By Bob Lewis

Grebes have some of the most spectacular courtship displays of any bird, and to top it off, they are doting parents, carrying their young aboard their backs as they explore their marshy habitats.  There are seven species of grebes in North America, and we are lucky to have four breeding near us in northern California, providing great birding and photographic experiences.

My first grebe event this year was with a Pied-billed Grebe family in Sierra Valley.  A pair had built their floating nest in a small ephemeral pond near the road, and had successfully hatched a group of young.  Normally these birds lay about six eggs, and there appeared to be six striped young competing for space aboard mom.

The youngsters are, at first, feathery puffballs unable to dive, due to the air entrained in their down, so the parents fish up crayfish and insect nymphs to feed them.

Adult Pied-billed Grebe with six chicks in Sierra Valley / Photo by Bob Lewis

They carefully hand a morsel to the chick, which then usually drops it into the water and stares at the parent.  The parent patiently dives down and fetches it back up, and the process repeats until the chick finally figures out how to swallow the delicacy.  At the first hint of danger, the young hop aboard one of the parents, who cover them with their wings.  Both parents build the nest, incubate the eggs, and raise the young.

Species two was a surprise for me, a pair of Eared Grebes at Hayward Shoreline, in brackish water in a marshy area with channels running through it.  Eared Grebes generally have three eggs. This pair had two fuzzy chicks, which they were feeding as fast as they could — diving, bringing up small pond creatures, and stuffing them in the chick about every 5–10 seconds.

Two Eared Grebe chicks with adult, one hitchhiking / Photo by Bob Lewis

The Alameda County Breeding Bird Atlas notes that the third nesting record of this species in the county occurred in 1999. Since that time, nesting increased dramatically at Hayward Marsh, and in July 2005 there were over 200 Eared Grebes present. The size of the colony has fluctuated in recent years.  Although these birds are colonial nesters, I only saw one pair.

I was too late to see the courtship displays of the Eared Grebe, which include a variety of behaviors named by ornithologists as the Cat Posture, Bouncy Dive, Ghostly Penguin, Penguin Dance and Habit-Preening. …

By Ilana DeBare

Is Peet’s Coffee about to merge with a corporate raptor-killer?

When German holding company Joh. A. Benckiser announced plans on July 23 to purchase Berkeley-based Peet’s, it was more than your run-of-the-mill corporate merger.

Benckiser is a significant (10 percent) shareholder in Reckitt-Benckiser, manufacturer of anticoagulant rat poisons that are a leading threat to raptors and other rodent-eating wildlife.

Reckitt-Benckiser sells d-Con, the most widely distributed rat poison on the market. It has resisted efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take anticoagulant poisons off the market, and sued the EPA when asked to come up with a less toxic alternative by 2011.

Brodifacoum, the lethal ingredient in d-Con, sometimes kills rodents right away but other times builds up in their bodies – with a deadly result for predators such as hawks, owls, foxes and bobcats.

“Brodifacoum is not metabolized by the liver and stays in high concentrations in the body,” said Michael Fry, former coordinator of the American Bird Conservancy’s pesticide program, in a San Francisco Chronicle story in May, “The rat goes back, eats a second dose, and the stuff builds up in its tissues. It can accumulate an eight-to-tenfold lethal dose. Any large animal that eats that rat dies. It doesn’t take a huge amount of dead rat to kill an animal 10 times its size.”

Predators that eat poisoned rodents die a particularly gruesome death. The anticoagulant basically causes them to bleed to death internally — blood oozing from their beak, ears, nostrils. Earlier this year, a mate of Pale Male – the famous Red-Tailed Hawk of Central Park – was found dead with rat poison in her system. The California Department of Fish and Game has documented 284 cases of anticoagulant poisoning since 1993, including 37 raptors and 50 endangered San Joaquin kit foxes.

New York bird lovers set up this memorial to Lima, Pale Male's mate, after she was killed by rat poison. / Photo by Jean Shum

And it’s not just wildlife that face potential harm from these poisons. According to the EPA, more than 25,000 children under the age of six showed poisoning symptoms after exposure to rodenticides between 1999 and 2003.

Last year conservationists – including GGBA Development Director Lisa Owens Viani and Golden Gate Raptor Observatory Director Allen Fish – started a group called Raptors Are The Solution to persuade people to stop using and selling the anticoagulants.…

By Marissa Ortega-Welch

This month we ran the first-ever Golden Gate Bird Alliance “Wildlife Discoverers” summer camp for children. As I sit here going through all the photos from our week, I am struck by what a truly amazing time it was.

We really couldn’t have asked for a better group of campers. The kids ranged in age from six to ten and came from all over the East Bay and from all walks of life – some were there on scholarship thanks to generous donations from Audubon members, and some were there from private schools. But what they all had in common was a profound interest in exploring, up close and personal, the natural world.

GGBA Education Director Anthony DeCicco and I had armed ourselves with an arsenal of activities, games, and stories in anticipation of what we thought would be the inherent squirrelly nature of the average eight-year-old. But from the very first morning, it became clear that all these activities would not be necessary.

Climbing trees / Photo by Anthony DeCicco

Our first day began at Arrowhead Marsh, where we handed out “field journals” to all the campers for use throughout the week taking notes and drawing the species we saw. Before we could even get to our first activity, a Great Blue Heron flew into the grass near us and some of the campers wanted to look at it through the scope. Meanwhile, a cotton-tailed rabbit ran into the bushes and some other campers wanted to identify the species. California ground squirrels were popping up all around us. Before I knew it, all of the youth were sitting on the ground, capturing what we’d seen in words and pictures in their field journal. And it wasn’t even ten a.m. on the first day.

The same thing happened on the day of our big hike in Joaquin Miller Park. We met at the ranger station and — equipped with binoculars, our bug catchers, field guides and lots of water — we hiked up the Big Trees Trail to the redwood forest. It was a hot day but the shade of the descendents of some of the oldest trees in California kept us cool. Again, Anthony and I were ready with a whole list of activities, but right after lunch the kids instinctively started turning over logs and looking for decomposers, and suddenly we knew that our afternoon wouldn’t go quite as planned.…

By Phil Price

If you love Renaissance-era art, you’ll get even more enjoyment from a trip to Italy than most people will. If you have a passion for French food, then you’ll get more from a trip to Paris than people who just make the usual rounds of Eiffel Tower/Louvre/Notre Dame. Travel is always enriched if it meshes with your interests.

You can’t force it. If you’re not interested in 17th-century church architecture, then stopping in every 17th-century church that you see is going to bore you to tears. And if you’re not interested in birds, then going on bird walks or trying to identify every new bird is going to diminish your vacation, not improve it.

But if you do enjoy birding, congratulations! Your horizons expand to include the whole world.

My wife and I focus most of our vacations on nature and wildlife, and had long discounted Europe as a vacation destination because most of the charismatic megafauna that once roamed the land have either been wiped out or forced into national parks that are tiny by U.S. standards.

But starting in our mid-30s we became increasingly interested in birds, and now, a dozen or so years later, we don’t have to see a grizzly bear or a wolf to count a day as a success when it comes to enjoying nature.  We have been traveling in Europe for almost two months now — the second-longest vacation of my adult life — and keeping an eye and an ear out for birds has enhanced literally every day of our trip.  Birding is one of the most portable pastimes.

Another great thing about birding: People who show up to go on bird walks are our kind of people, and we enjoy meeting them. Like us, they are not spoiled. If they see a family of otters a quarter-mile away, they are thrilled to see them at all, rather than disappointed that they’re not closer.

And of course, every now and then things go your way. We had long wished to see Puffins, and talked of someday chartering a boat to a Maine island to see them. So when we were on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland a week ago, and heard of an uninhabited island called Mingulay that has Puffins and is visited by a tourist boat twice a week, we signed up for a trip right away.

We would have been happy with a handful of Puffins seen at a distance with our binoculars.…

By Ilana DeBare

As both a birder and a Cal alum, I perked up when this press release from U.C. Berkeley came across my desk:

A graduate student recently completed a six-month count of birds on the Cal campus — and found that the number of species today is actually higher than a century ago.

Allison Shultz identified 48 species in an 84-acre portion of the 178-acre central campus. That’s more than the 44 species recorded with similar methodology in 1913-18, and more than the 46 recorded in 1938-39 by none other than a young, not-yet-famous Charles Sibley.

“The presumption going in was that we would see a steady decline in the number of species because the campus, like any urban environment, has been heavily modified, with more buildings and 15 times more students,” said Rauri Bowie, a Cal biology professor who co-authored the study with Shultz. “But despite everything that has happened on campus in the past century, we find absolutely no evidence for that.”

Still, though the total number of species stayed steady, the kinds of birds changed dramatically with changes in the campus landscape.

In 1913, the oak woodlands and shrubby chaparral of Cal were filled with Song Sparrows, White-Crowned Sparrows and Golden-Crowned Sparrows. Wrentits lived in the brush and Western Meadowlarks in the grasslands.

Today, some oaks remain but the tall grasses and chaparral have given way to lawns and ornamental shrubs. And common species include Lesser Goldfinch, Nutall’s Woodpecker, and the Chestnut-Backed Chickadee.

Shultz noted an increase in species that typically do well in human habitats: crows, ravens, hawks, Ring-Billed Gulls and Mourning Doves.

“We found evidence that if you still have a lot of open space, as in the suburbs or on campus, you tend to get community turnover,” Bowie said. “Very sensitive species disappear, but other species come in to fill similar functional roles. You get different seed eaters and different fruit eaters, for example, with no decrease in net diversity.”

Shultz and Bowie published their study in The Condor journal, the same place that Sibley published the survey he did as a Cal grad student in 1938-39.

Bird survey data from 1913 / Photo by Allison Shultz

Their work was unusual in that few researchers from a century ago left notes detailed enough to allow today’s scientists to replicate their work and make comparisons. The 1913 survey was influenced by zoologist Joseph Grinnell, whose method of precise observation and annotation became the basis of much of today’s field biology.…