By Ilana DeBare
In 2015, our Eco-Education program in Richmond added a component on Bird-Friendly Schools, where elementary school students enhanced their schoolyards with nest boxes and native plants.
This year, we expanded the nest box program to nearby park lands!
Fourth graders from Montalvin, Stege, and Lake Elementary Schools built twelve wooden nest boxes and installed them in nearby Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, where our Eco-Ed field trips introduce them to creek ecosystems. We designed the nest boxes for Western Bluebirds and crossed our fingers that a pair or two might show up.
We were not just pleasantly surprised. We were blown away when seven out of the twelve boxes were occupied… by four different species!
The student-built boxes attracted families of Ash-throated Flycatchers, House Wrens, and Tree Swallows, as well as Western Bluebirds.
Girls from Bayview Elementary with box that the flycatchers used / Photo by Anthony DeCicco
Nesting pair of Ash-throated Flycatchers / Photo by Miya Lucas
Ash-throated flycatcher with dragonfly / Photo by Miya Lucas
Looking down on newly-hatched Ash-throated Flycatcher chicks / Photo by Anthony DeCicco
In addition, two of the schoolyard nest boxes installed in 2015 drew Western Bluebird and Tree Swallow families this year. The nest box at Lake Elementary School even hosted two bluebird broods in one season. “The children were totally thrilled and proud,” Anthony said.
The broods in the Wildcat Canyon boxes hatched too late in the school year for the children to see them. But Anthony returned to monitor the boxes and took photos to share with classes next year.
Girls from Stege Elementary erecting the box that Western Bluebirds used / Photo by Anthony DeCicco
Female Western Bluebird near the nest box / Photo by Miya Lucas
Bluebirds (about nine days old) inside box erected by the girls / Photo by Anthony DeCicco
We also plan to expand the nest box program to our Eco-Ed schools in Oakland and San Francisco next year — with boxes targeted for Knowland Park in Oakland and Glen Canyon Park in San Francisco.
“It’s absolutely thrilling to know that some simple actions can create new generations of resident and migratory birds,” Anthony said.
 

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Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Eco-Education program provides hands-on nature education to ten Title I (low-income) elementary schools in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco. Since its start in 1999, Eco-Ed has served over 15,000 students and family members. Want to get involved?…

Editor’s Note: Golden Gate Bird Alliance members may be familiar with Alvaro Jaramillo from the pelagic and international birding trips he leads through his business, Alvaro’s Adventures. But Alvaro, born in Chile, also writes the “Identify Yourself” feature for Bird Watcher’s Digest and authored the new American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of California. He will be featured in three events at the Monterey Bay Birding Festival in September. In preparation, Alvaro was interviewed by the festival’s Debbie Diersch. This interview is reprinted with permission from The Albatross, the newsletter of the Santa Cruz Bird Club.

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Q: Alvaro, what do you want readers to know about you?
As far as birding goes, I’m different from some of the other people who are interested in bird ID and distribution because the main person I’m interested in reaching is the beginner or intermediate birder. It’s all about communicating this type of info to beginners/intermediate birders. I want them to know that it’s not all difficult or about trying to become skilled. When you put it in a way that makes it fun and simple, you don’t need to be a biologist to figure it out. I want to communicate to the every person.
As a young birder I was highly competitive. Let’s do a big day, keep a year list, but there came a time when it seemed empty. We have these wonderful birds, and it’s much richer than competition. Just enjoy the breeze, have a good dinner with friends, and make it the best it can be.
Alvaro Jaramillo on boat / Photo by Gail Stevens
Q: What do you find most fascinating about birds and birding?
It’s the most versatile and unending kind of endeavor you can get into. You can do everything else while you bird. You can even play tennis and bird at the same time. It adds to almost anything else you can do. Birds take you to places that are amazing. We go out on the bay and see killer whales as well as birds. You might not have gotten there if you weren’t going for the birds in the first place. I can’t imagine any other pastime you can have that is more fluid, diverse, and rich, and that adds another element to of life in this way.
Q: Why did you decide to write the American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of California and what makes it special?…

By Jack Dumbacher
Decades ago, I recall being told that birds can see incredibly “fast” – mostly from bird keepers who said that AC lighting (which flickers at ~120 flashes per second) appears as a flashing strobe to birds. But when I started teaching Ornithology, I was never able to find any definitive published evidence that birds do actually see fast, or how fast, or even what this might mean for how birds see the world.
Now a recent study published by a Swedish team (Boström et al. 2016) nicely shows how fast birds can see. In fact, the Pied Flycatchers of Europe can detect flickering light and dark cycles up to 145 Hz (or flashes per second) – about 40 Hz faster than any other known vertebrate.
This is called the “critical flicker-fusion frequency,” or CFF – the frequency at which a flickering light begins to appear as a steady light.
In the eye, each light-sensitive cell has to react to light, send a signal to the brain, and then refresh to be ready to receive the next signal. As long as a flashing light is slow enough, each cell can keep up, and detect both the dark and light periods, and send a uniform signal to the brain. But once the flashing rate exceeds the critical flicker-fusion frequency, then some cells drop behind and get out of sync, and soon a synchronized “steady” signal is generated from the eye.
This is why the flickering motion on a TV screen or movie projector is viewed by humans as steady motion – because the light is flickering faster than our critical flicker fusion frequency.
Flicker fusion frequencies for Collared (closed diamonds) and Pied Flycatchers (open squares). From PLoS One website. Averages are shown together with ranges for seven Collared and eight Pied Flycatchers tested repeatedly in different light intensities. Note that the speed of birds’ vision peaks in middle light intensities, when it is not too light and not too dark.
To measure birds’ ability, they did some simple experiments with captive birds. Each bird could see two LED lights – one randomly chosen to flicker, and the other with a steady light. Then they simply trained captive birds to find a prize (a peanut for Blue Tits, or a mealworm for Collared Flycatchers) if they looked in a jar placed under the flashing light.
They waited until the birds were well trained and could get the treat at least four out of five times.…

By Maureen Lahiff
My first adventure with Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s birding travel program was the 2016 Memorial Day Weekend trip in southern Oregon led by Harry Fuller. A longtime Bay Area birder, Harry moved to Oregon when he retired. Fortunately for birders, he didn’t retire from birding and sharing his knowledge of birds with others. I’d heard him at the GGBA Speaker Series a couple of times in the past few years, including a talk on Great Gray Owls, a species on which he has also written a book.
Detailed accounts of the birds we saw on May 28, 29, and 30 are on Harry’s blog in the May archive.
As a solo traveler, I wondered a bit what it would be like. It was a very convivial group, which was a good thing since we spent three long, wonderful days together in a van! People were good about sharing the non-window seats, while being being sensitive to the needs of those with some maneuverability/mobility restrictions. There were two couples and one birder accompanied by a non-birder spouse who joined us for a few dinners, while the rest were solo travelers like me.
For this trip, we made our travel and lodging arrangements individually. Harry provided some tips on places to stay. I’m a fan of hostels, so I was pleased to find one in the heart of Ashland, a lovely old house build in 1915, with wonderful shared rooms and a great kitchen and common areas. One participant flew to Medford, which is about 15 miles away; everyone else drove up the 350 miles on I-80 and I-5. A few of us stopped at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge on the way up. The drive up I-5 provided a great introduction to the habitat and dramatic views of Mount Shasta, which was our compass for the next three days.
View of Mount Shasta by Harry Fuller
Traveling together by van was one of the great things about this trip. We started at 7 a.m. every morning and got back to our rendezvous place around 5 p.m. Harry was accommodating about bathroom stops and did his best with a Sunday afternoon request for caffeine. We covered a lot of miles every day, and I really appreciated not having to drive and caravan. We took some short walks, but a lot of the birding was fairly close to our stops.…

By George Peyton

It was not long ago that undertaking a Big Year of Birding was fairly rare. Today carrying out Big Years of all types — from small areas like the City of San Francisco to larger areas like the State of California, the Lower 48 States, or the ABA Area of North America north of Mexico, which includes Alaska – is not that unusual.

For those unfamiliar with the term “Big Year,” it refers to an effort to see as many bird species as possible within a specific area during a calendar year. Lani Rumbaoa and I undertook a Lower 48 States Big Year in 2015, and I can tell you from experience that advance planning is absolutely crucial to ultimate success. Considering that Lani had to work at her job at least 26 weeks of the year, her final total of 641 bird species was very good. (The maximum ever seen in the Lower 48 is 704 species).

Here are my personal recommendations for planning a Big Year:

Start Early

I strongly suggest starting your planning at least a year in advance, and under no circumstances less than six months before the start of your Big Year. There are an incredible number of details that need to be pinned down — not just when and where to go, but airline, rental car, and motel reservations, registration for Birding Festivals, signing up for key birding tours such as the Colorado Chicken Tour (for difficult-to-find Prairie Chickens, Grouses, and Ptarmigans), and possibly hiring professional birding guides in certain key areas. The earlier you start your planning, the better the results will be.

Lesser Prairie-Chicken by Tony Ilfland (USFWS)

Read About Other Big Years

Many people who have carried out a Big Year want to write about their experiences, so there are a reasonable number of books published about Big Years of Birding. In the last few years it has also become common for someone conducting a Big Year to create daily or weekly blog posts about where he has been and what birds he has seen. A number of these blogs are still accessible long after the Big Year is completed.

Some suggestions for Big Year reading:

The Big Year by Mark Obmasick (2004), about an unofficial competition between three avid birders to see the most species in North America north of Mexico during 1998. It not only became a bestseller, but was also made into a popular movie with Jack Black and Steve Martin.…