• Refuge Takes Flight

    By Mark Lipman

    Editor’s Note: We are happy to offer GGBA members the opportunity to watch Refuge, a beautiful new film portrait of a wildlife refuge in California’s Central Valley that was recorded over the past three winters by director Mark Lipman. Mark has kindly extended free viewing for GGBA members through October 4th. This blog piece details Mark’s development of the project. Links to the film are included in Mark’s bio.

    It’s been really gratifying to offer my new film, Refuge, to GGBA members during the month of September and to see that so many of you have watched it! The filming and sound recording have been a labor of love over many winters and slowly evolved into this dawn-to-dusk portrait of the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area in Gridley.


    Ironically, I didn’t set out to make a film. I had been making social issue documentaries for many years when a friend introduced me to Gray Lodge in 2011. I wasn’t a birder at the time, but the beauty of the place and the symphony of bird sounds touched me very deeply. On subsequent visits I did a bit of filming and some of that early footage made its way into States of Grace, a documentary I was making with my wife, Helen Cohen, about a friend’s recovery process after narrowly surviving a head-on crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. The bird imagery became a reflective respite in the film and a metaphor for freedom and mobility.

    We were consumed with the distribution of States of Grace for several years after its release in 2014 and it’s only in retrospect that that I can see the germination of Refuge during that time. In late 2015 I visited the Fort Mason Center for the Arts to see its exhibition of Janet Cardiff’s sound installation, The Forty-Part Motet. It’s a magnificent recording of a 16th-century motet in which each of the 40 singers is miked separately and each voice is played back through one of 40 speakers that are arranged in a large oval. You can stand in the center and be engulfed by the entire chorus or go up to a speaker to hear an individual who is singing.

    This picture doesn’t show it, but when I was there people were so moved by the piece that many had tears in their eyes and couples were holding each other closely.…

  • Another Strong Year for Snowy Plovers at Ocean Beach and Crissy Field, As a New Overwintering Season Begins

    By the Snowy Plover Monitors at National Park Service

    Western snowy plovers are back on Golden Gate National Recreation Area beaches! They weren’t gone for very long. These small, federally threatened shorebirds leave Golden Gate to breed each spring, and return each fall to spend the winter feasting on beach invertebrates. Between the early and late breeders coming and going, June is often the only month plovers are absent.

    Average snowy plover counts rose to a new high at Crissy Field this past winter. Monitors recorded about eight plovers per survey, roughly double the 2006-2019 average! Photo by NPS / Katie Smith

    This year, despite some COVID-19 disruptions, the snowy plover monitoring team was mostly able to continue keeping track of the Golden Gate’s plover population. They counted the last overwintering birds on April 29, and the first new arrivals on July 7th. A preliminary look at their data from the last year reveals an overwintering population that was above average at Ocean Beach, and larger than ever at Crissy Field.

    After decades as a US Army airfield, a massive, collaborative, restoration effort led to Crissy Field opening as park land in 2001. In 2006, a handful of western snowy plovers took notice and began overwintering among the restored dunes. However, counts remained in the single digits. Monitors would record three to four plovers per winter survey, and occasionally spot eight or nine birds on the beach at one time. In 2018-2019, the team counted a new high of 11 plovers on the beach at once. This past year, that maximum count was up to 12. Average winter counts rose to a new high as well. Monitors recorded about eight plovers per survey, roughly double the 2006-2019 average!

    Snowy Plover by Jerry Ting

    The Ocean Beach plover population is much older, and biologists have monitored it since 1994. Over the last 26 years, they have counted an average of 30 plovers per winter survey. This past season, the monitoring team counted around 49 plovers per survey. In addition, the maximum number of plovers they counted on the beach during a single survey (96) was the second-highest max count on record. It is the sixth winter in a row that counts have been above average on Ocean Beach

    Snowy Plover by Eric SF

    One continuing threat to snowy plovers’ recent success is people and unleashed dogs disturbing them inOcean Beach and Crissy Field Wildlife Protection Areas.…

  • The Butterflies of Mount Sutro

    By Liam O’Brien

    When I surveyed all the butterflies of San Francisco County in 2007 (and again in 2009) Mount Sutro was not one of my ten transect sites. I dismissed it as a horrifying example of “Sutro’s Gift” of eucalyptus from the early 1900s – a monocultural wasteland.  I knew of Craig Dawson’s work and all that the Sutro Stewards had done. How an amazing oasis had been created at the summit. But part of this dismissal was the knowledge that few butterflies would probably make this journey through the trees; so few are reported to penetrate a forest (at least a eucalyptus forest).  I didn’t even think it was worth the arduous trek to look for anything.

    Lucky for me an offer came around last January from Noreen Weeden, GGBA’s former Volunteer Services Manager. Would I be interested in a year-long, thorough inventory of the butterflies of Mount Sutro?  I’d worked for Noreen and GGBA in a similar gig out at Pier 94 a few years back. The thought intrigued me. I flipped my dismissive hypothesis on its head and asked, “Just what butterflies do use Mount Sutro?” I said yes and had my first visit in late January.

    Well, it doesn’t get any better than starting off a project like this with a Mourning Cloak.

    Mourning Cloak by Liam O’Brien

    One of our most unique and beautiful (personally subjective call) butterflies, Nymphalis antiopa was basking in the morning light on a post. A true “harbinger of Spring,” over-wintering adults (the flying phase) emerge in late January from cracks and crevices they’d been sleeping in since the prior fall. Named by Linneaus after a small town in England, this butterfly throughout Europe is called the “Camberwell Beauty.” Mourning Cloaks were thought to have multiple generations (a couple of flights per season) but it turns out that there is only one generation with individuals living up to nine months! This makes it the longest-living species in North America each year. The primary thrill for me was I don’t get to see this creature very often in San Francisco. The chocolate brown field (the overall background color of the wings) with white bordered fringe is usually seen along riparian corridors and streams where its primary host plant (the plant or family of plants she lays her eggs on) willow (Salix sp.) is found in great abundance. Another cool factoid on the Cloak: if one sees the white border on this creature full and complete it’s a guarantee that it is a freshly enclosed (or just emerged from chrysalis or pupa) individual.…

  • Auk the Vote! Together, We Can Get Out The Environmental Vote

    By Laura Cremin and David Robinson

     

    America’s birding community has always advocated for conservation policies. Low voter turnout, however, is a huge roadblock to success. Although Americans prioritize environmental policies and climate action more than ever before, many simply do not vote. For instance, over 15 million identifiable environmentalists did not vote in the 2018 midterms. This failure to make our voices heard at the ballot box has tremendous implications for the future survival of birds, their habitat, and the communities — natural and human — we love.

    That’s why we formed Auk the Vote!, an entirely grassroots campaign to educate and mobilize birders to join volunteer Get Out The Vote efforts. The birders come from all over the U.S. (and beyond!), united in our love for birds and our understanding that we’re rapidly approaching a point of no return for fighting climate change, protecting endangered species, and conserving rapidly vanishing wildlife habitat.

    As widely reported last year, the Western Hemisphere has lost almost a quarter of its avian population over the past 50 years — a loss of 3 billion birds! And now, with climate change accelerating at an alarming pace, two-thirds of North American birds will be driven much closer to extinction — and many pushed over the edge, lost forever — if we don’t do all we can to keep our planet from heating up more than a couple of degrees.

    Birders, bird and wildlife organizations, conservation organizations, and environmental-justice organizations are working on numerous fronts to confront the challenges we’re facing. We need leaders who will support and strengthen such work. Unfortunately, as we document in our Bird’s Eye View of the 2020 Elections, foundational environmental policies, critical for long-term planning, are at risk — and in some cases (such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act) under outright attack.

    Great Auk painting from Birds of America by John James Audubon

    But all hope is not lost — far from it! A unique confluence of events has pushed birdwatching to the forefront of our national consciousness. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of Americans to stay home or close to home for weeks and months, birdwatching has spread far beyond the self-identified birding community. People who never paid much attention to birds are now discovering their beauty and fascination, which can connect us to nature almost anywhere — in the countryside, of course, but also in the parks and on the streets of every town and city in our country.…

  • Photographing on the Median

    By Gerry Traucht

     

    Editor’s Note: Gerry offers us glimpses of what he sees at and near his home. This unique collection embodies the qualities of the Japanese poetic form, Zuihitsu. Zuihitsu is genre of Japanese literature (since adapted by many Western writers) consisting of loosely connected personal essays or fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author’s surroundings. Photos taken by Gerry. 

     

     

    There was a Great Blue Heron on the University Avenue median near Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley.

     

    This Great Blue Heron was patient and focused.

    West of the freeway, University Avenue changes into a rough wavy road, not easy to ignore. It has a median. The median and roadsides are good places to see and photograph large birds before ever arriving at Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park.

     

    The Great Blue Heron shows the dynamics of this strip of land. Cars pass near him, but he is focused on something else. He’s patient. As he waits, cars disappear, leaving a large iconic bird in nature.

    The Turkey Vulture is perched high on a street lamp on the median. Sometimes there is a Red-tailed Hawk in his place.

    A few days before these photographs, I saw a Great Egret on the median. I could barely find a place fast enough to pull over on this busy, bumpy road with few good places to park.

     

    Turkeys are also many places in Berkeley, slowing us all down, making us pause, making us look and make contact.

    On the median, Turkeys go a step further.

     

    They chide. The females gobble at vehicles traveling too fast and too loud. They do more of the same with construction workers and their machinery.

     

     

    Here is the male Turkey as he crosses the road to the median. He goes into full display. He deliberately drags his skirt feathers on the pavement, the unnerving sound announcing his presence.

    And here is a video of Turkeys on the roadside near the median.

    https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/7_video-Turkeys_Median.m4v

     

     

    About Gerry: Gerry Traucht is a Berkeley photographer. More of his work can be seen here and in his blogs.

    If you have a blog or story you’d like to share with us, please email our Communications Manager, Melissa, at mramos@goldengatebirdalliance.org.…