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.

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.

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.…

By Ilana DeBare

San Francisco painter Robert Steiner has won the annual contest for the federal Duck Stamp — for the second time — with a beautiful image of a Common Goldeneye.

This means the Richmond district resident’s painting will appear on 2.1 million Duck Stamps, which are issued with hunting licenses.

Regardless of how you feel about hunting, it’s a great honor for a dedicated and talented local bird artist. The S.F. Chronicle ran a really nice profile of Steiner this weekend, and noted that he is one of only three living waterfowl artists to win the federal Duck Stamp twice. He has also won various state duck stamp competitions 83 times, more than any other artist, dead or alive.

Steiner works by photographing ducks at duck clubs near the Sutter Buttes each January, after hunting season is over. From thousands of photos, he develops hundreds of sketches and ultimately two or three paintings each year.

Chronicle reporter Sam Whiting wrote that the “painting of the goldeneye for the federal contest is a composite of five or six photographs of ducks, taking the best feature from each one…. Out of the sunlight, the head of the real bird is black. Its bright green head in the painting is a trick of iridescence, like a rainbow.”

“I’m trying to do for ducks what Vermeer did for Dutch women,” Steiner says. “You can’t win on sheer skill. Your painting really has to stand out, and the way I do that is with extreme contrast of dark and light.”

If you’re not familiar with the Duck Stamp, it is a $15 stamp that is a required purchase with every federal hunting license. It has raised over $800 million since 1934 to preserve 5 million acres of waterfowl habitat  — a major source of land acquisition for many of our national wildlife refuges.

Recently some folks including bird blogger Larry Jordan and wildlife photographer Ingrid Taylar have come up with an innovative proposal for a federal Wildlife Conservation Stamp — a similar revenue stream that would appeal to birders, nature photographers, and others who value wildlife refuges for non-hunting purposes.

Wildlife stamp backers write:

“A 2013 Wildlife Society Bulletin piece states that changing demographics and cultural shifts away from hunting could result in a $14.3 million annual loss to refuges….…

When I moved into my current house 11 years ago, I moved away from a creekside filled with trees. In the trees were nesting Cooper’s Hawks. I woke most mornings to their calls.  In the early summer the Coop baby elongated whistle would alert me to evening playtime of juvenile Coops.

So when I moved, I knew I’d miss the nesting Cooper’s Hawks.

Two weeks after moving into my new place in an urban/industrial area of Oakland, I was heading down the driveway on my way to work.  I looked down the driveway and there was a Cooper’s Hawk on the fence across the street.  “Thank you,” I whispered to the hawk.  I headed to work and looked for the Coop when I got home.  It was another couple of months before I again saw one, and this time it was three juveniles playing on the telephone poles at the end of the block.

Every year since then until last year I’ve watched the Cooper’s Hawks raise their young in trees less than a block from my house.  I’ve seen them sitting on the roof of my house, taking birds out of my feeders, bathing in my bird bath.  One year a juvenile took a bird and settled down on my garden trellis with the bird clutched in her talon.  She was startled from her perch by one of my dogs heading out the back door.  She flew to the plum tree dropping her prey in the garden.  I picked it up and placed it on the roof of the chicken coop and she retrieved it soon after.  (They’ve never bothered the chickens.)

Then two years ago the Coops stopped nesting in the trees.  I did see a juvenile in the yard but could not find where they were nesting.  Again this year I see Coops around but haven’t found their nest.  I keep listening for the baby Coop whistle but have been disappointed so far.

One evening about a month ago, I was in the kitchen fixing dinner.  The dogs were scattered around the room hoping something good would drop to the floor.

I heard a rustling from my bedroom and ran with one dog ahead of me and one dog following to see what was happening.  I got there just in time to see a Cooper’s Hawk disappear behind the curtain. …