By April Rose Sommer
Cliff swallows love a good overpass.  Unfortunately, last spring Caltrans construction to widen Highway 101 in Petaluma ran afoul of two colonial Cliff Swallow breeding sites. Caltrans contractors installed netting that was aimed at discouraging swallows from building nests there, but instead trapped and killed over 100 birds. When the agency refused to remove the netting, Golden Gate Bird Alliance joined a coalition of other conservation groups in filing a lawsuit.
Several month ago, the stakeholders reached a settlement that included the installation of less deadly exclusionary measures.  Last week, GGBA joined its fellow plaintiffs and Caltrans representative to tour the sites, view the exclusionary measures, and check up on the swallows.
Instead of the lethal netting, Caltrans has installed a barrier material called Bird Slide directly over the concrete faces of the bridge and overpass.  The exclusionary mechanism is simple – the installed materials are slick, and the swallows are unable to get mud to stick to the surface.
Petaluma highway construction – with white and beige exclusionary material on right, and area left clear with nests on left /Photo by April Rose Sommer
Broader view of the site. Again, the white exclusionary material is on the right and the area left clear for nests is on the left. / Photo by April Rose Sommer
Cliff Swallow nests are built drop by drop, with a typical nest containing 900 to 1,400 bits of hardened mud.  Mud is collected by both male and females at ponds, puddles, ditches, and other sites up to 1/2 mile away from the nest.  Mud gathering and nest construction are social activities; even unmated swallows will start nests! Most colony sites are close to a water and mud source and open fields or pastures for foraging.  In this case, the nearby Petaluma Wetlands provide ample mud for nesting, and the Petaluma River provides a desired water source.
In natural habitats, Cliff Swallows live up to their name, building their nests on cliff faces and overhangs.  But urban habitats provide a range of attractive nesting places, including buildings, bridges, and overpasses.  The swallows especially favor 90-degree angles such as the supports on the Petaluma Bridge and nearby Lakeview overpass, both part of the highway widening.  A corner nest requires less mud, thus decreasing the time needed to build.
Cliff Swallow gathering material for a nest / Photo by Bob Lewis
But all the mud, water and right angle in the world can’t help if there’s no good place to deposit the mud drops!…

Editor’s Note: Several years ago, Ivan Samuels started wondering what it would be like to do a Big Day in the style of California’s original inhabitants — no binoculars, scope, car, bike, flashlight, phone, playback equipment etc. This April was his fourth annual “Miwok-style” trip to raise money for GGBA’ Birdathon. Here is his report!
By Ivan Samuels
It was fun to daydream about where to do a Native American-style count when I first came up with the concept in 2011.  I soon settled on the area in and around the Bolinas Lagoon in Marin County due to the diversity of habitats within walking distance and the lagoon itself, which can easily be birded by kayak.  As this area was frequented by the Miwok Indians, I decided to call the team “Miwok-style.”  That year I did the count alone, setting a route that remains little changed today.  The route incorporated lush riparian, old-growth Douglas Fir, mixed conifer-hardwood, and oak woodland amongst the upland habitats.  The afternoon was then devoted to kayaking the lagoon, birding the town of Bolinas (the most altered of habitats visited) and finally scanning the rocky shore and ocean off of Duxbury Reef. 
Ivan Samuels
Repeating this route, the team added fellow San Francisco birder Brian Turner in 2012, and in 2013 and 2014 we added Peter Pyle.  In addition to being a professional ornithologist, Peter is a long-time Bolinas resident, thus bringing to the team a wealth of local knowledge about where particular species have been frequenting.  He also showed us the best route through the very shallow lagoon, and indeed our big-day list went from 105 species in 2012 to 124 in 2013!
We considered that record hard to beat when a Spotted Owl woke the team in the pre-dawn hours of April 14, 2014.  We would add a Great Horned Owl before first light, and then embark on an intense birding-by-ear hike, taking advantage of a robust spring chorus.  Our eyes played little role at this stage, although scraping in leaf litter did turn out to be the only Fox Sparrow of the day.
On the shore of the lagoon we finally felt our limitations, straining and squinting to ID distant ducks and gulls.  But most of these would be nailed down later by kayak.  A female Hooded Merganser that had spent the winter at the mouth of Pine Gulch Creek put in a fly-by, and perhaps our best bird of the day, a Green Heron, was spotted by Peter as it settled on a snag.…

By Rusty Scalf
The unanticipated can seem like a monkey wrench into the gears, and yet prove to be a great stroke of luck. This happened to our Birdathon trip last weekend at Pinnacles National Park.
We had planned an hour of riparian birding near the campgrounds till the air warmed up enough for soaring California Condors. But we abruptly cancelled the riparian walk due to the number of people flooding the campground area on this spring weekend.
Instead we scooted up to stop 2, the Bear Gulch headquarters, just in time to have a California Condor alight in a snag next to the parking lot!
This bird gave us several minutes of spectaclar close viewing before dropping down to a deer carcass, a well picked over mountain lion kill easily within view. The morning never really warmed and this was to be our only California Condor — though a condor tracker we met on the trail had a total of 10 electronic “detections” of perched, radio-tagged birds on the mountain sides.
Condor with deer carcass in its beak / Photo by Miya Lucas
Photo by Miya Lucas 

The hike up Condor Gulch trail was wonderful, with spactucular vistas unique to this special place. We had a nice bird list too, including Peregrine Falcon, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher and Calliope Hummingbird. Special thanks to our host, condor-tracking volunteer Richard Neidhardt.
Postscript: It turns out that the mate of “our” condor followed us back to the East Bay this week. The Oakland Zoo recently started a new partnership with the National Park Service where they will treat condors that have been found with high levels of lead in their bodies. Today the zoo received its first condor patient — condor number 444, the mate of number 340, the young male in these photographs. Lead poisoning is a significant threat to condors that eat carcasses containing the residue of lead ammunition. Although California passed legislation banning lead bullets in hunting, the law won’t take effect for several years, so there remains a continuing need to test and treat condors for lead poisoning.

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Rusty Scalf, who co-teaches GGBA’ Birds of the Bay Area class, led the Pinnacles field trip on April 26 as part of Birdathon 2014. But you can visit Pinnacles anytime! Spring is a lovely time to look for wildflowers there, as well as the park’s year-round population of 27 free-flying California Condors that have been reintroduced there since 2003.…

By Ilana DeBare

Looking at Rita Sklar’s vivid paintings of birds, you’d think she’d been wielding both binoculars and brushes since she was a child.

But it’s been less than two decades for both.

Sklar – a prize-winning Oakland painter who will be exhibiting her work at our Birdathon Awards Celebration on Sunday May 18 – received her first set of paints as a 10-year-old. She took to them with gusto. But then she abandoned painting in junior high and didn’t pick it up again until around 2000, when she took a watercolor class in Spain.

That was soon after she first started paying attention to the birds all around us.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even notice birds for most of my life,” Sklar said. “Then I was walking around Lake Merritt for exercise and I noticed some ducks, and saw that some looked different from the other ducks, and that led me to start walking around with a (bird) book. I was getting less exercise, but I was getting more fascinated.”

Rita Sklar in her studio / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Sklar joined Golden Gate Bird Alliance and started going on field trips with volunteer leaders like Bob Lewis and Rusty Scalf. She began learning about the environmental threats to bird populations.

That launched her on a series of paintings of birds in decline – at-risk species such as Nuttall’s Woodpecker, California Thrasher, Tri-colored Blackbird, and Surf Scoter.

Nuttall’s Woodpecker by Rita Sklar

Some of her works are traditional watercolors. But others are experimental or mixed media. Her Surf Scoter painting (shown next to her, above)  is a collage that incorporates fragments of pages from a report about the Cosco Busan oil spill.

“I like trying different things,” Sklar said, taking a break in her cozy Dimond district studio, where the walls are covered with her prints and paintings. “My quail painting is on rice paper, and my Canvasback is on Yupo, which is a kind of plastic that doesn’t absorb the paint.”

Canvasback and Scaup by Rita Sklar California Thrasher by Rita Sklar

Sklar doesn’t typically paint in the field. She works from photographs – either her own or more detailed close-ups by local bird photographers like Bob Lewis. In recent years, she has moved towards combining realistic bird images with abstract backgrounds as in her painting of Black-necked Stilts in flight.

Winged Migration in Black and White by Rita Sklar

“I did the birds first, then I covered them with a frisket (protective coating) to protect them,” she recounted of the stilt painting.…

This post is reprinted with permission from the Alameda Point Environmental Report blog.

By Richard Bangert

The 9.7-acre nesting area for the endangered California Least Terns at Alameda Point received a new layer of sand this year. Sixty dump truck loads of sand were delivered to the site on the old Navy airfield in March, paid for by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS).

After the sand was moved into place, USFWS and volunteers set up a numbered cinderblock grid system used for recording behavior and also distributed chick shelters and oyster shells for the chicks to use as protection from the elements and predators.

On Sunday April 13, a dozen volunteers showed up for the last work party prior to nesting. The task of the day was distributing oyster shells around the site, which provides a nominal amount of sun protection for chicks and, in theory, helps make it more difficult for avian predators like Red-tailed Hawks and Peregrine Falcons to spot the chicks amongst all the white shells.

Distributing oyster shells at tern colony. Photo by Richard Bangert

From now until the end of the nesting season in mid-August, volunteers will be participating in another program called the Tern Watch Program. Participants monitor behavior and watch for predators from their vehicles outside the nesting area.

Throughout the nesting season, a USFWS biologist makes periodic walks through the site and places numbered plaster markers next to nests so that the number of eggs and success rate can be accurately recorded. If there are three eggs in a nest one week, for example, and one egg the next week with no chicks, it’s an indication that predators have grabbed the eggs.

Each year following the end of the nesting season in August, volunteers at monthly work parties gather up the oyster shells, the wooden A-frames, drain tiles, grid markers, and the hundreds of numbered markers used to identify nests. Clearing the site makes it easier to remove weeds and grade the sand, which can erode during rains. The volunteers pull weeds from inside and around the perimeter of the fenced-in site. The volunteer program during the non-nesting season is organized by the Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge committee, in conjunction with the USFWS biologist in charge of the Alameda Point tern colony.

The effort to protect the Least Terns was begun by the Navy when nesting activities were first noticed in the 1980s.…