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How Birdwatching Helped Ease My Anxiety

By Emily Busse

Editor’s Note: This blog originally appeared in The Bold Italic and can be found here.

What I thought was a “grandmas-only” hobby has done more for my Sunday Scaries than anything else.

An old frenemy came back into my life this past year: anxiety disorder. I finally admitted to myself that this particular flare-up wasn’t going to just go away when my dentist said my gums were receding “due to stress-induced grinding.” If your dentist can guess your mental health, it’s time to get proactive.

I started looking for an in-network therapist (still working on that one five months later), and in the meantime, tried a slew of other self-treatments. I upped my workouts, paid $8 a month for a meditation app, and pulled out the adult coloring book I spent way too much on and never used. But the activity that’s done more for my worst weekend dread than anything else was something I never saw coming: birdwatching.

Photo by the author.

Birdwatching (or “birding” if you’re cool) is about observing birds in the wild. It started for me three months ago when my dad and stepmom gave me a pair of binoculars for my 28th birthday. They knew I liked hiking and camping, and figured I’d enjoy learning more about the wildlife around me. The first thing I did was watch a neighbor four houses away eat a banana through their kitchen window.

The second thing I did was find the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Western Region my parents gifted me two years before (they clearly had a vision for me). I hadn’t used the book yet, in part because I associated birdwatching only with my grandparents who had binoculars and a guidebook handy by the back porch. Or with my dad, who will spend 45 minutes Googling facts about an Anna’s Hummingbird after seeing one from the window. But now that my own birding tools were staring at me from my dresser, I thought I should at least give it a try. Maybe Grandpa was onto something.

The following weekend I schlepped up to Tilden Regional Park and gave it my first go. I didn’t see many birds, and I felt a little creepy using binoculars within view of a playground. But once I got far enough from other people and tweaked the binoculars just right, a whole new world opened up.…

GGBA teams up with the Feminist Bird Club at Land’s End

By Alex Smolyanskaya

“Why feminist?” is a question I’ve been getting a lot lately. I’ll answer by starting at the beginning. The Feminist Bird Club has its origins in New York City, where Molly Adams founded the club in 2016 in response to a violent crime near Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where she often birded alone, and as a do-something reaction to the new political climate. The group has been birding together and fundraising together ever since. Proceeds from the highly-coveted patch go toward social justice causes such as Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter.

The 2019 Feminist Bird Club Patch. $6,500 in proceeds were donated on July 4th to Pueblo Sin Fronteras and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.

The equity-driven mission, inclusive birding community, and activism attracts a young audience, largely of beginners, many of whom identify as members of marginalized groups. In the “Birds of North America” video series, brothers Jason and Jeffrey Ward, who are black, marvel at how “rare [it is] to find someone who shares the same beliefs and hobbies at the same time”. The New York Times wrote about FBC in its Style section. New chapters began to spring up from Boston to Seattle, even reaching the Netherlands.

When I was pondering where I would lead my first bird walk, a requirement for the Master Birder class in which I’m currently enrolled, I thought first about the Feminist Bird Club. I knew I wanted to do what FBC chapters were doing: appeal to a broad urban audience and go to a place easily accessible by public transit, nudge the start time a bit later in the day, and advertise among urban outdoorsy groups. I floated the idea of starting a Bay Area chapter to Molly, birder friends, and people I had never met. The response was overwhelming. People wanted community, they wanted to be activists, and most of all they wanted to be outside appreciating birds.

Participants in the San Francisco Bay Chapter’s Pride Bird Walk gather in front of the day’s leader, Sarah Burton.

Four of those like-minded birders joined me to launch the Bay Area chapter of the Feminist Bird Club. Our inaugural walk was held at Corona Heights Park during SF Pride Weekend, from 9 am to 11 am; late enough to sleep off Friday night, early enough to take off in time for the Dyke March. Almost forty people came to bird, learn about each other, and spark a new community.…

Waves of Warblers

By Marjorie Powell

My husband Joe and I spent 5 days in May visiting friends who have retired to the north shore of Lake Huron, a last-minute trip planned because of a family birthday party in Illinois – once you plan to fly to Chicago, it makes sense to expand the trip to see friends in Michigan. Mary and I went to college together and we’ve kept in touch over the years. Her husband Keith is a fly-fishing enthusiast, but also enjoys watching birds wherever they travel or live. I gave no thought to the time of year, but knew that Keith enjoyed both local and migrating birds, and had a friend, Paul Rossi, who specialized in photographing the birds, especially the warblers, that breed in or migrate through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As a treat for me, Keith had arranged a morning trip with Paul. Keith and Mary had given me a copy of his coffee-table book, Beautiful Birds of Michigan’s Eastern Upper Peninsula, so I had seen his stunning pictures of many of the birds that spend time in this part of Michigan.

Magnolia Warbler by Paul Rossi

The first morning of our visit, we watched Common Mergansers swim and feed in the waters in front of their house and hummingbirds feed, rest, and feed again as soon as Keith filled the feeder. We also walked up their driveway searching for the birds we could hear in the trees. Keith identified a few of the birds by their calls, a feat which always intrigues me, because my hearing and memory for sounds are not as well developed. Some year I will gather my courage and sign up for Denise White’s “Birding by Ear” class.

I was looking forward to the morning trip as it had rained each of the first few days we were there. Friday morning was wet and overcast, but no rain as we set out. While Paul is the expert photographer, I took my camera in the hope that I might get a few pictures, although with warblers I was not optimistic – I’m much better with larger shorebirds that stand still.

Photo by Marjorie Powell

During the early weeks of migration, Paul uses a speaker to play bird calls to attract migrants; the trees were full of birds hiding, resting after their flight across Lake Huron, and feeding in preparation for their travel further north to breeding locations.…

Takes a Village .. To save a Colony!

Text by Alison Garvin
Photos by Lyla Arum

SC: Did u c Cindy’s post about losing half the post office ficus tree last night?

AG: What!? no?…tree N fell!!???

11-Jul-2019

Su Cox sent me that alarming text on Thursday morning. Not fifteen hours earlier, on Wednesday afternoon, the beautiful lush ficus tree on the corner of 13th and Jackson St, split in half, sending chicks, eggs and incubating parents barreling down to the ground from a distance of up to 40 feet! That any survived is thanks to the quick thinking, bird-loving USPS employees who immediately reached out for help to Golden Gate Bird Alliance (GGBA) and International Bird Rescue (Bird-Rescue). Dozens of injured and orphaned birds were rescued and that very evening, taken to IBR for treatment and rehabilitation.

Why I got involved:

Tree N a few weeks before the collapse

Su and I volunteer with the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO) as well as Golden Gate Bird Alliance (GGBA). For several years we have been monitoring the Downtown Oakland (DTOAK) heron and egret colony; collecting data and rescuing injured birds. That the most productive nesting tree in this colony, known as “Tree N”, had partially collapsed was devastating news. You see, Tree N had hosted generations of birds, supporting over 50-100 nests a season!

That’s why that Thursday morning text changed everything. Our priorities were clear: Su and I, along with former Oakland Zoo zookeeper, Cathy Keyes, rushed over to the DTOAK colony to help rescue the remaining birds.

Thursday: Nest Check and Rescue

The danger of falling limbs onto the sidewalk and roadway left the USPS no option but to dismantle the remaining Tree N colony. Tree N was coming down. The nests, and their inhabitants, had to be removed. Ideally, active nests should never ever be disturbed. But this was an extraordinary event.

The team that formed on Thursday morning was small nimble, creative and committed to the objective at hand: Save the birds!

Bird-Rescue, GGBA, and SFBBO volunteers brought the skills to rescue and secure birds, but access to the birds and nests, high up in the tree, was left to the Davey Tree experts whom had been contracted by USPS employees to remove Tree N.

Davey Tree staff enthusiastically joined in the effort. Using a truck mounted with a hydraulic boom and bucket, a tree specialist outfitted with an animal box, net and handsaw carefully approached each nest looking for chicks and eggs.…

Lessons from a Little Bird

Text and photos by Joe Galkowski

Well known to advertisers, safety specialists, and those who design road signs, is the psychological principle of habituation. In simple terms, if you see something enough times, and it is unchanging, it no longer gets your attention. It becomes invisible to you. Something similar happens in the wilderness.

Hiking through our local wild places, animals you see every day hardly get noticed. Where I live, California Quail are very common, and although undeniably beautiful, I pretty much ignored them. They were never a subject of my photography, probably because they seemed to be everywhere.

On a hike in June, I spotted a family of California Quail. Although these birds are very common where I live, this group caught my attention. It consisted of a male, a female, and a handful of chicks. As I walked down the trail towards them, they sprinted into the shadows of some heavily-branched shrubs, promptly disappeared from sight. Very typical behavior.

California Quail family

To my surprise, however, the male who was leading the group, the father of the chicks, suddenly re-emerged from the safety of the cover. This was unusual. He voiced a few warning calls and then walked further out into the sunlight in my direction. It was then that I noticed that one of the chicks had hunkered down before reaching the brush. All his/her siblings were crouching in the shadows and invisible amongst the leaves. This little guy, on the other hand, was still in the open.

While keeping his eye on me, the father quail walked back over to the little chick, quietly made the warning peep sounds they so often make, and nudged the youngster with his beak. He continued with soft peeps until the chick stood up and hopped into the shadows disappearing from sight. Before the adult followed the chick into the brush, he made eye contact with me one more time. It was almost like he shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and whispered, “…kids…”

Male California Quail Striking a Pose

As this was right before Father’s Day, I couldn’t help but think of what a good father this quail was. Fathers, actually all parents, occasionally need to gently nudge their children if they have strayed, warn them when they are in danger, teach them by example how to survive as adults, or guide them by showing them what options they have. It is just what fathers do.…