Birding the Bay Islands: Mare Island Shoreline & Beyond

Birding the Bay Islands: Mare Island Shoreline & Beyond

By Helen J. Doyle and Evan Weissman

Maybe the birds knew Valentine’s Day was just two days away. Love was in the air, literally. Soon after we left the Mare Island San Pablo Bay Trail parking lot, we were stopped in our tracks by two pairs of Northern Harriers in full airborne courtship display, swooping around each other, showing off their legs and feet, and vocalizing back and forth.

Northern Harriers were also using the sky for stunning displays of romance. Both species are year-round Bay Area residents, feeding on small mammals and birds that also thrive in this marshy, grassland habitat. A thrilling start to birding on Mare Island.

Northern Harriers displayed mating behavior and hunted over the grassland habitat, Helen Doyle

First though, is Mare Island really an island? Its Spanish names suggest it was at one time – Isla de la Plana (Flat Island) around 1775 and later, around 1834, Isla de la Yegua (Mare Island), renamed by Mariano Guadeloupe Vallejo in honor of his white mare who safely swam ashore here after a boat capsized in the Bay in 1835. Soon after that, in 1854, the US Navy opened its first west coast shipyard here. The Navy and shipbuilding dominated Mare Island for almost 150 years, until 1996, changing its landscape to better suit these industrial purposes. Now Mare Island is a peninsula, bordered by the Napa River and the San Pablo Bay, but it’s easy to imagine that the Napa River once flowed more freely into the Bay, creating wetlands dotted with islands like Mare Island. Today those wetlands make up the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Mare Island is not technically part of this refuge, but its wetlands are also being restored as the decades-long decommissioning of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard continues.

To get here, we ferried from San Francisco to Vallejo with our bikes and rode over to Mare Island via the scrappy but solid Mare Island Causeway Bridge, built in 1934. We sited a few morning birds along the Vallejo marina and shoreline park before meeting fellow-birders Jon Altemus and Marilyn Nasatir at the San Pablo Bay Trail parking lot. Despite a reputation for single-mindedness, birders are generous about sharing knowledge and teaching others. We laughed about Marilyn’s story of becoming hooked by birds over three decades ago. After a bird walk in Golden Gate Park, for which she had opera glasses but no binoculars, she thought she’d seen just three types of birds.…

When birds + letters = art

When birds + letters = art

By Ilana DeBare

Birds. Letters. Art.

It seems natural, given that those are Jeanette Nichols’ loves, that she would create one-of-a-kind watercolors illustrating the letters in people’s names with birds.Like this one: SUSAN = Sandhill Crane, Upland Sandpiper, Scarlet Tanager, American Avocet, and Northern Shoveler.

Customized name painting by Jeanette Nichols, with each letter represented by a bird.

Our 2024 Birdathon Adventure Auction is offering one of Nichols’ custom watercolors: the winning bidder can commission Their Name in Birds. But Nichols’ bird-name pieces are only a tiny sliver of the art she’s created over the years. Her Oakland home is festooned with a diverse array of work, ranging from landscape paintings to Hebrew calligraphy to whimsical greeting cards.

Nichols isn’t a professional artist: she spent her career as an oncology and  hematology nurse at Children’s Hospital before retiring in 2015. But both creativity and birds have been part of her life since childhood. 

Greeting card designs by Jeanette Nichols. Watercolor of Sandhill Cranes at dusk by Jeanette Nichols.

“I always drew,” she recalled. “When I was six, we moved to Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino mountains where my mother ran a motel, which we called a ‘resort.’ There was a chair at the bottom of the stairs with a space behind it. I claimed it as my space where I drew and read. I was either there or outdoors.”

She inherited a love of nature from her mother’s family, who hailed from Wyoming.

“When I had trouble learning to swim,” Nichols said, “my uncle pointed out a dipper to me. He said, ‘See that little bird? It can swim. You know you can too.’ Since then it’s always been my favorite bird.” 

Throughout her adult life, she created greeting cards and small artworks for friends. She provided some of the images for a new prayer book for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco and submitted paintings each year to the Jewish Community Library’s invitational exhibit. For her wedding to Daryl Goldman in 2004, she spent a year learning Hebrew calligraphy to create their ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract. 

Daryl Goldman and Jeanette Nichols with the ketubah that Jeanette created. Photo by Ilana DeBare. One of the images by Jeanette Nichols in the Sha’ar Zahav prayerbook. Notice the Jewish star-shaped foliage and the birds perched in the branches! Project portraying black birds on black backgrounds by Jeanette Nichols

Her involvement with birds deepened when she and Daryl took Golden Gate Bird Association’s East Bay Birds class, which was taught at the time by Bob Lewis and Rusty Scalf.…

CENTRAL PARK BIRDING — WHY IT’S SPECIAL

CENTRAL PARK BIRDING — WHY IT’S SPECIAL

By Ilana DeBare

What makes birding in New York’s Central Park different from birding in the Bay Area? 

(Um, you mean beside the hundred or so skyscrapers ringing the park, the 8.5 million people living around it, and the 42 million people who visit it each year?)

Waterfowl on the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, with Central Park West in the background. Photo by Ilana DeBare

That question was on our minds as we organized this year’s Birdathon Adventure Auction, with prizes that include a three-night hotel stay in Manhattan and a private, expert-led bird walk in Central Park. So we turned to an authoritative source—Glenn Phillips, Executive Director of Golden Gate Bird Alliance, who lived in New York for 27 years, including eight at the helm of NYC Audubon, before returning to his childhood roots in the East Bay.

Phillips had two answers, one about birds and one about humans.

The Birds“It’s the abundance of warblers, first and foremost,” he said. “Central Park is one of the best places to see them in spring and fall. In spring, in almost any section of the park, you can get ten species of warbler on any given day. You just can’t do that in California.”

Chestnut-side Warbler. Provided by RHODODENDRITES Yellow-throated Warbler. Provided by RHODODENDRITES

Beyond warblers, the park offers a variety and density of birds that is remarkable for such a compact area. That’s because of its nature as a unique oasis within a vast, concrete urban area.  Migrants moving north and south along the East Coast stop off in the 843-acre park for rest, food, and water. More than 280 species have been recorded in Central Park, including 192 that are year-round residents or regular visitors.

“Because it’s this island of green in the middle of the city, the density of birds is much higher,” Phillips said. “You can see more birds in a limited time and space. And when there’s a storm the night before, you get a migratory fallout. The storm sets in at night when birds are already on the move and they look for the nearest open space. The trees are literally dripping with birds.”

Central Park is an island of green in the middle of the city. Photo by Ed Yourdon

 Two of his personal favorite sightings in Central Park have been:

  • Owls. “Central Park is really great for owls. One year there was a group of three or four Long-eared Owls roosting every night in the same tree in the Pinetum.
…
Obi Kaufmann: Storytelling by “Field Atlas”

Obi Kaufmann: Storytelling by “Field Atlas”

By Ilana DeBare

How many nature writers get to create an entirely new genre of book? Heck, how many writers of any sort get to create an entirely new genre?

Obi Kaufmann did—through publication over the last seven years of his “field atlas” series about California.

There are road atlases. There are field guides. But The California Field Atlas—his #1 Chronicle bestseller that launched the series in 2017—is both. And neither.

“It’s not a road atlas since I’m not telling you how to get anywhere,” Kaufmann said in an interview this spring. “It’s not a field guide since it’s not concerned with the where of things or the what of things.”

Obi Kaufmann, after signing one of his books that will be included in the 2024 Birdathon Auction by Ilana DeBare.

What is a “field atlas,” then, as Kaufmann defines it? It’s filled with art—watercolors of mountains and fish, birds and trees—but it’s also data-driven and thick with citations. It’s nature filtered through his impressionistic, big-picture sensibility. 

It transcends the minutiae of species description to place our world in geological time that goes back hundreds of millions of years and is likely to go forward an equally long time, with or without humans.

“I want every page to drip with color and soul and offer a nugget of information you can be confident in,” he said.

Autographed copies of three of Kauffman’s most recent works—The Forests of California, The Deserts of California, and The Coasts of California, which together make up The California Lands Trilogy—are part of a Heyday Books nature book package that’s a prize in our upcoming Birdathon Auction.

The three books in The California Lands Trilogy by Obi Kaufmann.

Kaufmann, a resident of Oakland, fell in love with the natural world as a child in Danville.  His father was an astrophysicist and his mother a social scientist, but his most significant teacher might have been Mount Diablo, where he spent countless hours wandering and exploring. 

A Tolkien fan, he compares Mount Diablo to the Lonely Mountain, an isolated and unmistakable mountain that held great treasure (as well as a dragon) and was central to the plot of The Hobbit.

“Mount Diablo was my Lonely Mountain,” he said. “Sticking out like a thumb into the Central Valley, it’s its own world. It was my world. There I could find all the diversity my father found in his exploration of the universe.”…

Arizona birding — prized destination and auction prize

Arizona birding — prized destination and auction prize

By Daryl Goldman

This year for the first time the Birdathon Auction is offering three great Arizona “bed and bird” experiences — overnight stays at inns or guest houses, two of them paired with an expert birding guide. How did this happen? For years I heard about the amazing birding in southeast Arizona and, when I finally went there with my wife and sister-in-law in 2019, I became hooked.  Here’s a little about what I loved about SE Arizona.

Tucson, AZ

We started our birding adventure in Tucson, making our first-stop Saguaro National Park West. Saguaro NP has separate districts on either side of Tucson, with mountains to the east and protected desert vegetation to the west.

I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the sheer number of saguaro cacti and the number of nest holes in the cacti. With all the bird activity I felt like I was in a Roadrunner cartoon and was warned more than once to stop making Beep-Beep sounds. Cactus Wren, Gambel’s Quail, Ladder-backed Woodpecker, Gila Woodpecker, Verdin, Black-tailed Gnatcatcher, Phainopepla, Black-throated Sparrow, Bell’s Vireo, Lark Bunting, Blue Grosbeak, Canyon Towhee, Curve-billed Thrasher, Pyrrhuloxia, Elf Owl, and of course Greater Roadrunner. These are just some of the birds to be seen there.

Saguaro NP East by Daryl Goldman, Gila Woodpecker by Gary L Clark, Saguaro NP West by Daryl Goldman 

We next visited Saguaro NP East, on the other side of Tucson, and were enchanted by the abundance of birds and the way the tops of the mountains glowed as the sun set. The tarantula crossing our path was exciting, although less enchanting.  

My wife and I are in the process of planning our next trip to Arizona and we will definitely stay at the Tucson casita being offered in the Birdathon Auction this year. It’s just 15 minutes from downtown, minutes away from Saguaro NP West, offers a wonderful courtyard to watch birds over morning coffee, and is delightfully designed and furnished. 

(The casita stay is being donated to the auction by naturalist-turned-realtor Angie Salonikios. The other part of this Tucson Birding Package is a full day of birding the area with David Robinson, a former Golden Gate Bird Alliance board member who is currently Tucson Audubon’s Director of Advocacy and Education.) 

Madera Canyon

During our 2019 visit, we next headed 30 miles south towards Madera Canyon National Forest Recreational Area, a valley in the Santa Rita Mountains.…