• The Secret Lives of Turkeys

    By Alan Krakauer

    Editor’s Note: Alan is a biologist living in Richmond. He is broadly interested in evolution, ecology, and natural history. Most of his research has focused on the behavioral ecology of birds. To learn more about Alan’s life and work, you can go to his WEBSITE. Alan also has a Nature PHOTOGRAPHY WEBSITE, complete with his lovely photographs. Through the end of December he is offering 10% off purchases to friends of GGBA at his online store and donating 5% of his sales to GGBA during this period.

    Everyone thinks of November as Turkey Time, but if you are a wild turkey (or turkey watcher), spring is when much of the action happens. Males are still gobbling for attention and fanning their tails to woo females. Meanwhile, hens that have already nested are cautiously chaperoning their broods of adorable fluffy poults. Spring provides a glimpse into the secret social lives of Meleagris gallopavo. In reality, although turkeys are often considered avian simpletons, they actually sport one of the most complex societies of all birds!

    Wild turkeys, El Cerrito by Alan Krakauer

    PART 1: Mating System: How males and females are organized

    Let’s start with the dating life of a wild turkey. Turkeys are an odd bird in the spring. The vast majority of bird species grow up in some variation of a nuclear family– a mother and a father tending a nest and raising their offspring together. Raising hungry kids is hard and fraught with danger, so dual-parenting usually makes sense as a strategy to ensure those chicks survive and get out of the nest as quickly as possible.

    Not so with turkeys. The hen can incubate on her own and the poults can feed themselves once they hatch. Over the period of a day or so, they hatch and leave the nest site for good. Male turkeys have one job (standing in the street blocking traffic is more of a hobby, ha!), and that’s to mate with hens. As far as we know they aren’t aware of where the nests are located and don’t hang out with the moms before or after the poults leave the nest.

    Especially in areas with lots of turkeys, the ways that males and females get together for courtship can be a complex affair. Their mating system is a unique blend of several breeding strategies and hard to put under one specific label.…

  • Why I’m Partnering with GGBA

    By Alan Krakauer of Alan Krakauer Photography

     

    When I launched Alan Krakauer Photography in 2018, I wanted to channel my passion for birds into advocacy for nature and open space. I didn’t start with any special plan for how this would happen. It was a happy feature of my fledgling business that I found myself with opportunities to educate and excite people about the natural world. My prints, greeting cards, and calendars provided focal points for sharing stories about treasured animal encounters, favorite local trails, and unforgettable trips.

     

    Alan Krakauer and Lauri La Pointe at the Kensington Farmers Market. Photo Credit: G. Kitamata

    At some point this year, as our “new normal” grew ever more alarming, the enormity of our societal challenges hit me. Simply talking to people while on a trail or at my market booth didn’t seem sufficient– it was time to do more. I made the decision to formalize my support for groups that were doing the good work of making our world a better place. My first philanthropic target was The Innocence Project, a non-profit working to overturn wrongful convictions and implement criminal justice reform.

    The second? Golden Gate Bird Alliance.

    Why did I select GGBA out of all the options out there? The answer is simple­ – I believe strongly in this organization and its mission. Over many years as a member I’ve gotten to see first-hand how GGBA makes the Bay Area a better place.

    Godwits against the grain by Alan Krakauer

    My introduction to Golden Gate Bird Alliance may sound familiar. Like hundreds of you, I have spent many mid-December Sundays participating in the long-running Oakland Christmas Bird Count. As I became more familiar with GGBA, I sought out deeper connections including a season as a Meeker Slough Bay Trail docent and sharing the story of my photography passion with Clay Anderson’s Nature Journaling class. Most recently, I’ve contributed pieces for GGBA’s blog and The Gull.

    The list of ways in which GGBA touches the lives of birds and people in the Bay Area is longer than a curlew’s beak! Birding and education resources on the website. Volunteer clean-up and habitat restoration projects. Advocacy for bird-related issues like the Oakland night-herons and bird-safe buildings. Youth education programs. Field trips. The list goes on.

    Close encounter with a Red-tailed Hawk by Alan Krakauer

    With the lack of in-person events this year, Golden Gate Bird Alliance has had to get creative with their fundraising to keep all of these amazing programs strong.…

  • Celebrating Clay Anderson, one of Bay Nature’s 2021 Local Heroes

    By Melissa Ramos, Communications Manager

     

    We at GGBA are pleased to announce that our own Clay Anderson (Youth Programs Manager and the head of our award winning Eco-Education program) is being celebrated as one of Bay Nature’s 2021 Local Heroes! Today, Clay was named Bay Nature’s 2021 Environmental Educator. His lifetime of service in environmental conservation and environmental education is both impressive and deeply important for many reasons. Clay’s work positively impacts the lucky kids who learn from him in GGBA’s Eco-Education programs. He inspires youth of color to pursue eventual careers in environmental conservation and to take on the vital work of environmental stewardship. He also positively impacts those who take his classes at the Rotary Nature Center, go on bird walks with him, hang out with him… and those of us who are fortunate enough to work with him on a daily basis, like I am.

    Portrait of Clay by Bay Nature Magazine.

    Clay’s existence in environmental conservation spaces is very important. He is one of the few people of color who has made a name for himself in environmental circles. He is a rarity among birders and naturalists alike. The fact that he is self taught is also incredibly meaningful; his existence brings to us a story of tenacity and passion and endless drive to learn more about and connect with the natural world. We can all learn a lot from Clay.

    He is also a professional artist who became a naturalist and birder as a child, although he didn’t get his first pair of binoculars until graduating from high school. Clay worked his way through San Jose City College, then transferred to San Jose State University, graduating with a B.A. in Drawing and Painting.

    Westy, the Western Bluebird. One of Clay’s most recent creations for Linda Carloni, a GGBA board member and former board president. Photo by Anna Carloni.

    He joined GGBA in 2017. He previously worked with a number of environmental education organizations, including California State Parks and Recreation, East Bay Regional Park District, and The Oakland Museum.

    Over the summer, we featured Clay’s biography in our quarterly Gull magazine. Eric Schroeder, GGBA’s current board president, wrote a wonderful piece about Clay’s life and love of the outdoors. You can read Eric’s piece by clicking here.

    Clay has worked with Bay Nature, too—check out his article on where shorebirds sleep at night here.…

  • Spring on the Summit

    By Liam O’Brien

     

    “Mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.” – E.O. Wilson, Biophilia.

     

    I’d like to start this off with a correction for my last blog entry. Celia Ronis correctly pointed out recently that my sentence structure made it sound like Linnaeus gave the Mourning Cloak butterfly it’s other well-known name, the “Camberwell Beauty” He did not. What I was trying to say was that it was Linnaeus who named the butterfly to science. Is it any wonder I received A for content and C for grammar on my papers in high school? Thanks Celia for pointing that out!

    On the way up to Mount Sutro one day in early May, I observed a Black Phoebe – a bird I consider to be the super Pterodactyl of butterfly eaters.

    Trying to bridge the worlds of birders and butterfly enthusiasts here, it might be an appropriate point now to point out the obvious to many: butterflies, though celebrated for their pollinating skills (which is somewhat overrated) ultimately, are bird food. Spiders, lizards, dragonflies, and many other small predators eat butterflies as well when the opportunity presents itself.

    I was in the Presidio once photographing a California Tortoiseshell butterfly and I observed a Black Phoebe through the lens snatch it away for a midday snack. Butterflies have evolved many ways to dodge this fate: mimicry, false heads and colors that help them blend into the background. This day I crossed paths with one of the best examples of this, the Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus).

    Gray Hairstreak by Liam O’Brien

    The Gray Hairstreak is a perfect example of a butterfly with a false head on its backend. There is a real eyeball on the real head and a large fake eyeball/dot on the edge of a large orange spot on the other side. A real set of antennae above its real eye and the threadlike hairs coming off the fake head that represent faux antennae. That’s where the name “Hairstreaks” come from. Many of our Lycaenidae (the family this butterfly belongs to) in San Francisco take it one step further with a motion called “scissoring”- a type of twitching and rubbing of the hind area to draw attention the predator’s attention away from the real head. One sees many butterflies with v-shaped notches out of the wings. These are what we call “bird strikes.”…

  • The Anatomy of a Fundraising Event

    By Daryl Goldman

     

    We’re almost halfway to our goal of $20,000 for GGBA’s second online fundraiser, our Bird Art and Holiday Sale. I hope you will keep shopping and tell your friends about our fundraising sale. The sale has been extended to November 3rd! If you’d like to go directly to our sale, please click here. Thanks for helping raise money for GGBA programs!

    I’d like to share my experience as the lead volunteer on this online event. Maybe my experience will encourage you to volunteer for any future sales that GGBA may have. Or perhaps you could propose your own fundraising event that fits your interests and talents.

    For those of you who want some more excitement in life because of pandemic-related restrictions, I recommend working on a project like this. Thanks to your collective support we sold $5,700 of art on the first day of our sale! That was so very exciting. It was like seeing your first Pileated Woodpecker or being the first to spot a rare bird. Well, maybe more like going on a GGBA birding trip to Chile and being surrounded by colorful birds you have never seen.

    But I’m getting ahead of myself.

    July and August were an especially fun part of this fundraiser because that is when I started the search for the artists and formed our working relationships. Over 90% of the artists I contacted responded right away, and with enthusiasm. It was great to get to know them and learn about their work.

    During this first step of the fundraising process, I followed up on a couple of recommendations I got for artists who were featured in GGBA’s first online fundraiser, our May 2020 Bird Art Auction. I was able to get in touch with artists from the May auction who said that they would be interested in participating in future events with GGBA and who had items in a certain price range. After that, I searched the internet for more artists, using every combination of words that I could think of that had to do with “birds” and “art.” I followed trails from Instagram pages, Etsy, art festivals, and galleries. I probably spent way too much time doing this, but it was fun and a great escape from the reality of the pandemic and the escalating insanity of politics. When I wasn’t searching for art, I was writing postcards for Reclaim Our Vote, so my days felt structured and meaningful.…