By Frances Dupont

A Golden Gate Bird Alliance docent hikes a half mile to the northeast corner of Cesar Chavez Park, carrying binoculars, camera, brochures, data sheets and a spotting scope.  She sets up the scope next to the trail and aims it at a small speckled lump that blends in with the dry grass beside a ground-squirrel hole.  Then she greets a passerby and asks if he would like to see an owl. He peers through the scope and sees a pair of bright yellow eyes looking back at him, and says something like, “Oh my gosh.”  Taking his eye away from the scope, he looks out across the grass and asks, “Where is it?”

The Chavez Park Burrowing Owls are a delightful lesson in camouflage. This helps to explain how they manage to survive along a busy park trail.  The GGBA docents call attention to those owls that are within the area cordoned off by a protective art installation, so that the public may understand why the area is protected.  These yellow-eyed ambassadors help spread the word that even a busy public park is shared with a wide variety of birds and other creatures.

Each year several Burrowing Owls spend the winter at Cesar Chavez Park, at the end of University Avenue, next to the City of Berkeley Marina.  This former dump site was covered and then turned into a park in 1991.  Twenty-one years later, it is heavily used by walkers, dog-walkers, joggers, cyclists and, surprisingly, wildlife.  Up to ten burrowing owls reportedly wintered in the park once, and five owls were seen in the winter of 2011-2012.

Burrowing Owls are one of the few birds that live in a hole in the ground, and they are the only ground-dwelling owl. They are capable of digging their own burrows in soft soil, but generally use holes dug by ground squirrels.  They were once a common grassland bird, but their habitat has been greatly diminished by agriculture and housing.  Currently they breed in the Central Valley, but the owls that winter in Chavez Park may have raised their young as far away as Idaho.  Here in Berkeley, the ground squirrels and owls have been able to create comfortable living quarters along the stone rip-rap that separates the landfill from the bay.  Many park regulars make a habit of looking for the owls when they walk the perimeter trail between October and March.…

Note: Golden Gate Bird Alliance is delighted to reprint this blog post by Rue Mapp, founder of Outdoor Afro, an organization that reconnects African-Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities such as camping, hiking, biking and birding. Rue lives in Oakland with her three children and worked as a Development Associate at GGBA in 2009-10.

By Rue Mapp

“I’m not really a birder.”

This is how I began my group introduction this weekend at a summit of leading bird and travel bloggers from around the United States in Tucson, Arizona. In this crowd, I considered labeling myself a birder risky, like I might be ousted as an imposter from the group of world-traveled birding experts with hundreds of species on their life lists.

But Sharon Stiteler — otherwise known as “Birdchick” — challenged me.

“Do you own a pair of binoculars?” she asked.

“Um, yeah,” I said.

“And how many bird books do you own?”

I stared at her blankly as I started running through my mind the bird guides I owned, and wondered if I should count the wildlife photography books too…

But before I could respond, Sharon said with a shrug, “You’re a birder.”

Busted.

Our group came together to network and help Swarovski Optik (yes, the crystal folks) learn about the role of social media and bloggers to connect more people to the world of birding through their premium lenses. And over two days of focused bird searching and observing in the stunning mountains and valleys surrounding beautiful Tucson, we each had a chance to try out a variety of scopes and binoculars that put the bins I have been using at home these past two years to shame.

But there was something else about my birder disclaimer that nagged at me over the weekend, and I finally realized it had a lot to do with how the birding community is perceived beyond its traditional participants.

You see, many people I know have not even heard of the term “birding” as an activity to do, much less be.

For generations, African Americans have known and identified birds and other wildlife necessary for living in close contact with rural land and for pleasure. But in recent generations, as more of us have moved to busy cities that distract us from the natural world, there is an opportunity to re-engage the appetite for birding again, although it is critical to make the experience directly relevant to how people can expand their quality of life.…

By Bob Lewis

I took a class with bird photographer Artie Morris in San Diego some years ago. His co-leader was Todd Gustafson, a well-known African safari photographer.  Todd had some guidelines for being a good nature photographer, which went something like this:

• Have good equipment. (That doesn’t mean the most expensive or latest-version cameras. It means equipment that you can depend on, that will do what you want it to do.)

• Know your equipment. (How to set the camera down a stop, where the autofocus button is, where to stand to be close but not inside the close-focusing capability of your lens, etc.)

• Have a plan. What do you hope to shoot: Shorebirds, migrants, heron nests, etc.?

• Know where to go to find your subject – and know when to go so the lighting and tide and wind direction are right.

• Know your subject. Does it feed in the mud or sand?  Will it defend a territory?  Is it courting or delivering food to a nest?  Is it likely to offer a wing-flap when preening?  In other words, spend some time learning the behavior of your subject so you can anticipate behaviors.

• Be prepared. Expect the action or behavior you are hoping to capture, and anticipate the exposure requirements of the shot.  Watch for warning signs, like chicks’ agitation or beak opening to presage arrival of an adult with food.

• Be quiet, move slowly, be patient. It may take time for the bird to arrive, and you may need to reposition yourself to get the right angle with the light, or arrival of the bird.

• Push the button.

  Know where to go: We wanted the warm feeling of evening light, but to be “up light” from these Royal Terns, we stood in the ocean, positioned so our shadows were near but not on the birds. We needed an ebb tide to provide them with a roosting place. Photo by Bob Lewis.

These are all good guidelines, and although I probably don’t always follow them, I usually wish I had.  But Todd didn’t talk about all the post-button-push activity, like downloading your image, archiving it in Lightroom, developing it in Photoshop, posting it on Flickr, printing at Costco or matting and framing.

And he didn’t mention the most important issue of all – why are you taking the picture, and what do you plan on doing with it?  The requirements for a good blog photo are different from those for a large format print or a projected image. …

By Burr Heneman

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of a certain nymph, the most famous of all the wood nymphs. She was much beloved by the satyrs and spirits of the woods, who called her Syrinx. But she would have none of them as she was a faithful follower of chaste Diana, imitating her in her pastime of hunting, and in her virtue too.

One day as Syrinx was returning from the chase on Mount Lycaeus, Pan caught sight of her and determined to possess her. With Pan pursuing her, she fled through the pathless forest till she came to the deep waters of the Ladon River, which halted her flight. Pan reached for her, and in that instant, she prayed to her sisters of the stream to transform her.

They answered her prayer; Pan thought that he had at last caught hold of the nymph’s body but found he held only a handful of marsh reeds. As he stood sighing, the wind blew through the reeds and produced a thin, plaintive sound. “Still, you and I shall always be together,” he cried. Then he took reeds of unequal length and fastened them together with wax and made an instrument he called Syrinx and that we know as Pan pipes.

Syrinx underwent another metamorphosis centuries later when her name was given to the vocal organ of birds. The syrinx is located where the trachea divides into two bronchi, one of which leads to each lung. The name is especially apt for those few bird species that can control the two sides of the syrinx separately, creating two simultaneous tones. The result is the haunting “solo duets” of our Swainson’s Thrush and many of its relatives.

Hearing a slowed-down recording of the thrushes’ songs reveals a little of the mechanism without diminishing the magic. Here’s a web site that plays the songs at normal speed and slowed:

http://www.wildmusic.org/animals/thrush 

Whenever I hear it, I am young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever I hear it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against me.

By Jack Dumbacher 

Some bird species show tremendous geographic variation in plumage or body measurements.  For example, Fox Sparrows have a sooty Pacific form and a reddish Taiga form, Song Sparrows look different on the California coast than they do further north in the Pacific Northwest, and Dark-eyed Juncos – well, where does one begin…?

But most birders rarely consider that these subtle differences might be adaptations to local conditions. And it’s rarer still when there is scientific research suggesting how these differences evolve or make birds locally more fit.

Russ Greenberg, from the Smithsonian Institution’s Migratory Bird Center, has been studying differences in plumage and bill size in Song Sparrows and Swamp Sparrows for many years.  He has long understood that different populations of sparrows have significant variation in bill size and shape, but figuring out the evolutionary function of the variation has been difficult.

Greenberg’s research group recently made a huge breakthrough by examining how birds lose heat.  As we all know, birds’ bodies have a thick layer of feathers that provides superior insulation for heat and cold, so birds don’t lose much heat from their bodies.  However, birds’ exposed bills and legs can dissipate a great deal of heat.

Using stunning infrared photography, Greenberg and his colleagues showed that bird bills can work as an effective “radiator” that burns off excess metabolic heat [1].  And because radiating heat does not waste water from evaporation (as does panting or sweating), it is an especially effective means for dissipating heat in dry environments, such as our California deserts. Meanwhile, in cooler environments, a smaller bill may prevent heat loss, thus helping to keep the birds warmer.

So with this potential explanation, Greenberg’s team needed birds to study.  They turned to California Song Sparrows that are widespread and variable and live in a variety of habitats from the cooler coastal areas to the warm central valley, the Sierras and western deserts [2].  They measured almost 1,500 Song Sparrow bills from museum collections, including those at California Academy of Sciences and U.C.…