Behind a Winning Shot

Behind a Winning Shot

By Alan Krakauer

Female Greater Sage-Grouse, winner of the 2022 “Female Bird” category

By now you may have seen the winners of the 2022 Audubon Photography Awards. Given the ever-expanding ranks of excellent bird photographers, I had no expectation of winning anything when I submitted three photos this spring. I had entered a few times in the past, and with the exception of a photo of roosting Marbled Godwits at Arrowhead Marsh that made the Top 100 in 2019, I’d not had any luck. I was just happy my entry fees were going to a great organization. You can imagine my shock when a representative from the National Audubon Society called to tell me my photo of a Greater Greater Sage-Grouse hen took home the “Female Bird” prize!

The story of the shot itself is doubtlessly similar to many other photographs recognized by Audubon through the years. Like most, it’s a variation of ‘photographer gets up early, waits patiently in unpleasant weather for birds to appear, magic happens.’

In my case, the magic happened in central Wyoming. My day started well before sunrise carefully navigating a snow-covered gravel track into sagebrush country. Parking on the shoulder in a remote valley, I switched on my headlamp, hoisted my backpack and thermos of coffee and trudged through several inches of snow. Eventually I reached my destination and my headlamp beam swept across the photography blind that would be my home for the next several hours. The fabric blind was already staked in place so it was just a matter of popping it up (not always easy when the pieces were frozen!), opening a couple of view flaps, and waiting in the pre-dawn chill for the first Greater Sage-Grouse to arrive.

Pop-up blind in Greater Sage-Grouse country. Photo is from a different day and location

In the spring, Greater Sage-Grouse and other prairie grouse congregate on traditional display grounds called leks, a term that is used both for the groups of animals and the spot of land they use. These leks are extremely vulnerable to disturbance – one golden eagle zipping by or person walking up could scare all the birds away for the day and repeated disruptions could cause them to abandon the area completely. What is a photographer to do? Temporary blinds are small fabric tents that can hide wildlife watchers and their gear in view of a lek or other area of interest.…

Least Tern (bird) with yellow beak, black head and grey wings feeds a baby Least Tern chick a small silver fish

How to See Nesting California Least Terns and their Chicks

By Marjorie Powell

California Least Terns (Sternula antillarum browni) can be seen plunge-diving for fish at several East Bay locations in the summer but seeing them nesting is more difficult. Traditionally, Least Terns make scrapes in the sand to lay their two or three eggs, but with beaches full of people and dogs, the terns have found other nest sites. At the Alameda Wildlife Reserve and Hayward Regional Shoreline, large fenced areas protect nesting terns in the Bay Area from mammal predators (feral cats, racoons, etc.) and human disturbance. Devoted birders can serve as monitors for the nesting colonies, alerting US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) when an aerial predator appears (Peregrine Falcons are especially skilled at taking eggs, chicks and sometimes adults), but training for new monitors at the Alameda Reserve has not happened since the start of COVID, and monitoring provides no option for other birders or potential birders.

yellow school bus with people lined up in front waiting to enterPeople board a bus for the trip to the Least Tern colony at Alameda Wildlife Reserve on June 25, 2022 by Rick Lewis

About the only other option to see eggs and chicks is Return of the Terns. A cooperative endeavor between USFWS, which manages the colony at the Alameda Wildlife Reserve for the Department of Veterans Affair, which now holds title to the land, and Crab Cove, part of the East Bay Regional Park District, Return of the Terns is a yearly event where members of the public can learn about the endangered species. Pre-registered participants spend around 30 minutes on a school bus inside the reserve’s outer fence looking over the breeding site fence to watch chicks running and adults holding small fish while searching for their chick. An unadvertised bonus is the view of San Francisco from the northwestern corner of Alameda.

Foggy view of San Francisco cityscape, with sand from the beach in the foreground San Francisco is impressive even in the haze when seen from the northwest corner of the Reserve in Alameda by Rick Lewis

This year’s presentation was outdoors, with pictures projected onto a canopied screen. Susan Euing, the USFWS Wildlife Biologist who manages the colony, gave the first presentation about Least Terns’ life cycles and nesting practices and then lead three bus tours of twenty-five people to the colony. A Crab Cove naturalist gave the latter two presentations while tours were happening. One important take-away from the presentations is that nesting success depends on the presence of small fish and the absence, or at least lesser presence, of a Peregrine Falcon (they also nest in Alameda).…

On Naming Individual Birds

On Naming Individual Birds

By Ryan Nakano

When I bought my first car I named it Lorelai, after Lorelai Gilmore from the show Girlmore Girls. Growing up with beagles, my family had Elsa, and then Buddy. My cat has many names, the primary of which is Eevee, after the Pokemon, although this is disputed by my girlfriend who named our cat after her aunt and did in fact sign the paperwork. The Black Phoebe I see almost every morning at the rose garden is simply Phoebe.

The point is, naming is both fascinating and complicated.

Last week Golden Gate Bird Alliance finished up a naming process for two new Osprey chicks. After receiving 570 responses to a choice of five pairs of potential names, it was decided that the chicks would be known as Brooks and Molate. Prior to this vote, we opened up for name suggestions and received 125 submissions. After participating in the process for submission review, I couldn’t help but think about the act of naming individual wild animals and the thought process behind what names we believe to be appropriate or representative of them.

In an article titled What’s in a Name?—Consequences of Naming Non-Human Animals author Sune Borkfelt addresses the necessity of naming as a communication tool.

“Indeed, it is naming something that enables us to communicate about it in specific terms, whether the object named is human or non-human, animate or inanimate.”

Now, instead of sharing that chick A and chick B are starting to become easier to tell apart, I can say that Molate has a broader dark stripe on the back of their head, while Brooks’ head is lighter in color. But why Brooks and Molate?

Named after two important bird areas local to the Bay Area, Brooks Island and Point Molate, it would appear that these birds now represent a reminder to continue preservation and restoration efforts of our shared natural environment.

Borkfelt goes on to note, “A name is a representation and can therefore potentially carry all the values, ideas, perceptions and conceptions carried by representations and have the array of potential consequences, which can ensue from representation.”

Under this premise, these two new chicks now intentionally or unintentionally become the mascots for local bird habitat and the ongoing efforts to preserve such spaces. (Which, all things considered, doesn’t seem like a bad thing!)

Of course, Brooks Island itself was onced named after something, limited research concludes that it is an eponym to an unknown person from the past.…

How Many Birds Can Be Found in the Bay Area in One Day?

How Many Birds Can Be Found in the Bay Area in One Day?

Originally published on June 15 in Bay Nature

By Lia Keener and Mukta Patil

Birders sometimes have competitions to see who can find the most bird species in a set amount of time. If you want to participate in one of these, a few things to know first: It is frenetic. It is competitive. Forget the leisurely walks through the woods; if you’re serious there isn’t even time for a lunch break.

It is, however, a great time to watch birders watching birds, and to try to understand the appeal of a pursuit that delights and entrances people around the world. So when two teams decided on a 13-hour competition this spring to see which side of the Bay could find the most birds, the debut Golden Gate Bird Alliance Bay Birding Challenge, the two of us tagged along.

The leaders of the two teams, Alex Henry, Rachel Lawrence and Eric Schroeder of GGBA established ground rules in advance: teams could travel anywhere within their two assigned counties (San Francisco and San Mateo for the San Francisco team, and Contra Costa and Alameda for the East Bay team). Birds could be identified by sight or sound, but at least two people from the team had to see or hear them. The birding would begin at 6:14 a.m. exactly, 29 minutes before the sunrise, and end 13 hours later at 7:14 p.m.

1. Beginnings

Six fourteen a.m. rolls around without much fanfare in the mist at Lake Merced. It’s still dark at first light but bird identifications by sound fill the air around me: “ruddy duck,” “mallard,” “white-crowned sparrow.” As the sky lightens, gnats buzz below, and a double-breasted cormorant carrying nesting material flies above. San Francisco faces long odds in the competition – spring is a great time for birding in the East Bay – and the team starts here with the urgency of the underdog. “I don’t expect to win,” says San Francisco team leader Lawrence, “but I just don’t want to be embarrassed.”

After a 4 a.m. wakeup and a 40 minute drive from Berkeley, the East Bay team gathers in the darkness beneath Mount Diablo. It’s cold in Mitchell Canyon compared to Berkeley as the birders, decked out in hats, binoculars, walking sticks, spotting scopes, and hiking boots, materialize out of the darkness of the parking lot. The official start time marks an immediate end to our pre-dawn chatter.…

The Birds and The Beavers

The Birds and The Beavers

By Elizabeth Winstead

I may not be the best birder since I’m not much of a morning person, but recently I woke up at an ungodly hour to drive to Fairfield for the dawn. I thought, “Who is this person who really doesn’t like to be cold, but is so captivated that she forgets she is shivering, and her hands are numb on a wind tunnel of a bridge despite a hat, gloves, and multiple layers, because she is waiting for, of all things, a baby rodent to appear?”

Beaver Dam by Elizabeth Winstead

The dawn slowly lit up the small creek below as I searched the water because I heard there was a beaver kit, and I’m a pushover for baby animals. Suddenly, a Green Heron erupted out of the marshy edges and flew across the creek and over a nearby house. Green Herons have declined by 68% (from 1966 to 2014) and can be elusive to find as they hide in vegetation. Who would’ve thought that you could find a family of beavers in the middle of a city on a human-channeled creek surrounded by houses on both sides, and that the beavers would be able to create enough habitat to attract waterbirds like Green Herons? Happily, I got to watch both an adult beaver and a kit swim in the creek. The kit seemed annoyed by a nearby mama Mallard and her five ducklings and slapped the water with a cute tiny whack.

Beaver Lodge and Great Egret

A love of nature led to a love of birding, which led me to notice a reference to the California Beaver Summit in a Golden Gate Bird Alliance email last year. Worrying about climate change, I was intrigued by their hook—what if one of the solutions to problems like drought and wildfires was simple, affordable, and nature-based? What if it involved an unlikely, plump rodent with buck teeth and a flat tail?

Beaver at dam

The two-day summit of virtual presentations on this keystone species included Dr. Emily Fairfax, who researches how beavers can engineer drought and fire-resistant landscapes, and Dr. Michael Pollack who studies how beavers create slow water habitat that is critical for salmon growth and survival. I was on my way to becoming a beaver believer.

eBIRDing a Local Beaver Creek

Female Red-winged Blackbird

Before the California Beaver Summit, I had never seen a wild beaver, so I got excited when they told me there were some in Fairfield and on the Napa River.…