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Re-nest Success

By Tara McIntire

I had noticed a persistent Anna’s Hummingbird zipping about our yard, collecting web from all the nooks and crannies, which made me wonder if she were building a nest nearby. Sure enough, a few weeks later our neighbor mentioned there was a very agitated bird in their yard with a nest in their lemon tree. Luckily for me, they lived next door and offered access through the side gate whenever I wished!

I grabbed my camera and headed over to check out the situation. I was delighted to find a female Anna’s Hummingbird tucked inside a perfect nest she had built on a lemon leaf. (Note: The males are absent during parenting, taking no part in nest building or rearing of young.)
Female hummingbird on her beautiful nest – Feb 26, 2021
Still working from home at that point, I was eager to fill rare moments between meetings with something other than more work. I readied my camera and identified the best angles and time of day for lighting, while making sure to not disturb the female who was potentially incubating eggs.
Another view of the nest, built on the leaf of a lemon tree
Anna’s Hummingbird egg incubation takes typically around 16 days, so on March 14th I wandered over to see if there were any changes. With mom safely away, something caught my eye through my long lens. One tiny hummingbird was barely peeking out of the nest!
First view of a hummingbird nestling – March 14
This species of hummingbird fledges roughly 20 days after hatching and since I wasn’t looking directly into the nest, I couldn’t tell how far along the nestling was. However, just six days later I spotted not one but TWO birds, and they were nearly bursting out of the stretchy, tiny nest made of lichens and spider web. I imagined the nest felt a bit like my yoga pants after a long Covid winter eating ice cream and comfort food.
Not one but TWO hummingbirds – March 20
Two days later, our neighbor called and said, “A baby bird fell out of nest!’

“I’ll be right over!” I responded, sprinting to the yard. The nestling was sitting on the concrete patio, from which I quickly scooped it up. My adrenaline valve was wide-open at this point and I went into full emergency-response mode. As I filled a bowl with tissues to make a warm temporary nest, I was also carefully inspecting the bird and visually assessing its general condition.…

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Birding by Ear with help from AI

By Margot Bezrutczyk

I’ll probably never know what it was: the bird that sang such complex, liquid song in the thicket of bay laurel that morning on Bolinas Ridge. I tried and failed to come up with a mnemonic, resorting to simile: “It sounds like an Ewok and a robot fighting. It sounds like a computer drowning.” I climbed up some fallen branches hanging off the trail in an attempt to see the bird, but several crows and a wren joined the chorus and began scolding me. I was brand-new to bird identification, armed only with my field guide and binoculars, birding alone during the pandemic, and eventually I simply had to walk away. I found birding in the woods both exhilarating and frustrating, because it was so difficult for a beginner to even know what to listen for.

Then I discovered BirdNET.

BirdNET is a sound ID app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in partnership with Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. I’ve been a bit of an evangelist for BirdNET since I started using it, and I was happy to see that similar artificial-intelligence (AI) technology has recently been integrated into the Merlin app as a “Sound ID” feature.

Both apps are free, and both work by recording spectrograms of the sounds detected by your phone. The spectrogram—a visual representation of audio frequency and signal strength or “loudness”—is processed through a neural network that returns one or more predictions based on both the spectrogram and your location. A sound may represent multiple bird species, which the app can identify simultaneously.

You have the option to share your recordings with Cornell’s Macaulay Library, where they’ll be used to improve the quality of IDs in the future. I usually don’t do this because because many of my recordings end with something like, “…it’s just a f*∆king squirrel, again.”

Shortly after downloading BirdNET, I held up my phone towards the cacophony of an oak woodland one April morning, and finally begin to distinguish signal from noise. The first test: I was able to determine that a certain call I’d been hearing for weeks was the song of a Wrentit, an untrustworthy-looking little grey bird I’d seen in my Sibley book and longed to lay eyes on: It was right here all along!

With an idea of what to look for, it wasn’t long before I was able to spot the Wrentit and learn its song by heart.…

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Two weeks on the Farallones

By Michael Pierson

I recently had the pleasure of spending two weeks volunteering on the Farallon Islands as part of an invasive plant removal team. I work as a naturalist on a local whale watching boat and have spent many weekends circling the islands, wishing I could set foot on this forbidden place. The many books and articles I’ve read had given me an idea of what it would be like, but the reality was so much more than I imagined.
View with nesting gulls from the Farallon Islands by Michael Pierson Marine mammals on the Farallones by Michael Pierson
There’s lots of planning: filling out paperwork, rolling sleeping bags, cleaning the camera lens, and completing food order lists. This last task is no easy feat. Trying to determine how many apples, eggs, or slices of cheese you’ll consume in a week is harder than you would think. There’s limited storage, fresh food can go bad, and it all must travel to the island with you because you can’t just run to the store if you forgot to buy milk.

Flexibility is important because you don’t have a departure date so much as a window. If you’ve done a trip around the islands, you know the weather can be quite mercurial and accessing the islands is dangerous enough in good conditions. Four days before the target departure, we still didn’t know if we would be going. The wind picked up and didn’t seem to be calming any time soon. Finally, forty-eight hours before our anticipated departure, the forecast predicted a break in the wind and e-mails went out: “The trip is a go.”

The departure day started early, with everyone arriving at the dock by 6 a.m. so we could get there and unload the boat before the wind started again. Supplies and gear were loaded and we passed under the Golden Gate for a bumpy ride to the islands. On the boat were the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crew that I was part of and researchers from Point Blue Conservation Science, the non-profit organization that conducts most of the research on the island. Several of the researchers got seasick right away; fortunately, my time working on a boat saved me from the same fate.

I’d traveled this route countless times before, but this felt different. As the islands became visible in the fog and the smell of thousands of pinnipeds and hundreds of thousands of birds began to burn my nostrils, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.…

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Birds for breakfast

By Alan Krakauer
Breakfast cockatoo by Alan Krakauer
The past year of Covid-19 saw folks change how they relate to nature. Like many of you, my wife and I enjoyed a bit of a silver lining by getting reacquainted with our local wildlife. Attendance in nearby parks soared as people sought freedom and relief in the outdoors. When one can’t get outside to scratch this itch, sometimes biophilia can find a strange and creative outlet. For us, it changed how we have breakfast!

I present to you: Fruit Art!

When lockdown began last March, we decided to try eating healthier by making oatmeal every morning. Instead of just throwing some pieces of fruit into the pot, I started decorating the oats to lighten the mood as we grappled with the uncertainty of the pandemic.

Some of the inspiration came from my father-in-law: We’d laughed out loud at the whimsical mandarin, apple, and banana sections he arranged into faces for breakfast. I also channeled my inner Charley Harper to leverage the simple geometric shapes that a piece of fruit can yield in a few quick cuts. As I became more familiar with this organic ephemeral art medium, I took on the challenge to make animal-inspired designs. Naturally this included a lot of birds. Here’s a selection of our bird-related breakfast art from the past 14 months.
Northern Cardinal in the style of Charley Harper, by Alan Krakauer
Some were local species.
Bewick’s Wren for breakfast by Alan Krakauer Wild Turkey for breakfast by Alan Krakauer California Quail by Alan Krakauer Pileated (?) woodpecker by Alan Krakauer
Some were from farther afield.
Prairie chicken or Sharp-tailed Grouse by Alan Krakauer Penguin, definitely in the style of Charley Harper, by Alan Krakauer Ostrich for breakfast by Alan Krakauer
How many ways can you make an owl?
Breakfast Barn Owl by Alan Krakauer Great Horned Owl by Alan Krakauer Another Great Horned Owl by Alan Krakauer Yet another Great Horned Owl by Alan Krakauer
A couple of bonus bowls.
A kiwi, obviously, by Alan Krakauer “Birbs,” unknown species, by Alan Krakauer
Curious about our recipe? We use steel-cut oats and typically add apple (whatever isn’t needed for the design), ground cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Any other extra bits of fruit are chopped and added to the bottom of the bowls before we spoon in the cooked oats. Occasionally we add a splash of milk, but no extra salt, sugar, or butter.…

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Mount Sutro’s Bombardier Butterflies

By Liam O’Brien

They blast by incredibly fast, zipping and zagging every which way. No, I’m not talking about the annual visit of the Blue Angels for Fleet Week. I’m talking about our skipper butterflies. I remember wondering if I’d ever learn them, back when this butterfly mania took hold of me. Years of frustration, mainly because they all look so damn similar and don’t sit still long enough for a novice to study them. But then one day the clouds parted and I’d cracked their code.

Once thought of as halfway between butterflies and moths, skippers are impish, entertaining, and maddening, all at once. (How’s that for anthropomorphism?) Now that summer has officially arrived on Mount Sutro, I’m dedicating this blog post to the three most common ones at the summit and in our fair city.

We have a total of six skipper species scampering about San Francisco County. (Bet you didn’t know that.) They are the Fiery (Hylephila phyleus), the Umber (Poanes melane) and the Common Checkered (Pyrgus communis). Less common are the seasonal Sandhill (Polites sabuleti), the Woodland (Ochlodes sylvanoides) and the Rural—a population that I discovered breeding out on Yerba Buena Island in 2009.

Sandhill Skipper butterfly by Liam O’Brien

Woodland Skipper butterfly by Liam O’Brien

Skippers are a family of the order Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) named the Hesperiidae. Being diurnal (day-flying), they are generally called butterflies. They were previously placed in a separate superfamily, Hesperiodea; however, most recent taxonomy places them in the superfamily Papilionoidea, the superfamily of butterflies, which taxonomically supports their description as butterflies. Did you get all of that?

The “skipper” name comes from their quick, darting flight habits. Most have antenna tips that are modified into narrow, hook-like projections. Moreover, skippers mostly lack the wing-coupling structure typical of moths. More than 3,500 species of skippers are recognized worldwide, with the greatest diversity in the neotropical regions of Central and South America.

Remember when you a kid and those little golden guys would blast about the family lawn? That was, and still is, the Fiery Skipper. I was somewhat surprised to see one up on Mount Sutro last season because one would not really consider it habitat. In San Francisco, it’s much more common on the Great Lawn. But there it was in August 2020, completing a trifecta of the ones we see the most in the city.…

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