Blog Posts Archive - Page 102 of 138 - Golden Gate Bird Alliance

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.…

My first GGBA Yosemite trip

By Maureen Lahiff
It’s taken me quite a while to combine my love of Yosemite and my love of birds. I get to Yosemite several times a year for day hiking, High Sierra Camp stays, and snowshoeing. I’ve always enjoyed the birds that are easy to see, and I’ve had several fortunate encounters with not-so-easy-to-see-birds – a Sooty Grouse with chicks in the open forest high on the flanks of Half Dome, a Mountain Quail performing a broken-wing injury-feigning display on a trail deep in the Hetch Hetchy backcountry. But only recently have I walked in Yosemite specifically to hear and see birds.
The Golden Gate Bird Alliance trip led by Dave Quady and Dave Cornman the weekend after Memorial Day was an amazing experience. Both leaders, who clearly have long-term experience birding in Yosemite, did a great job scouting and locating active nests a few days before our trip started. They filled us in on the changes in the parts of the Park affected by last summer’s Rim Fire, especially around Hodgdon Meadow. I’m truly grateful for leaders like these two Daves, who know and love Yosemite’s habitats and birds.
Lawrence’s Goldfinch / Photo by Donna Pomeroy
Pygmy Owl at Yosemite / Photo by Donna Pomeroy
With some patience and a lot of help from our fellow birders, we all got a good look at a Warbling Vireo working on a well-concealed nest. I knew Mountain Chickadees were cavity nesters, but I didn’t know that they would nest in a stump! We got close looks at them flying in and out making food deliveries to a tiny hole in the center of a stump no more than two feet high. We saw a juvenile Pileated Woodpecker looking out of its nest hole. A majestic oak harbored both a male Bullock’s Oriole and a male Western Tanager, in full breeding plumage and in perfect sunlight.
We were all looking forward to the possibility of seeing a Yosemite Great Gray Owl. Great Gray Owls, North America’s largest owl by size, range across boreal forests in Alaska, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. The Great Gray Owls in the Sierra are geographically separated from other Great Gray Owl populations. There are only about 200 of these birds in California; they are listed as a California Endangered Species.
Yosemite National Park is the center of this population. Dave Quady gave us an account of his experiences finding them in the Park, from being almost a certainty in the right habitat in the 1980s to today’s rare experience to be savored.…

Protect the Mokelumne River & its bird habitat

Editor’s note: Make your voice heard! Email state legislators today about protecting the Mokelumne River. There is an important hearing on Monday June 23.
By Andrea Cassidy
The Mokelumne River in the central Sierra Nevada may seem far from the Bay Area, but we have a vital connection: It’s the source for much of our drinking water through the East Bay Municipal Utility District.
Friends of the River and the Foothill Conservancy have been working to protect the Mokelumne River for 24 years. They had hoped to have it designated as a wild and scenic river under the Federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, enacted under President Lyndon Johnson. However, their congressman Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove) does not support the federal program to protect rivers. Thus, one year ago, the organizations changed direction and decided to seek protection of the Mokelumne under the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. While the California Act is not as protective as the federal act, it would prevent new and larger dams from being installed on the Mokelumne River.
Since the state representatives in the Foothill area are not supportive of the conservation efforts, the local sponsors sought support from State Senator Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) whose district consumes 90 percent of the water obtained from the Mokelumne River. Hancock introduced Senate Bill 1199 in February. It passed in the Senate and is being heard by the Assembly Natural Resources Committee next Monday, June 23. If it gets out of committee, it will go before the full Assembly. It would designate 37 miles of the Mokelumne River as a California Wild and Scenic River. The proposed stretch runs from Salt Springs Dam to the Pardee Resevoir.
North Fork of the Mokelumne / Courtesy of Foothill Conservancy
North Fork of the Mokelumne
The protection is being sought because the Mokelumne River is already oversubscribed and further dams could destroy the important riparian habitat, home to Yellow Warblers, Black Phoebes, Bullocks Orioles, and Western Tanagers. Dippers live along the river and the area is also home to Cave, Barn and Cliff Swallows. Northern Goshawks and Spotted Owls live in the forested river section upstream. The river is also home to amphibians and fish. There is potential for restoring salmon to the river above the Pardee Dam, and protecting the 37 mile section of the river would assist in the salmon restoration project.
Western Tanager / Photo by Bob Lewis
Birds aren’t the only ones who benefit from protecting the Mokelumne!…