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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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Contributing to a Breeding Bird Atlas

By Brandy Deminna Ford

Have you ever really looked at a Mourning Dove—its grayish blue crown, pale rosy breast, and shimmering iridescence punctuated by myriad black spots on the wings? Have you paused to notice the slight differences between a male and female pair or listened to a female’s low cooing call from a nest in a hollowed-out tree branch, continuing until a male approaches to replace her on the nest?
Mourning Doves by Sivaprasad R.L.
Busily birding, we often forget to look up from our species lists to really hear a familiar sound. Or catching a glimpse of a Mourning Dove in our periphery, we might not choose to take a closer look. But contributing to a breeding bird atlas isn’t just birding. It’s the chance to slow down, watch, and listen—and go from aspiring master birder to natural historian hopeful.

This breeding season, I have circled the Phyllis Ellman Loop Trail near Corte Madera a half dozen times, repeatedly walked along the public shore in Marin’s Paradise Cay, and been a rare visitor to the shoreline at Blackie’s Pasture in Tiburon—and I will be doing this for a little over a month more. It all began at the 2020 San Francisco Christmas Bird Count, when Atlas Coordinator Juan Garcia first introduced me to the idea of participating in the Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas.
Ring Mountain, in one of Brandy’s Breeding Bird Atlas survey areas. She saw a Vesper Sparrow there in April and a Rufous-crowned Sparrow in May. / Photo by Brandy Deminna Ford
The main purpose of a breeding bird atlas is to collect data that reflect the geographical distribution of breeding birds in an area. These data provide conservationists and other avian enthusiasts with the information they need to understand how birds interact with the surrounding environment over time and what changes occur to bird populations in specific areas. A bird atlas is much more than a list of species: It typically includes maps and illustrations as well as extensive narrative text.

This isn’t the first time a breeding bird atlas has been conducted in Marin County. During the breeding seasons of 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1982 organizers Bob Stewart and David Shuford assembled a group of dedicated volunteers to conduct the first bird atlas in western North America. After the initial bird atlas was completed in 1982, its findings were published in the Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas: a Distributional and Natural History of Coastal California Birds by David Shuford, a book that remains influential to this day.…

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Chow time for cormorant chicks

Photographer Rick Lewis, a Golden Gate Bird Alliance member, specializes in documenting the avian life near his Alameda home. Over the weekend he had a chance to watch young Double-crested Cormorants being fed by their parents in a nesting tree near a busy shopping center there. Here are two of the eagerly waiting chicks:

Double-crested Cormorants are the most numerous and widespread of our six North American cormorant species, and San Francisco Bay is one of their main nesting areas along the California coast. They lay an average of three or four eggs. The young don’t start flying until they’re five or six weeks old and they become fully independent around 10 weeks. In the meantime, someone needs to fetch them dinner, and it’s not DoorDash.

Adult male and female cormorants are indistinguishable, and they both feed the chicks through regurgitation. They catch and swallow fish until they’re full; then they return to the nest. The nestlings peck at a spot on their throat—the yellow gular pouch—which stimulates them to regurgitate the fish.

“The young Double-crested Cormorants need to coax the adult if they want food,” explained Rick Lewis. “It is only given after the proper ‘buttons’ are pushed repeatedly. Only then will the applicant be given entrance. It is an invasive process.”

Depending on how long it’s been since the fish were swallowed, they may have been digested into a slurry liquid or they may still be whole. Sometimes older nestlings remove an entire fish from the adult’s neck pouch.

The older or more aggressive nestlings get most access to food and have the best chance of surviving to adulthood. “Sometimes the other sibling simply waits its turn, other times it pesters both birds,” Lewis said. “The adults get tired after a while and turn away or move away entirely and take a nap.”

The feeding process can be messy! Ornithologists studying the diet of cormorants use the splattered remains of regurgitated meals to figure out what kinds of fish they’re eating. But bird barf isn’t just for feeding chicks. If threatened, both young and adult cormorants will regurgitate what they’ve eaten as a defense mechanism.

We’re fortunate to have so many Double-crested Cormorants around the Bay because of the environmental movement. The species faced a severe decline from the 1940s through the 1970s because of the pesticide DDT, which accumulated in the fish they ate and caused their eggshells to thin and break.…

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