By Patricia Bacchetti and Mark Rauzon

Fifteen years ago, Sausal Creek wouldn’t have been even an afterthought on most Bay Area where-to-bird maps. Running from Joaquin Miller Park in the East Bay hills down to the Oakland estuary, the creek was long confined to concrete channels, with its tree canopies cloaked in ivy.

But in 1996 volunteers from the newly-formed Friends of Sausal Creek (FOSC) together with the City of Oakland began to liberate the creek along its run through Dimond Canyon. Since then, thousands of cubic yards of invasive plants have been removed and local-to-the-watershed natives have been added to the creek’s banks and its tributaries in the hills. As the riparian vegetation began to mature, animal life emerged, and the creek now hosts an increasing list of breeding and migrant birds, currently at 120 species.

If you follow Sausal Creek as it meanders from the hills down to the estuary, you encounter the full range of urban birding in the East Bay.

Headwaters

The creek’s headwaters are in the redwoods along Skyline Boulevard, near Redwood Regional Park. A trip to Fern Ravine (near the Sequoia Horse Arena) offers the opportunity to find nuthatches, Brown Creeper, singing Pacific Wren, and Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers the year-round, and House Wren in spring. There have been sightings of Pileated Woodpecker across Skyline Boulevard near the Chabot Space and Science Center, one of the few places in Alameda County where they can be found.

Sausal Creek near Mountain Blvd / Photo by Alberto Fox

The Fern Ravine wetland is one of the newer areas restored by FOSC, so look for more species to appear as the habitat matures. It is the only spot in the watershed that still hosts California Quail, and a migrating MacGillivray’s Warbler was counted here on the last bird-monitoring survey.

As you work your way down the hill, a short hike up the steep Palos Colorados Trail along Palo Seco Creek in the spring holds the possibilities of Pacific Wren, Hutton’s Vireo, Black-headed Grosbeak, Olive-sided and Pacific-slope Flycatchers, towhees, and migrating warblers. (The trailhead is at the end of Joaquin Miller Court, off Mountain Boulevard.)

Dimond Canyon

The most developed part of the restored creek bank is in Dimond Canyon along Park Boulevard. This stretch of the creek is becoming a reliable area to find breeding riparian species and is a migrant trap in spring and fall. Here the hills meet the flats, and conifers merge with riparian vegetation that surrounds the park.…

Want to learn bird calls but not sure how to start? Here are some tips from Denise Wight, who teaches Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s popular Birding By Ear classes. 

By Denise Wight

1. Learn to listen. While birding, be still and remain silent for a minute or two. Begin attentive listening to the bird sounds around you. Try to stay focused on individual sounds. Repeat often.

2. If you can, watch a bird as it sings or calls. Observe a vocalizing bird for as long as possible. Be aware of the habitat, season, time of day, smells, etc. Let the entire experience burn new path- ways of memory in your brain.

3. Start with the common birds. Get to know the vocalizations of House Finch, chickadee, Mourning Dove, and additional birds you encounter regularly.

4. Record the sound. Even the faintest sound recorded on a cell phone will help you recall the bird’s vocalization. Add comments at the end of the recording if possible.

Photo by Denise Wight

5. Use various techniques to recall bird sounds. Try mnemonics, silly phrases, or line drawings, or record yourself making the call! If “Chicago” prompts you to think “California Quail,” use it. Most of all, use what works for you!

6. Go out with someone who knows bird sounds. Join a GGBA field trip or take classes. You’ll learn much faster. Ask questions, take notes, even ask the leaders what tricks they use to recall the sounds you hear. This may also be an opportunity to find out just what bird species you may be missing due to hearing loss.

Spotted Towhee / Photo by Denise Wight

7. Consult apps and recordings. This can be helpful, but try to listen to the real bird in the field for as long as possible before you listen to recordings. They often sound similar, but sometimes they don’t, for various reasons.

8. Use additional information. Check books and online resources. Many links are on my website, denisewightbirds.com

9. Take a look at sonograms (also called spectrograms). They are bit advanced, but are a great way to visualize bird sounds. Check out xeno-canto.org or macaulaylibrary.org.

10. Just get out and listen! Go out as often as you can, in different locations, weather, time of day, time of year. Listen with a joyful heart and without fear.…

By Ilana DeBare

The San Francisco Airport Marriott has had some unusual guests for the past two springs — families of Barn Owls.

In spring 2012, a Marriott guest discovered a pair of Barn Owls nesting in the recessed ledge outside an 11th-floor hotel room. The pair successfully raised four fledglings.

In spring 2013, a pair returned to that same ledge and raised another three babies. Then the hotel discovered a second pair with another three nestlings on the floor below!

The Marriott was more than tolerant of the owls – it made them part of the hotel family. Cleaning crews monitored the owlets’ progress when they cleaned the rooms; other staff posted photos of the owls around the hotel and on Facebook; some guests made a point of requesting rooms with an owl view. (Because the hotel windows don’t open, there was no risk of disturbing the nests.)

Second Barn Owl family at SF Airport Marriott / Photo by Karla Vogtman

Now Golden Gate Bird Alliance is pitching in too. We worked with local Eagle Scout Matthew Turney on building  a Barn Owl box to encourage future nesting at the hotel. This week, Marriott Director of Finance James Last stopped by our office to pick up the finished box.

Delivering bird boxes isn’t normally part of a finance director’s job description. But he was totally into it.

Marriott Finance Director James Last picks up the owl box / Photo by Ilana DeBare Barn Owl photographed by Marriott guest Harry Ghuman

“It’s been fun watching the owls grow up,” he said. “We’re all wondering if the families will keep multiplying more and more.”

We’re hoping they do! And we look forward to seeing more owlets next spring… either on the ledges or in the new nest box.

Big thanks to Matthew and his family for building the owl box. And big thanks to the Marriott staff for being so welcoming to these amazing creatures.

You can read more about the SF Marriott Barn Owls in the San Jose Mercury News, the Marriott’s Facebook page, or in this blog post by the National Wildlife Federation. The NWF shot a video of one group of nestlings over the summer:

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By Ilana DeBare

I joined about a zillion other Bay Area residents this past weekend in exploring the bike/walk trail along the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

My husband and I biked it — a smooth, slightly uphill path of four miles from the Emeryville Ikea store to the current endpoint just before Treasure Island. We passed middle-aged bike geeks on $5000 titanium racing bikes, and families with six-year-olds on wobbly two-wheelers. Then there were walkers, joggers, baby carriages, roller skaters. It was a complete cross-section of Bay Area humanity.

This was a weekend for people-watching more than bird-watching.  But the new bridge was apparently designed to maintain roosting spots for cormorants. (Might it also be more forgiving for Peregrine Falcon fledglings making their first flights? Unclear.)

There are benches along the bike trail where one could sit and watch for occasional birds on the water or on the nearby old bridge.

Bay Bridge bike/walk trail / Photo by Ilana DeBare One of the benches along the bike trail / Photo by Ilana DeBare Viewing the old span from the bike trail / Photo by Ilana DeBare

It would be easy to turn a Bay Bridge bike ride into a more bird-filled outing. If you exit from the bike trail onto Maritime Street in West Oakland, it’s a quiet, flat, ten-minute ride to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in the heart of the Port of Oakland. (Take Maritime Street to 7th Street, turn right, and follow signs for the park.) We did that this weekend and were rewarded with numerous terns and shorebirds.

The old Bay Bridge span has only been out of use for about twelve days, but already it looks like a dark, rusting relic from another era. The new span is as white and shiny as an iPod.

I predict the bike/walk trail will be immensely popular — which hopefully will add impetus to the push to extend the trail all the way to San Francisco. Treasure Island (which will be reachable by bike in 2015, once the old bridge is dismantled) is a nice destination for a picnic, but come on…

The trail should go all the way to The City so it is accessible to San Francisco residents and useful for commuters!  Let’s support bike advocates such as the East Bay Bicycle Coalition as they push for an extension of the trail.

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Want to walk or bike the trail?…

By Jack Dumbacher

We know that birds have been adapting to life in human landscapes. They change their songs to stand out against the urban background din,  they sing at times of day when they are more likely to be heard over our noise, and several recent studies have shown that they have been adapting to avoid traffic hazards.

Some 80 million birds are estimated to die each year on American roads, and two groups of avian biologists took observations from their daily commute to learn about how birds are adjusting.

Charles Brown has studied Cliff Swallows for many years in Nebraska.  Although the birds typically nest in mud banks and cliffs, they have taken to nesting in highway bridges and overpasses.  While this creates excellent nesting habitat, it may not be the safest place for flying.

Cliff Swallow / Photo by Bob Lewis

For years, Brown collected dead swallows from the roadside and prepared these specimens for the local museum. Over the years, he noticed that Cliff Swallow road kill numbers were declining, but he was unable to find a correlation with their population sizes or the numbers nesting near roads.

Careful measurements showed that birds with longer wings (and therefore less agile) were more likely to be struck and killed by cars – and that overall, this natural selection was causing wing length to become shorter in this population of swallows.  Thus, he was able to show that auto traffic was killing the less agile swallows and selecting for more agile, shorter-winged swallows! [1]

Another study, just out, suggests that birds actually can tell the speed limit on local stretches of road. [2]

Pierre Lagagneux had a long commute through towns and countryside in his little Peugeot. To pass the time, he started measuring the distance from him that birds initiated their flight as he was approaching (his so-called Flight Initiation Distance, or FID).  This was easy to do, by simply multiplying his speed by the time it took to reach the place where the bird flew.  By measuring hundreds of birds in lots of different places, he was able to show that birds had longer FIDs in faster speed zones, and they had shorter FIDs in slow zone – regardless of the speed that the approaching car was going.

Thus, they were not estimating the speed of the particular oncoming car; rather, they formulated some estimate of the local speed limit.  …