By Ilana DeBare

In a dozen years of leading nature trips in Honduras, not once has Robert Gallardo run into another birding group in the field.

“There are just so many areas to go running around here,” he said. “Honduras could hold many groups at one time and they’d never cross paths.”

Gallardo should know. A co-founder of the Honduras Ornithological Society, he has personally added 30 species to the list of Honduran birds and is writing the definitive Field Guide to the Birds of Honduras, to be published in 2014.

Next Thursday August 16, he’ll be sharing his stories and photos of Honduran birds with Bay Area residents at Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s monthly Speaker Series in Berkeley.

The best-kept secret about Honduras, Gallardo says, is that despite years of news about political turmoil in Central America, it is actually quite safe to bird there. Plus the country has an extensive but under-utilized reserve system that doesn’t yet draw the crowds found in places like Costa Rica.

One such reserve includes the Rio Platano — an area of virgin rain forest that is accessible only by raft and is home to tapirs, Great Green Macaws, Scarlet Macaws, monkeys and jaguars.

Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve / Photo by Robert Gallardo

Gallardo first came to Honduras in 1993 as a Peace Corp volunteer. He fell in love with the landscapes, flora and fauna and the opportunity to make a real difference in local avian knowledge and birding. Since then, he’s started butterfly farms and a small eco-lodge, and led numerous birding trips including two sponsored by GGBA in 2011.

Ocellated Qual / Photo by Robert Gallardo

His own favorite bird? The wren family. There are 18 species of wren in Honduras, and sometimes you can find five species living in the same area.

Of the thirty bird species Gallardo has added to the country’s list, three have been wrens.

In-between writing the field guide, conducting eco-tours and speaking to groups like Golden Gate Bird Alliance, he is working on finding a fourth.

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Join us for Robert Gallardo’s slides and presentation on Thursday August 16th.

Birds of Honduras presentation:

 

Date:   Thursday August 16

Time:   7 p.m. refreshments

              7:30 presentation

Place:  Northbrae Community Center

              941 The Alameda (between Marin & Solano) – Berkeley

Cost:   Free for GGBA members, $5 for non-members 

 

 

 …

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.…