• Ear Birding with LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

    By Helen Doyle, Jeanette Pettibone, and Daniel Scali

    Dan interrupted us halfway around our introductory circle. “Did you hear that?” Several people had heard the bird chipping nearby. For those who didn’t, Dan tried to orient the group: “Off to the left, a little in front of me.” We remained quiet, listening for the chip notes. Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s (GGBA)s first birding field trip with Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, an organization that “promotes independence, community, and equity created by and with blind and low vision people,” took place on October 25, 2024 during Birdability Week. It all started with listening.

    A group of eight people and one dag talking in a circle outside.Trip leaders Dan Scali (left) and Jeanette Pettibone (right) with new birders from LightHouse. Photo @ Helen Doyle

    Listening can be a challenge at Salesforce Park, an urban rooftop park located in the busy SOMA neighborhood of downtown San Francisco. Although it’s four stories above the street, the sound of trucks, buses, and sirens below forced us to concentrate in order to block out background noise. Despite the noise, trip leaders Dan Scali and Jeanette Pettibone chose this birding hotspot for its central location, accessibility, and ability to bring in other sensory experiences. The flat, wide, paved path that loops the park is bordered by a waist-high railing with a wealth of plants native to California and other Mediterranean climates within reach. This offered opportunities for the participants to feel, smell, and for some, see, the leaves and flowers of the plants hosting birds.

    A group of eight people, some with white canes. on a pathway in a park.The group explores plants as well as birds at Salesforce Park. .
    Photo @ Helen Doyle

    We identified 11 bird species, mostly by ear. The chip notes of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, the chattering of White-crowned Sparrows in a bush four feet in front of us, the electric buzz of Anna’s Hummingbirds flying overhead, the typewriter-like sounds of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. As much as the sounds themselves gave a clue to the bird’s identity, so did the location. The sparrows stayed in the bushes or foraged for food on the grassy lawn. The Black Phoebe flew quickly over the lawn from its perch and back, catching flying insects in midair. The warblers stayed higher in the trees. For each bird, Dan and Jeanette described the sounds, location, behavior and appearance, including color, patterns, and size. Markings like crowns, eyebrows (on birds, called supercilia), eye-lines, and moustaches relate to the human face.…

  • The Man-Made Mess of Meeker Slough

    By Ryan Nakano and Jeni Schmedding

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    Ridgway’s Rail / Rachel Lawrence

    As the sky awakens at Meeker Slough, a beautiful array of colors backdrop the channeled saltwater marsh. The morning calls and the elusive and endangered Ridgway’s Rail respond with a round of applause, “Kek kek kek kek” as if to acknowledge each new dawn as nothing short of a miracle.

    And in many ways it is a miracle for these olive-brown and cinnamon-colored hen-sized birds, skulking and skittering about, probing the mudflats with their lean orange beaks.

    “Right here, where the bay meets the land and these tidal wetlands occur, that’s where the Ridgway’s Rails live and thrive,” wildlife biologist and Ridgways Rail Monitoring Manager Jen McBroom said. “Unfortunately, we’ve lost 85% of our tidal wetlands in the bay since we started developing these shoreline habitats.”

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    Ridgway’s Rail at Meeker Slough / Alan Krakauer

    McBroom, who’s been officially monitoring the Ridgway’s Rail population with Olofson Environmental Inc. for the past decade, detected 17 rails in total with her team during this year’s most recent survey, making Meeker Slough and neighboring Stege Marsh, one of the densest Ridgways Rail habitat in the Bay Area. 

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    Map of Ridgway’s Rail observations in 2023 California Ridgway’s Rail Surveys for the San Francisco Estuary Invasive Spartina Project by Olofsen Environmental Inc. .kb-image66786_a2f696-11.kb-image-is-ratio-size, .kb-image66786_a2f696-11 .kb-image-is-ratio-size{max-width:668px;width:100%;}.wp-block-kadence-column .kt-inside-inner-col .kb-image66786_a2f696-11.kb-image-is-ratio-size, .wp-block-kadence-column .kt-inside-inner-col .kb-image66786_a2f696-11 .kb-image-is-ratio-size{align-self:unset;}.kb-image66786_a2f696-11{max-width:668px;}.image-is-svg.kb-image66786_a2f696-11{-webkit-flex:0 1 100%;flex:0 1 100%;}.image-is-svg.kb-image66786_a2f696-11 img{width:100%;}.kb-image66786_a2f696-11 .kb-image-has-overlay:after{opacity:0.3;}
    Map from UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station

    For this reason, among many others, Meeker Slough on the southend of the Richmond shoreline, is a critically important place to protect, a place full of promise, full of hope, and unfortunately, full of trash. 

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    Ridgway’s Rail in tire at Meeker Slough / Rick Lewis
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    Shopping carts and other debris in Meeker Slough / Jeni Schmedding

    Among the rails, ducks, herons, and other wildlife, and below steady streams of cyclists, joggers, and dog walkers on the SF Bay trail, sit large truck tires, half-submerged shopping carts, and all matter of junk in the mudflats past the slough’s perimeter fence. …

  • The Vanishing Chorus: A Reflection on North American Birds in Decline

    by Kenneth Hillan

    Wilson’s Warbler, Roys Redwoods Preserve, Spring 2025 – Kenneth Hillan

    In the bustling and growing town of Paisley, Scotland—the place of my birth—a young Alexander Wilson once wandered the woodlands, unaware that his journey would lead him across the ocean to North America. From his letters home, what he encountered in the New World was beyond anything he had known or imagined: skies teeming with birds, forests alive with song, rivers echoing with nature’s pulse. Two centuries later, I reflect on Wilson’s experience—and the troubling question: what remains of that magnificent abundance today?

    On May 1, 2025, a landmark study, published in Science, revealed a sobering truth1. Of 495 North American breeding bird species, fully three-quarters have declined significantly in some part of their range over the past 15 years. The research, led by Alison Johnston and a team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is based on an analysis of nearly 37 million eBird checklists submitted by observers between 2007-2021. The conclusions from the research, grounded in rigorous data analysis combined with national as well as local habitats, paint a portrait of a continent in quiet crisis. A summary of key findings and takeaways from their publication can be found in a one page summary here.

    Curiously, the decline is not always where one might expect. Some species appear to thrive in fragmented habitats—perhaps a mall here, a restored marsh there—offering the illusion of recovery. But these modest gains, while welcome, are dwarfed by losses in the vast habitats where these birds are most common, as populations are declining most severely where they are abundant.

    What sets this study apart is its use of fine-scale trend mapping—measuring bird population change in grids of approximately 10 square miles, rather than just looking across broad regions. This higher resolution has revealed a more nuanced picture: while most species are declining, many also show areas of local increase. For conservation groups like GGBA, this represents a powerful shift. It allows us not only to target urgent declines but also to identify and build upon local successes—guiding action where it can be most effective.

    In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley, the study data highlights significant declines in wetland and coastal breeding birds, mirrored by parallel losses in the wintering populations of local species that breed in the North American Arctic.

    Here in California, birds that depend on wetlands for breeding have been among the hardest hit.…

  • My Journey and the Bay Birding Challenge

    Harmony Yu


    I’m Harmony Yu, a 13-year-old girl who loves nature. I have a rabbit named Spot, I go to eighth grade, and I plan on participating in the Bay Birding Challenge this year.

    Ever since I learned to read at age 4, I’ve always preferred nature books. It took me until second grade to read any fiction books at all, and even then, they were books with animals as the main characters, like Pax or the Warriors cats series.

    Over the pandemic, I found that learning over Zoom was not effective at all. For an avid marine biology lover, going for more than two days without being able to see sharks in person was unbearable. I needed another way to learn about them and understand them better, so I decided to learn biology on Khan Academy. After all, if I were to become a biologist like I had hoped, I would need those skills, and I couldn’t wait to start as soon as possible. In my ample free time, I managed to finish high school biology within the school year. Hiking was a luxury back then, since everyone was quaking in their boots at the mention of COVID. Despite having Seek on my phone, there were only so many things I could identify around me, since I didn’t have a camera (yet!). Besides, I had already memorized most of the plants around the house and a few birds. Only my rabbits, Spot and Venus (RIP Venus, she died of pneumonia in June 2023), and feeding peanuts to the wildlife outside, gave me nonhuman animal interactionssomething interesting to interact with.

    After taking an online course about creative writing, another weapon against boredom, I decided to try writing a book myself. My parents promised me to publish it if I could actually do it, not expecting anything beyond a frivolous ramble. Surprising everyone (including myself), my first book, Blizzard in a Rainforest, came out in the summer of 2021, advocating against illegal pet trafficking from the point of view of a Ssnow Lleopard that had gotten cubnapped, shipped off to a rainforest, and left to fend for herself in a completely foreign environment.

    Emboldened by my success, I decided to write Bubble Up in a Kelp Forest the following year, which was about otters’ vital role in marine ecosystems. Having recently been reading up on otters, I figured I needed to write something.…

  • Profile of a Lifelong Birder – Betty Carson (1930 – 2025)

    By Ann Carson

    Many GGBA members got a glimpse into the life of my mother, long-time Bay Area birder Betty Carson, when they attended a book sale of her incredible collection after her passing in early March. With over 5,000 books in her library, on wide-ranging topics including African wildlife, Ancient Egyptian history, tropical ecology, California natural history and much more, her largest area of interest was birds, delighting and amazing the dozens of birders who came to browse. 

    My mother became a naturalist at an early age – shell collecting as a young girl on Southern California’s beaches and observing and recording notes on the birds in her San Fernando Valley backyard as a teenager. She moved north for college and earned a Zoology degree from UC Berkeley in 1951, followed by a Master’s degree in Biology from Oregon State and a second Master’s in Library Science from UC Berkeley. During her graduate years at Cal, she met and married my dad, Pete Carson, and they built a modest mid-century modern house at the top of the Berkeley Hills next to the vast open space of Tilden Regional Park. Pete and Betty raised three kids, all of us inspired by their love of the natural world. Family time for us involved frequent day trips to Marin County and its wild beaches, as well as camping trips in the Sierras. 

    Mom continued to develop her passion for birding and other aspects of natural history throughout her adult life. She was a unique individual, especially for her time. Never interested in fashion, fancy food or trinkets, she prioritized time in nature, travel and books. On weekends when we were little, for example, she sometimes treated herself to solo trips out to Alameda’s south shore, where she enjoyed witnessing the seasonal rhythms of the shorebird community while Dad watched the three of us for the morning. As we got older, she traveled further afield in search of birds and other wildlife, with regular trips to U.S. hotspots like Yosemite National Park, the Texas Gulf Coast, and Florida. She took dozens of international trips as well, logging nine trips to Africa and at least as many to South and Central America.  Each time she traveled, she conducted extensive research to prepare herself for the experience, gradually accumulating an impressive personal library of books that she revisited each time she went back to a particular area.…