• GGBA intern restores habitat – and her career

    By Ilana DeBare

    Salt grass? Gumplant? Sticky monkey-flower?

    Rachel Spadafore knows them all. And she’s helped scores of Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers restore prime bird habitat along the bay by returning these native plants to the San Francisco and East Bay shorelines.

    For the past year, Rachel served as GGBA’ first Restoration Coordinator. Her work involved leading teams of volunteers during monthly work days at Pier 94 in San Francisco and Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline Park in Oakland.

    Rachel, 29, formed her love of nature as a child in the Alleghany foothills of Pennsylvania. She received a master’s in environmental management at the University of San Francisco, where she was inspired by a professor with expertise in tidal wetlands restoration.

    But her career plans hit a brick wall after graduation due to the recession – bad news for Rachel, good news for Golden Gate Bird Alliance.

    There were few openings for newly-minted environmental scientists.  Rachel ended up taking a less-than-thrilling office job for a green building company.

    Then she found out  that GGBA was looking for a restoration intern, and jumped at the chance to get back into the field, even if it was just a couple of times a month.

    The shoreline at Pier 94 / Photo by Lee Karney

    “I love being outside,” she said. “It was so refreshing after being in a cube for almost a year. I felt I’d gotten back to who I was and what I enjoyed.”

    Rachel’s work centered on two sites – Pier 94 and MLK Shoreline – at which Golden Gate Bird Alliance has been the lead agency in habitat restoration.

    On a typical Saturday work day, Rachel would stop by the GGBA office at 7 a.m. to pick up picks, shovels, buckets and birding scopes. She’d arrive at Pier 94 or MLK about 45 minutes before the volunteers – walking the site to assess the progress of recently-planted grasses and shrubs, or deciding which non-native invasive plants should be the focus of that day’s attack.

    As the volunteers worked, she’d point out birds and their songs. And when they were done, she’d lead a bird walk to explain how wildlife would benefit from the restored landscape.

    Although Rachel had done some birding before the GGBA internship, her personal expertise was in plants. So GGBA Volunteer Coordinator Noreen Weeden helped bring her up to speed on the avocets, clapper rails, osprey and other avian inhabitants.…

  • Fort Funston Bank Swallows

    By Dan Murphy

    A unique San Francisco treasure is the Bank Swallow colony at Fort Funston.  And just as unique is its current nesting site — a band of rip-rap placed there illegally (oops!) by the San Francisco Department of Public Works.

    Let’s start with the basics. This year there are at least 110 nest burrows between the rock revetment (rip-rap) placed on the beach by the Department of Public Works and the crumbling roadbed above.  If you want cute and super hyperactivity, you’ve got to love Bank Swallows. These brown and white swallows with the distinctive black breast band are our smallest members of the swallow clan and among the longest-range migrants.

    On my most recent visit in mid-June, there were at least a half-dozen swallow families of four to six birds swarming around the colony.  The young had probably fledged in the early morning and were bidding farewell to the colony before heading all the way to Ecuador or Columbia for the rest of the year.

    Can you believe our tiniest swallow migrates all that way?  The first birds arrive on April 1 — yes, it’s predictable — and the last depart by August 1.  Mid-May to mid-June sees the height of activity at the colony.  It’s just non-stop activity.  There must have been insects on the beach because there were often a dozen or more adult birds pecking away there.  They use the beach to get bits of wrack for nesting material early in the season, but this is the first time in over 30 years of observations I’ve seen them apparently feeding on the sand.  The fun never ends with these guys.

    Two juvenile Bank Swallows in their burrow at Fort Funston / Photo by Dan Murphy

    Bank Swallows have been recorded at Lake Merced since at least the early 1900s.  There was also a colony near Skyline and Sloat that was destroyed when Skyline Blvd. was built.  We don’t have records of when they started nesting at Fort Funston, but it’s safe to say they’ve been there since the 1960s.  In better times they used the bluffs at Fort Funston between their north end and Panama Point, the point you can see to the south from the parking lot.

    About four or five years ago, the compacted sand that forms the cliffs at Fort Funston started to slump into loose dune-like sand instead of the old sand cliffs that made for good swallow burrows. …

  • Good news on Snowy Plover habitat

    By Mike Lynes
    This week the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service designated 24,527 acres along the Pacific Coast as critical habitat for endangered Western Snowy Plovers — an important step towards ensuring the species’ recovery and ultimate survival.
    The FWS action ends several years of legal conflict over how much land would be designated as critical habitat for the plovers, and doubles the acreage initially proposed in 2005.
    While the FWS didn’t include any habitat along the San Francisco coastline, its action will benefit the Snowy Plovers that over-winter at Ocean Beach and Crissy Field by protecting their breeding grounds along the Pacific Coast.
    The Snowy Plover — a six-inch shorebird weighing up to two ounces — was first listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1993. Its major nesting sites had dropped from more than 50 to fewer than 30. Today, approximately 2,500 plovers remain breeding along the Pacific Coast.
    This week’s action by the FWS is aimed at protecting sufficient habitat to improve the plovers’ reproductive success and ultimately remove them from the threatened and endangered species list.  The new rule designates 47 sites in California, nine in Oregon and four in Washington. It doesn’t affect land ownership or create any refuges, but alerts federal agencies to take the plovers into consideration when planning or funding activities involving its designated habitat areas.
    The benefits of this ruling go beyond Western Snowy Plovers. Habitat set aside for plovers also benefits other shorebirds such as Godwits, Long-billed Curlews, and Western and Least Sandpipers.
    The new critical habitat designation is actually a revision of prior efforts.  The Western Snowy Plover was first granted 19,474 acres of critical habitat in 1999. In 2005 the Bush administration illegally reduced the critical habitat to 12,145 acres, eliminating protection for thousands of acres scientists believed necessary for the snowy plover’s survival and abandoning key habitat areas crucial for recovery.
    In 2008 the Center for Biological Diversity sued over the unlawful reduction of the plover’s habitat protections, leading to a settlement agreement with the Service and this week’s revised designation. Those of us who love Snowy Plovers and want to see their population survive owe a debt of thanks to the Center for pressing this issue.
    There will certainly be critics of this habitat designation:  It has the capacity to affect other recreational users along some stretches of the Pacific coastline.  But we hope that these areas can, where appropriate, be managed for multiple uses in a way that accommodates reasonable use of the beaches while protecting the Snowy Plover.…

  • Return of the Terns

    By Ilana DeBare

    The cement stretched for acres around us, cracked and neglected, weeds springing up every few feet through the cracks. It reminded me of a scene from some post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, or from Alan Weisman’s fascinating book The World Without Us, in which he extrapolates what would happen to the planet if humans were to suddenly vanish.

    NOT your stereotypical wildlife refuge / Photo by Ilana DeBare

    But it wasn’t anything quite so dramatic. We were crossing an abandoned runway at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.

    And we were riding in, of all things, an old-fashioned yellow school bus – on the annual Return of the Terns tour.

    Each June, the East Bay Regional Park District joins with other groups including Golden Gate Bird Alliance to host bus tours of the breeding colony of endangered California Least Terns at the old Alameda naval air station.

    The area is normally closed to the public to prevent disruption of the tern nests. But on Saturday, we were able to drive within yards of the tern colony, provided we didn’t get off the bus or make loud noises.

    This may be one of the most unusual birding sites in the world. Forget images of birding in leafy groves or reedy marshes.  Least Terns traditionally nest on flat strips of sand or gravel — wide-open surfaces that seem frighteningly vulnerable but give them a good view of potential predators.

    Decades ago, the terns apparently decided that the airstrip’s tarmac would be a good substitute for their vanishing beaches. They started returning and nesting here each spring despite the constant takeoffs and landings.

    These were California Least Terns — the West Coast subspecies of the smallest kind of tern, which were placed on federal and state endangered species lists in 1970. So the fact that they were trying to breed here was a big deal.   Over the past 30 years, volunteers with Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge — a committee of Golden Gate Bird Alliance — have worked with East Bay Regional Parks, the Navy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to nurture and protect the colony. (GGBA is still pushing to get the nesting area declared an official wildlife refuge.)

    Tern on nest (behind wire fence) near marker for monitoring nests. The terns return to the Bay Area each April to breed, then fly south in July or August.…

  • Bushtits in the acacias

    By Dan Murphy

    A few years ago I noticed an unfamiliar species of acacia at North Lake in Golden Gate Park.  Acacia is one of those woody plants between a shrub and a tree.  It has little needle-like leaves and yellow flowers.  What actually caught my eye about it was that fall-migrating insectivores were using it.

    That’s pretty odd for acacias, which are usually shunned by most local birds. About a year later, I observed that it was growing and spreading rapidly.  I asked the gardener about it and she referred me to her foreman.  He said it was part of the Recreation and Park Department’s plant palate for Golden Gate Park.  I thought that was pretty odd, but not a battle I wanted to start.

    More recently, my wife Joan and I were birding at North Lake at the end of May when we spotted a lot of activity at the top of one of those acacias. I checked and spotted a Bushtit at its nest.  Suddenly there was a second Bushtit and then more! The baby birds were exploding from the dirty-sock-like nest.

    Bushtit nest in an acacia / Photo by Dan Murphy

    The adults returned several times to move more chicks into the world.  There was a buzz of activity around the nest until the last of the chicks made it out and the flock moved off.  In all, we counted nine birds, but surely there were more.  One weak flier landed in bushes where we didn’t see it emerge.  I wonder now if it made it.

    So here’s a problem.  We have a relatively newly-introduced tree to which birds have almost immediately adapted.  It grows with little water and is evergreen.  Who could ask for more?

    I guess I could.

    The problem is that this tree is spreading faster than anything I’ve ever seen.  It crowds out other ornamentals.  It’s dense, so it shades out plants that might form an understory.  Remember, there is little native in Golden Gate Park, so I don’t really have a frame of reference for how this plant would act in a native habitat, but among the mostly exotic plants at the Chain-of-Lakes it is an example of a virulent and invasive plant that is just overwhelming everything.

    North end of North Lake in Golden Gate Park, crowded with acacias / Photo by Dan Murphy

    It’s one of those species that — even though it appears to benefit some birds — really should be removed before it expands to the rest of Golden Gate Park and beyond.…