. Here, it is a cacophony of crows – an unholy chorus – from dawn to dusk. The creek next to this retirement “campus” is dry as a bone, lacking the lush streamside vegetation to attract the spring singers like the Swainson’s Thrushes, Warbling Vireos, and Wilson’s Warblers that populated my beloved Strawberry Canyon.
Some days, I would imagine sitting on the bench under the sheltering branches of the oak I had planted 60 years ago. Or I would envision myself at the U.C. Botanical Garden, climbing the path up to the Old Roses garden, and to the fence line where I could look up the steep chaparral-covered slope to the bent tree at the top of the hill. Coming down, I would stop to view the Bay in the “V” of the hills. Of course, there would be robins singing everywhere, and the Olive-sided Flycatcher calling from its perch at the top of a redwood.
There’s no cure for this nostalgia other than to acknowledge that I will always look at what’s around me through Berkeley eyes. I don’t want to surrender that perspective. But maybe I could allow myself to consider the virtues of the South Coast, of Santa Barbara where everyone wants to come and visit and — if they could afford to – stay.
A month after I came to live here last September, flocks of Yellow-rumped Warblers arrived, just like the ones in Berkeley. The manicured gardens of lawns, palms, and agapanthus beds were just fine with them. They dove into the palms and out again, forever “chipping.” Then a Hermit Thrush took up winter residency beneath the live oaks below my bedroom window. And then a troupe of cheerful White-crowned Sparrows arrived, singing sweetly, but in a different dialect.
Hermit Thrush / Photo by Matt MacGillivray
My retirement community is just up the hill from Oak Park, one of the scruffier city parks but with some fine live oaks and sycamores. Sycamores are new to me except for the ones I would infrequently see out around Sunol where they favored the flats near streams.…

A fallen sparrow spurs a bird-friendly schoolyard

By Anthony DeCicco
Imagine you are a Golden-crowned Sparrow. You hatched in 2013 on the shrubby lowland tundra of Middleton Island, about 80 miles off the coast of Alaska. You were banded on September 15 of the same year, and eventually you make your natural journey southward along the Pacific Flyway.
You stop along forest edges, shrubs, chaparral, and backyards for about 2000 miles until you come to the garden at Verde Elementary School in North Richmond, California. Its lush habitat is alluring, and you stop to rest in a Coast live oak. The view south looks promising as you fly quickly from the oak’s branches – but what appeared to be a sunny horizon and more trees turn out to be reflections from a large classroom window. You collide. The impact is too much, and flapping wildly, you fall and pass away at the base of the oak.
The third graders in our Eco-Education program found “Goldie” and noticed the tiny metal “ring” on its leg on January 10, during their initial schoolyard habitat survey. We reported details of the band to the U.S. Geological Survey, which sent the students a certificate with details of the bird’s banding:

“This record is actually quite unique and documents one of the longest movements for Golden-crowned Sparrow in our database.”

It is estimated that a billion birds die annually in North America as a result of window collisions like Goldie’s.
The children were both fascinated and sad. They wanted to help prevent future window strikes but were at a loss for solutions.
Fortunately their interest coincided with a pilot program GGBA had been starting to develop in Richmond this year – creating “Bird-Friendly Schools.”
GGBA Eco-Education staff helped the children create a flock of beautiful bird silhouettes and place them on school windows.
Applying silhouettes to prevent collisions at Verde Elementary School / Photo by Anthony DeCicco
Next school year, these students can serve as advocates for other steps that would help transform Verde Elementary into a Bird-Friendly School, such as:

Treatments on all key windows.
More native flora habitat.
Placement of monitored and appropriate feeders.
Installation of nest boxes for Western Bluebirds, Chestnut-backed Chickadees and (possibly) Barn Owls.
Advocating for a ban on pesticides and rodenticides and for adoption of a “lights out” policy on school grounds.

Elsewhere in Richmond, Eco-Education students at Lake Elementary were also busy taking bird-friendly action this year.…

Making the case for biodiversity

By Jack Dumbacher
I have little doubt that as long as there are people to watch them, there will always be some birds to watch. But as birders, we understand that just seeing birds is not enough – we want diversity. It is not enough to have a life list of one species that you’ve seen really well. We want a long life list with many species. We want to count as many species as we can on each field trip. We want to see birds doing a variety of interesting things. We want reasons to visit a variety of habitats and regions. And we love seeing that occasional rare, out-of-place species.
This seems intuitive if you are used to diversity. After all, who wants to eat only potatoes for the rest of your life? Or only watch one television program? Or only enjoy art painted with one color? It is the diversity of sounds and colors and plants and animals and landscapes that provide spice to life. These are the ingredients that, when all mixed up and allowed to stand for a few million years, lead to incredible and beautiful evolutionary diversity.
But for people not used to these things, how do we make the case for diversity? My father spent much of his spare time in open green spaces. Sometimes I would go with him, and we heard birds and saw squirrels and geese, and we believed that we loved and understood nature. After spending many more years of my life studying biology, I realized that we were just golfers on a relatively impoverished golf course landscape.
Over the years I’ve learned that a forest is much more than a collection of green leaves and brown woody trunks. Green spaces are not all created equal, and just because an area is green does not mean that it can support the natural diversity of insects, other plants, or birds. Especially when there are fewer and smaller patches of natural open space, it is important that each patch provides excellent habitat for many plants and animals and that there is a diversity of these patch types.
Song Sparrow eating native Red Elderberry on Mt. Davidson. Photo by Eddie Bartley.
Pacific-slope Flycatcher searching for insects in Red Elderberry. Photo by Eddie Bartley
Surprisingly, though, the case for diversity is not always an easy one to make.
Over the past year, I’ve become aware that we are losing important conservation battles right here in the Bay Area to a vocal minority who love open space and green areas, and believe they are standing up for trees and nature.…

An Eco-Ed school year winds up at the ocean

By Marissa Ortega-Welch

Gathered in the cafeteria of their school at eight a.m. on a school day morning in June, the three third grade classes of Esperanza Elementary repeat after me, matching their hand motions to mine in a sort of a dance that they know well:

“Rain … Creek … Bay …. Ocean.”

“Can you do it faster?” I challenge them. “On the count of three…”

They barely wait for me to count: “Rain, creek, bay, ocean!”

During their year of Eco-Education programs with Golden Gate Bird Alliance, this chant has become a mantra for these Oakland third graders. They’ve learned that the rain fills the creeks, which empty into San Francisco Bay and then out to the ocean. They’ve visited creek and bay shoreline habitats on field trips to Knowland Park and Arrowhead Marsh. They’ve also learned through an interactive physical watershed model that I bring to their classroom that the storm drains in their city streets are connected to this system too and when trash enters the storm drain, it’s heading for the bay and ocean as well.

But many of these students, as well as the students in our Richmond and San Francisco programs, have never actually been to the ocean. That’s why we’re gathered here so early in the morning, along with about twenty parent chaperones and a handful of our dedicated Golden Gate Bird Alliance Eco-Ed volunteers.

Call us crazy, but we’re taking sixty third graders to the beach.

These beach field trips have always been a capstone for GGBA’ year-long Eco-Education program. Some of our schools go as a family field trip on a weekend – a wonderful opportunity both for families to spend time together in nature and for us as educators to reach beyond just our elementary school students. Other schools opt to visit the beach as a weekday school field trip so that all the students are able to attend, regardless of whether their parent can accompany them.

After a brief safety talk at the school with the students and parents, we board the three buses GGBA has chartered for Esperanza Elementary and begin the hour-long drive to Muir Beach in Marin. The students squeal in delight as we cross the bay from Richmond and see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

We arrive at the beach in time for low tide. I always like to circle the students around the first rock we see and point out how from a distance it just looks like a rock but, as we come closer, we see it is actually covered with living organisms — barnacles, mussels, and snails.…

Forming a national network for bird-safe buildings

By Noreen Weeden
Ten representatives from Audubon Society chapters and National Audubon staff came together in St. Paul, MN earlier this month to share ideas and strategies for protecting birds from building collisions.
I was excited to be part of this group, representing Golden Gate Bird Alliance and the Pacific Flyway. GGBA has been in the forefront on this issue, successfully pushing for Bird-Safe Building Standards in San Francisco and Oakland and mounting a Lights Out for Birds educational campaign during migration season.
Other chapters have been working on bird-building safety too. But until this summit, there had been no coordinated initiative on this across the massive Audubon network.
That changed with the Bird Safe Buildings Summit, funded by a Toyota TogetherGreen grant that let us spend three days sharing information and challenges and crafting a common vision statement.
The group included representatives from the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific Flyways – the migration-based divisions that National Audubon uses to focus its work. We first gathered outdoors at dinner in downtown St. Paul, a city along the Mississippi River. American Robins were singing in the park across the street and a bit later Chimney Swifts flew overhead. The next day, we lunched on an island in the Mississippi where we watched Cliff Swallows nesting under the bridge. On an evening riverboat ride, we had the opportunity to see an Osprey nesting on a platform provided by the local power company as well as several Bald Eagles that nested nearby.
This is not to imply we were sitting around birding the whole time! But it shows the challenges faced by birds in cities like St. Paul – where prime river or coastal migration routes run into walls of glass-paneled skyscrapers.
The Mississippi migration route, where adjacent buildings create a collision risk / Photo by Noreen Weeden
Glass-walled buildings like this one in St. Paul are deadly to birds, which don’t perceive the glass / Photo by Noreen Weeden
Clear glass skyways like this one in St. Paul are another hazard for birds / Photo by Noreen Weeden
Faced with migratory bird-building collisions, Audubon Minnesota has established a bird monitoring route through the downtown area. We followed the route, which volunteers walk daily during migration season to collect birds that have been injured or killed in building collisions. This kind of monitoring provides data that can be used to educate building owners and tenants, and track the success of preventive measures.…