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:

…

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.

—————————

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.  …

By Ilana DeBare

There’s some potentially good news for the Cliff Swallows near the Highway 101 overpass in Petaluma: Caltrans may reevaluate the use of netting that has trapped and killed more than one hundred birds at that bridge.

Faced with an ongoing lawsuit by conservation groups including Golden Gate Bird Alliance, Caltrans in July asked for information about the netting’s impact on swallows and whether it is significant enough to require a more complete environmental assessment than was initially done.

“Caltrans now has a chance to get this project right, and should immediately supplement the environmental review so bird protection measures can be evaluated and in place before swallow nesting season,” said Veronica Bowers of Native Songbird Care and Conservation, the Sonoma County group that raised the initial alarm over the deadly netting. “Disturbing the nesting colony and killing swallows again this spring is not an option.”

The Petaluma overpass problem started last spring, when Caltrans began widening Highway 101. The overpass has long been a nesting destination for Cliff Swallows who have made the thousand-mile flight up from wintering grounds in South America.

Petaluma River bridge / Photo courtesy of Native Songbird Care & Conservation Swallows in netting / Photo by Scott Manchester, Santa Rosa Press Democrat

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act prohibits disturbance of nests. So to prevent the swallows from nesting in the construction area, Caltrans installed netting on the bridge. Exclusion of nesting birds is often standard procedure for construction projects, but the Petaluma nets were sloppily installed and turned out to be a death trap — entangling, maiming and killing scores of birds.

Despite numerous protests by wildlife lovers, Caltrans refused to remove the nets and consider alternative, safer ways to prevent the swallows from nesting there. So in May, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Center for Biological Diversity, Madrone Audubon, Marin Audubon, GGBA and Native Songbird Care filed suit to halt the killing.

The judge turned down our initial request for an injunction to stop the project. But now nesting season is over for the year. Caltrans has a window of several months to reevaluate this ill-starred strategy and come up with a better approach.

Will they do so? We’re keeping our fingers crossed — and the legal pressure on.

“There are some common-sense solutions Caltrans should evaluate, such as scheduling bridge construction work outside of nesting season, or (safer) methods to encourage swallows to nest elsewhere during construction,” said Susan Kirks with the Madrone Audubon Society.…

By Sam Zuckerman

In the vast array of birding guides, it’s hard to stick out. Harry Fuller’s Freeway Birding: San Francisco to Seattle (Living Gold Press, 2013) distinguishes itself with a special hook. It only covers places to bird along the 800-mile Interstate 80 and I-5 corridor from San Francisco to Seattle. If a birding spot can’t be reached by taking a detour of 20 minutes or less, it’s not in the book.

Think of it as On the Road meets National Geographic Guide to Birding Hot Spots.

That’s precisely the book’s great virtue and weakness. The San Francisco-to-Seattle freeway route is certainly a rich birding area. As Fuller notes, fifteen National Wildlife Refuge units lie near the road, many of them wintering grounds for scores of migratory waterfowl species. Obviously though, some of the most spectacular birding destinations are outside the book’s geographical limit, including those along the Pacific coast and in the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains.

Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge near Tacoma, Wash. / Photo by Harry Fuller Ashland, Oregon in winter / Photo by Harry Fuller

Within the limits he’s set for himself, Fuller — a former Golden Gate Bird Alliance field trip leader who now lives in Oregon — does a workmanlike job of cataloging birding sites. He provides generally accurate information about refuges and parks, including driving directions for reaching them, what facilities are on site, what habitats are there, and a few of the species that can typically be found.

For some of the more important areas, such as the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, the descriptions are lengthy and detailed.  In addition to sites that have been formally set aside as parks and protected areas, Fuller describes opportunities for birding at a few rest stops and side roads along the freeway.

Map from Freeway Birding, showing birding spots between Red Bluff and Anderson, CA

Freeway Birding includes more than 100 maps of individual birding locales or the regions I-5 passes through. Although the book is not a field guide, it includes brief descriptions of a small number of species, including the Calliope Hummingbird, Wrentit, and Northern Spotted Owl. The book has some nice drawings, but no photos.

I have family in Seattle, and I travel there often. Generally I fly to Seattle so my I-5 birding experience has been limited to some of the California refuges north of Sacramento. I judged Freeway Birding by its descriptions of places I’m familiar with.…