By Ilana DeBare

NOTE: Check out our more recent post on Holiday Gifts for Birders, 2015!

Looking for kids’ gifts? We also have a post on Great Bird Books for Kids. 

Hard as it may be for some of us to imagine, the Audubon Christmas Bird Count isn’t the only big event in December. There’s that little holiday called, um, Christmas. Plus Chanukah, and Kwanzaa, and solstice… lots of reasons to celebrate and buy gifts for loved ones.

Need help finding gifts for the birders in your life? Here are some ideas for cool presents for adults and kids, home and field, in various price ranges.

(Note: We’re not including bird feeders, field guides, or optics — too many options in each of those categories! But you can find field guides, other birding books, feeders, toys and other bird items for sale at the Golden Gate Bird Alliance office at 2530 San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley.)

Birding Gear

LowePro FieldStation belt pack with ledge for reading/writing

Fingerless gloves can make it easier to handle binoculars and scopes in cold weather. Bike gloves are one option that can cost as little as $20. Or you can get fingerless gloves designed specifically for outdoor optics and photography such as a waterproof, insulated pair for $49.99 from Aquatech.

Backpacks or belt packs. The FieldStation Beltpack by LowePro has a padded compartment for binoculars and a retractable platform for reading a field guide or writing in a journal, as well as a water bottle pouch. It’s $99.99. Other LowePro backpacks are built to hold scopes and tripods.

BirdCam. Catch images or video of feathered backyard visitors even when you’re not home! Wingscapes sells a motion-detecting birdcam that is endorsed by the National Audubon Society for $119.95.

Nest boxes. If you’re in the Bay Area, consider gifting one of the wooden nest boxes made by our volunteers! Prices are $20 and up, with all proceeds going to our conservation and Eco-Education programs. Call us at (510) 843-2222 to reserve one.

Drawing birds kit. GGBA board member John Muir “Jack” Laws recently published a wonderful book on how to draw birds. Pair that book with a set of colored drawing pencils and… voila! a great gift set that will open up a new and fun approach to seeing birds. The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds costs $24.95 and colored pencils are available at any art or stationery store.…

By Ilana DeBare

You’d never guess it from the box-office-blockbuster Skyfall, but…

James Bond was a birder.

No, not the Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery secret agent Bond. But the James Bond who was an eminent American ornithologist, an expert in Caribbean birds who wrote the definitive Birds of the West Indies field guide.

In fact, Ian Fleming named his secret-agent-Bond after the birder.

Wikipedia writes:

Ian Fleming, who was a keen bird watcher living in Jamaica, was familiar with Bond’s book, and chose the name of its author for the hero of Casino Royale in 1953, apparently because he wanted a name that sounded ‘as ordinary as possible’. Fleming wrote to the real Bond’s wife, “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.”

Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, 1936 edition

Fleming initially used Bond’s name without permission, according to a 2008 article by Katherine Tweed in Audubon magazine. Apparently Bond didn’t notice until several years had passed — at which point his wife wrote a furious letter to Fleming. The novelist apologized and said he viewed Bond’s field guide as “one of my bibles.” He later invited the Bonds to stay at his Jamaican estate.

The real Bond was born in Philadelphia in 1900. His interest in natural history grew out of a trip taken by his father to the Amazon in 1911. Later he studied at Cambridge University, worked briefly as a banker, and then joined the staff of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, eventually becoming its curator of birds.

Since Bond first published his Birds of the West Indies in 1936, it has been reissued several times, including as a Peterson Guide. Bond died in Philadelphia in 1989.

Wikipedia notes that, “In his novel Dr. No, Fleming referenced Bond’s work by basing a large Ornithological Sanctuary on Dr. No’s island in the Bahamas.”

In the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day, the Pierce-Brosnan-Bond is seen examining Birds of the West Indies in an early scene that takes place in Cuba.

Later in that film, Brosnan introduces himself to the Halle Berry character as an ornithologist. It was, of course, a false identity.

But not quite as false as most movie viewers assumed.

James Bond, birder, 1974 / Photo by Jerry Freilich from Wikimedia Commons…

Each fall, hundreds of volunteers with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory track hawk migration through the Bay Area. To celebrate fall migration, here’s the second installment in a two-part interview with GGRO Director Allen Fish. 

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Q: What trends have you seen in recent years in terms of numbers, species, timing, anything else?

A: With 19 species of annual raptors, and a quarter-century of data, I could spend days on this question, but to give a few examples:

• Peregrine Falcon numbers have increased steadily over the 25 years of the GGRO count.  In 1985, we tallied one Peregrine every 200 or so count-hours at GGRO; today we see a Peregrine just about every other hour.

• We have started to mine our data for phenological changes — that is, changes in peak dates of migration that might be attributed to climate change.  Sharp-shinned Hawks seem to show some slippage of their peak dates over time, but the statisticians are still working on their part of the analysis, so I better not say too much.

Q: How many volunteers do you have counting on weekdays? On weekends?

A: Weekday counters, about 80 volunteers.  Weekend, about 60.  A volunteer makes a commitment to one weekday or weekend day every other week from August through December.  An exceptionally experienced volunteer with five to 25 years’ experience is the leader for the day.  He or she tries to see and corroborate every raptor.

Q: How does the Quadrant System work? Does it keep you from counting the same hawk multiple times? How was it created?

A: We split the 360-degree view-shed on Hawk Hill into four impossibly huge slices of pie that we call quadrants.  Two to three volunteers focus on one of these quadrants for an hour at a time trying to see every new raptor, and to pass every previously spotted raptor.  If we’re not sure whether a hawk has been counted already, we count it.  One person records species, ages, and sexes for the whole team.

Nothing can keep a human being from counting the same hawk multiple times on Hawk Hill.  We have learned from band recoveries and radio-tracking studies that raptors may leave Marin and come back days or even months later.  So how do we account for “double-counts?”  First off, we assume they happen.  And that they happen at some regular rate that stays consistent from year to year. …

Each fall, hundreds of volunteers with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory track hawk migration through the Bay Area. From the top of Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, they spot and count raptors that are following the coastline south and then swerving inland when they reach the Golden Gate. GGRO’s Hawkwatch program is one of the unique treasures of Bay Area birding. To celebrate fall migration, here’s the first installment in a two-part interview with GGRO Director Allen Fish. 

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Q:  When does hawk migration season “officially” start, peak and end??

A: Most years we start to see the early migrants – young Redtails and Osprey in particular – right around the first of August.  We long ago made a decision that we would start to count and band right around August 15^th and carry our daily studies through at least the first full week of December.  Although, on the back end, some raptors, Redtails and even accipiters are still moving through until the first week of January.  Probably because of the moderate winter climate here, some raptors have a great deal of behavioral flexibility about when they move.  Some of this movement may not be classical migration, but would be more described as dispersal, that is, an ecologically-stimulated movement.

In terms of numbers of hawk-sightings, the highest flight-days of the season have fallen in a date-slot from about September 15 to October 8. However. the peak day usually hits in a smaller range of September 25-30. This peak is usually driven by Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks. The big migration period — which tends to stay above 120 raptors per hour  and may peak at ten times that — lasts through about November 10.

Broad-winged Hawks near the Golden Gate Bridge / Photo copyright by George Eade

Q: About how many raptors are sighted on a typical day at the peak of the season?

A: Our peak days have ranged from about 600 sightings per day (six hours of counting per day) all the way up to 2,800 sightings per day.  That was on September 21, 1984.

Q: Which species are most common?

Turkey Vultures, Red-tailed, Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks together make up 87 percent of the flight.  Fifteen other species of diurnal raptors are seen most years.  We’ve seen Mississippi Kite on three occasions since 1976, and a Eurasian kestrel was banded here in 2007.

Q: Where are they coming from and going to?…

By Ilana DeBare

Welcome back to the Lake Merritt Tufted Duck!

Once again, a Tufted Duck has arrived to winter among the scaup of Lake Merritt in Oakland. This is of note since Tufted Ducks aren’t native to California — they’re a Eurasian species that occasionally turns up here, presumably migrating south with other birds from Siberia.

Its arrival sparked an interesting dialogue earlier this week on the East Bay Birding email discussion group. People started trying to figure out how long there’s been a Tufted Duck wintering at Lake Merritt. We at GGBA were happy to spot it last January during our first-ever Kids’ Bird Count at Lake Merritt, but the record goes back much further.

Bob Power reported sighting the duck each year from 2006 through 2012; Glen Tepke said he had seen one in 2005. John Harris saw one in 1998. Dave Quady noted that the Oakland Christmas Bird Count turned up a Tufted Duck in 1994 and every year from 1997 through 2004 except for 2002.

Traveling even further back in time, John Sterling recounted seeing one in the 1970s — when he was too young to have a driver’s license, and had his mother drive him to the lake! And Joe Morlan weighed in with a string of sightings in 1976-8.

Tufted Duck at Lake Merritt / Photo by Mark Rauzon, from http://rauzon.zenfolio.com

Mark Rauzon, who started the whole discussion with a sighting of the duck last week, summed it up this way:

A Tufted Duck has been reported 22 out of the last 36 years at Lake Merritt, Oakland. Mostly a single male was seen each winter from 1976-79, 1987, 1991, 1994, 1997-2001, and 2003-12. The same individual was likely reported in 1976-79, and again from 2003-12. And while they can live to be 45 years, it is likely that more than one individual male has been involved, as well as a few females. Many of us got it as a “lifer.” We’re lucky to live in an area where this Eurasian species winters.

For me, it’s also moving to consider that this could be the same male returning for several years in a row. Except for occasional banded birds, we don’t often get to know individual birds or their histories.…