By Jack Dumbacher

In late 2010, two fascinating articles appeared that described a new and very serious avian disease (1,2).  So-called “avian keratin disorder,” or AKD, caused birds’ bills to radically overgrow. With these outsized bills, birds were unable to preen or even properly feed — and in their Alaskan environment, where birds were first found with the disorder, this spelled almost certain death by starvation and hypothermia.
The second article suggested that the disease wasn’t limited to just a couple species, and also showed that it appeared to be spreading to both more birds and to more localities.  The disorder was found in chickadees, nuthatches, crows, jays, woodpeckers, hawks – and these are just the easy-to-see birds that tend to hang out at people’s feeders or urban parks.  The articles were partially a call to arms and a plea for more information from citizen birders and other scientists to recognize and help track the disease.
Black-capped Chickadee in Alaska with deformed bill / Photo by Martin Renner

Despite investigating several possible causes, the authors were unable to determine what caused the beak deformities.  They looked at known viruses, bacterial infections, fungus, mites – even potential environmental toxins.  But no smoking gun.

At the same time, I was starting a collaboration with Joe Derisi, who is a virus researcher at University of California San Francisco and clever virus hunter (among other things).  He had some fancy lab equipment and techniques for finding viruses.  One tool was a virus microarray chip — their virochip — a small glass microscope slide with tens of thousands of short sequences that are made to match a portion of the genome of virtually every known virus.  By putting DNA from a sick person (or bird) onto the microarray, a DNA match would light up and indicate a virus present, and potentially which one. We thought it would be fun to see if his virochip could identify a bird virus.
So I quickly contacted the key investigators, Colleen Handel and Caroline van Hemert from the USGS labs in Alaska.  They were keen to try anything, and consented to send some samples taken from sick birds.  We tried the virochip, and got some hits that we followed up, but answers weren’t quickly forthcoming.  One challenge was that bird DNA was very different from human DNA, so we didn’t know what the background virochip pattern would look like when normal bird DNA was run on the chip.…

By Ilana DeBare

Birding helps us notice little wonders that we might otherwise take for granted — the California Towhee pair hopping in our backyard, never far from each other, or the Red-tailed Hawk regally surveying its world from a freeway sign over our traffic-clogged commute.

But sometimes even birders get complacent and take things for granted. “Another hawk, another towhee.” At that point photography can shake us up and make us look at things freshly again.

The Extraordinary Beauty of Birds: Designs, Patterns and Details (Prestel Publishing, 2016) is a new coffee-table book of photographs of close-up images of feathers, nests, eggs, and skins from the ornithology collection of the Royal Ontario Museum. Photographer Deborah Samuel selected 135 pictures of species ranging from the familiar (Mourning Dove, Wild Turkey) to the exotic (Superb Bird-of-Paradise), and Royal Ontario Museum ornithologist Mark Peck provided short, interesting nuggets of information on each one.

My favorite images in the book were those of feathers. We never get close looks at feathers in the field, and so photos like Samuel’s show patterns and structures that we otherwise might never see. They let us view familiar birds in a whole new way. You can look at these images as breathtaking geometric art, or you can study them more literally as examples of bird anatomy. The Mourning Dove wing feathers are so regular and smooth they almost resemble twill fabric. The red tips of a Cedar Waxwing feather do indeed look like the drops of molten wax that inspired their name.

I was less happy with the images of skins, or dead birds. They made me sad. We have access to so many wonderful photos of living birds — including many by Golden Gate Bird Alliance members, including the photos we feature each year in our Birds of the Bay Area wall calendar — that I didn’t feel like the skin photos offered anything new. And I would much rather look at a photo of a live Tree Swallow than a dead one.

Samuel’s photographs of nests brought to mind another wonderful set of nest photos — by our own member Sharon Beals, author of Nests: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them. Like Samuel, Beals photographed nests from a museum collection against a black background. But Beals’s nests are lit more brightly and bring out the colors, contrasting textures, and beauty of the nests much more vividly.…

Editor’s Note: Sea-blite is an endangered shoreline plant that had not been seen in the Bay Area since the 1950s — until it was recently re-introduced at Pier 94, the onetime dump site owned by the Port of San Francisco that Golden Gate Bird Alliance is restoring as wildlife habitat. The following is an excerpt from an article on sea-blite in the current issue of Bay Nature magazine. Click here to read the full article. 
By Eric Simons
To get to the exceedingly rare plant called California sea-blite you go down to the east shore of San Francisco on an unmarked industrial road, past warehouses and jumbled rail lines. Cement plant rock-crushers roar, grinding Canadian gravel to fuel the city’s construction boom. A black tanker rests on a weed-lined rail spur, its side stamped in white: INEDIBLE TALLOW. A concrete road divider marks the end of the industrial area, and then in the shadow of the rock piles the waves sigh over a small crescent marsh with a view of the Bay Bridge and Oakland.
On a sandy rise about 10 feet from the water’s edge sprouts what looks like a plantation of waist-high green pipe cleaners. Over these, the freelance coastal ecologist Peter Baye pauses. This is one of only three small populations of endangered, once-extirpated sea-blite (Suaeda californica) around San Francisco Bay….
Peter Baye inspecting sea-blite seeds at Pier 94 / Photo by Eric Simons
Baye wears jeans, wire-rim glasses, and a gray wool beanie in the style favored by the Cousteaus. A former staff scientist at both the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he is considered one of the leading architects of coastal conservation in Northern California….
Twenty years ago Baye latched onto an anonymous plant that had been extinct in the San Francisco Bay for decades and, in the face of overwhelming bureaucratic and public indifference, has worked doggedly to bring it back. Peter Baye saw something bigger in the case of the sea-blite. Today, from the mud at our feet, spring the spiky green tendrils of a defiant attack on marsh idolatry—and on the way we think about endangered species.

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California sea-blite thrives in the narrow strip of ecotone sandy beach on the bay edge of tidal marshes. In Southern California’s Morro Bay, the only other place it lives, it is a climber of fences, driftwood, and dunes.…

By Ilana DeBare
Golden Gate Bird Alliance is for the birds. But not JUST for the birds.
This month, we were delighted to see results from our advocacy on behalf of a colony of harbor seals in Alameda.
Harbor seals — five to six feet long, with spotted coats in a variety of colors — spend about half their time on land and half in the water. “Hauling out” onto land allows them to rest and to warm up from the cold Bay waters, which is particularly important when they are molting. Harbor seals are social with each other but shy of humans. They usually gather in much smaller groups than California sea lions, the “celebrity” pinnipeds that delight tourists at San Francisco’s Pier 39.
At Alameda Point, harbor seals had been hauling out for years onto an old wooden dock between Encinal Beach and the U.S.S. Hornet. Golden Gate Bird Alliance members often spotted 6-12 seals resting on the dock. One one occasion, there were 33 seals on the dock at once!
Last year, though, the haul-out faced imminent destruction when the Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) negotiated a lease with Alameda city officials to build its new headquarters with an adjacent ferry maintenance terminal there.
Harbor seals on old dilapidated dock / Photo by Richard Bangert
GGBA members and seal fans spoke up at the Alameda City Council hearing when the lease was up for consideration. We pointed out that harbor seal habitat is protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and recommended that the city require WETA to provide a suitable replacement haul-out nearby under the guidance of a competent marine biologist.
Surprised to learn about the seal population and its fan club, the City Council placed a rider on the lease agreement that required $100,000 in escrow for mitigating the project’s impacts on seals.
With input from GGBA, WETA hired a veteran marine biologist to identify a good location and design a special haul-out that would meet the seals’ needs. Seal advocates met with the biologist to scout locations and provide input on a haul-out design for Alameda’s waters.  Last month, a new floating platform — a concrete platform with a long, wide ramp resting on buoyant materials — was installed.
The floating platform was initially placed just next to the old dock on June 22. Both structures were left in place for a short while to acclimate the seals to the platform’s presence.…