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.…

By Maureen Lahiff

This year, we’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Yosemite Grant and California State Parks with much festivity.  But  Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove were granted to the State of California in 1864 for “public use, resort, and recreation.”

What was the first area in the U.S. set aside specifically for wildlife? Oakland’s Lake Merritt!

In 1870, the Lake Merritt Wild Duck Refuge was created by the California State Legislature.

Today Lake Merritt looks much different than it did 150 years ago.  The wetlands that once surrounded it are gone. But it is still a wintering spot for thousands of migratory waterfowl and a year-round home to a great variety of resident birds.

Every other Saturday morning from March through early June, GGBA provides docents at Lake Merritt in partnership with S.F. Nature Education. We set up a spotting scope and information table near the artificial islands, along the path just east of the Rotary Nature Center. I love serving as a docent there. Ducks come in close to the walkway and offer us good looks and plenty of chances to see them interacting.  Gulls drop mussels on the path to crack their shells.  Black-crowned Night Herons sit motionless in the trees.  American White Pelicans sail by; in spring, we see the “breeding bumps” on their bills.

Eared Grebe in breeding plumage with a pipefish at Lake Merritt / Photo by Lee Aurich Docents in action / Photo by Liz Westbrook

The Double-Crested Cormorants are one of the highlights for me.  Forty to fifty pairs nest in trees on the islands.  This time of year, we can actually see their double crests of feathers, and the bare throat skin near their bills — their gular patches — are bright orange-yellow.  We saw a male displaying on a nest on March 8th, and several birds carrying sticks to refurbish nests for the current season on March 8th and 23rd.  The males and females look alike, and both contribute sticks to the nest building.

Cormorant bringing twigs to nest / Photo by Allen Hirsch, http://allenh.zenfolio.com/p274720386 Double-crested Cormorant at Lake Merritt / Photo by Allen Hirsch, http://allenh.zenfolio.com/p274720386

At the beginning of March, a lot of the wintering ducks were still there: many scaup (mostly Lesser Scaup), about a half dozen Canvasbacks, some Bufflehead, and Pie-billed Grebes.  On March 23, the Canvasbacks were gone and there were fewer scaup.…

By Pipi Ray Diamond

On the first day of spring, twenty third-grade students from Oakland Unified School District’s Korematsu Discovery Academy bravely head into the outdoors. They are accompanied by their teacher, several parents, one grandparent, volunteers, and their leaders — Anthony DeCicco and Marissa Ortega-Welch, who work with 700 low-income schoolchildren each year in Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s award-winning Eco-Education program.

Their destination is the Arroyo Viejo Creek, just outside the Oakland Zoo in Knowland Park. Seven years ago this portion of the creek was restored to provide better habitat for wildlife and increase human access. Many institutions collaborated to make it happen, including the California Coastal Conservancy, City of Oakland, Oakland Zoo and Urban Creeks Council. The restoration project also resulted in the perfect outdoor classroom.

This is the students’ second Eco-Ed field trip. In the fall, they visited Arrowhead Marsh where they went birding and planted wetland plants to support endangered Clapper Rails. Today they are here to explore the creek habitat – to see what lives here and understand how the creek is connected to the Bay.

Anthony DeCicco shows the kids how to plant / Photo by Pipi Ray Diamond

The class splits into two groups. Anthony takes one group over to an open area that needs more native plants. The students gather around as he orients them. Pointing to the creek, he asks “What is the name for this?”

One excited boy yells out “A sewer!”

Anthony looks surprised but waits for more answers.

Unfortunately, the boy’s answer is not as silly as it sounds. The day before, volunteers from Friends of Sausal Creek discovered a sewage spill in that nearby creek. City staff recommended that people stay out of Sausal Creek until further notice.

A lot of work goes into making sure that local creeks are safe places for an outdoor classroom. Seeing the kids crawling over the banks and touching the water, I remind myself not to take water quality for granted.

Anthony keeps the kids focused and engaged with lots of call and response.

“A fancy word for a creek is ‘riparian.’ Can you say it?”

The children chant back, “Riparian!”

Anthony explains today’s project: planting sagebrush. He asks, “How will this plant be helpful to animals? Like a rabbit or a bird?”

“They can hide,” one student says.

“Correct,” says Anthony. “The plants will provide shelter for animals to hide from predators.”…

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.

Birding by the Campanile / Photo by Peter Maiden Tiffany Wong and Maureen Lahiff locate a bird / Photo by Peter Maiden

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.

Birding in the Botanical Garden / Photo by Ilana DeBare Anna’s Humming bird on nest in the U.C. Botanical Garden / Photo by John Colbert

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.…