By Noreen Weeden
On September 12, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee will hear a proposed resolution seeking expanded public access to the Peninsula Watershed Lands. It urges the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to provide enhanced public access to existing roads and trails in the Watershed Lands, consistent with the goals of protecting the water supply and the environmental quality of the area.
Sounds like a wonderful idea … except when you look into what this means for our drinking water supply, native plants, and wildlife.
Golden Gate Bird Alliance opposes this resolution or, at a minimum, calls for postponing any decision until the SFPUC has completed its study on the impacts, costs, and funding for opening the watershed. We believe the wording of the resolution itself is contradictory. How exactly does opening up the watershed lands protect the water supply and the environmental quality? It will not. Opening public access to our watershed will have environmental impacts – especially impacts on our drinking water, native plants, birds, and other wildlife – that must be considered.
Pilarcitos Reservoir in the Peninsula Watershed / Photo by Emma Leonard, Bay Nature

Protected since the 1860s

The Peninsula Watershed is a 23,000-acre area surrounding Crystal Springs Reservoir, bordered by Pacifica and San Bruno in the north and Woodside and Redwood City in the south. (See map at bottom of this article.) As a source of drinking water for the city of San Francisco, it is owned by the PUC and has been closed to the public since it was originally set aside in the latter half of the 1800s. The watershed is part of a regional water system serving 2.6 million people in four San Francisco Bay Area counties. About five percent of San Francisco’s drinking water comes directly from rainfall and run-off into the Peninsula Watershed reservoirs. In addition, some Hetch Hetchy water (which makes up 85 percent of the city’s water supply) is stored in the Peninsula Watershed reservoirs on its way to the city.
The watershed is critical, intact habitat for 800 plants and trees, 165 bird species, 50 mammal species, and other wildlife – many of which have been extirpated from other parts of the Bay Area. This watershed has the highest concentration of special status (rare, threatened and endangered) species in the entire nine-county Bay Area.
The Peninsula Watershed is a California-designated Fish and Game Refuge and protected under the UNESCO Golden Gate Biosphere.…

By Ilana DeBare
Capping a season of successful heron rescues and public education, Golden Gate Bird Alliance joined with partners International Bird Rescue and Oakland Zoo last Friday to release seven rehabilitated herons and egrets back into the wild.
We released three young Black-crowned Night-Herons and five Snowy Egrets into the protected marsh area at Martin Luther King Jr. shoreline — a marsh that GGBA helped save from development over the past several decades.
It was an inspiring moment, and one that was captured by media including the San Francisco Chronicle, ABC7, KTVU, KCBS Radio, and the Oakland Tribune. There is nothing like watching birds that have been injured and nursed back to health peer out of their carrier boxes, take a step or two, realize they are no longer in a pen, and spread their wings to fly freely.
Friday’s release was the culmination of our work during the 2016 nesting season protecting and educating people about the heron and egret rookery in downtown Oakland.
All told, we saved the lives of 21 young herons that would otherwise have died from injuries, traffic, or exposure!
Juvenile Snowy Egrets awaiting please / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Snowy Egret ventures out of its carrier / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Released Snowy Egret flies into the marsh / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Released night-heron flies out into the marsh / Photo by Ilana DeBare
This effort began two years ago, after a highly-publicized incident in which Black-crowned Night-heron nests were destroyed by tree trimmers hired by the downtown Oakland post office.
We responded immediately by publishing a brochure in English and Spanish on how to care for trees without harming birds or nests. (You can download the brochure here.) Last year, we broadened our educational initiative by a adding volunteer heron docents, guided bird walks through the rookery, and posters about herons in English and Chinese.
This year, we expanded the docent program and added the rescue component. Twenty-four GGBA volunteers monitored the rookery, counting the nests, explaining the heron colony to passersby, and watching for fallen and injured young birds.
GGBA leads a bird walk under one of the nest trees
Adult night-heron in Oakland nest tree / Photo by Ilana DeBare
They documented 149 nesting pairs of herons and egrets in central downtown Oakland — 120 pairs of Black-crowned Night-herons and 29 pairs of Snowy Egrets! With each pair producing two to three young, that is a very large rookery — in fact, the second largest night-heron rookery in the Bay Area.…

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.…