By Eric Schroeder
“Adorable” is how my wife Susan once described the Bewick’s Wren, and even non-birders would agree with the aptness of the description. These wrens are brown on their backs, wings, tails, and heads, and grey on their bellies. The bill is curved, the tail is long, and the outer tail feathers show white.
Most distinctive is the long, pronounced white eyebrow that helps to distinguish the Bewick’s from the House Wren that it most resembles in the west and southwest. This eyebrow gives it a cocky appearance—contributing to the “adorable” effect. Bewick’s are small, slender birds, averaging a bit over five inches in length and weighing only about a third of an ounce. But their size is belied by their bold character.
Their boldness is perhaps most evident in their song. For such a small bird, the Bewick’s Wren has tremendous vocal range and power. A male bird can have up to sixteen different songs. They can be tireless, too: In early spring, singing can take up to half of the male’s time. It’s no wonder that one of the names for a group of wrens is a “chime”—the others being a flock, a flight, and a herd! On a recent bird walk in the Oakland Hills, Golden Gate Bird Alliance birding instructor Bob Lewis said that when you hear a bird you can’t immediately identify by song, Bewick’s Wren is often the right guess. I’m becoming more familiar with my resident male’s repertoire, but he is still capable of fooling me on occasion.
Bewick’s Wren in the backyard by Eric Schroeder
Primarily a New World species (the only exception being the Eurasian Wren), the Bewick’s Wren, Thryomanes bewickii, was first collected by John James Audubon in Louisiana in the winter of 1821. Audubon named it after the English naturalist Thomas Bewick, whom Audubon met during a visit to England in 1827. Bewick was by then 74 years old and famous for his book A History of British Birds, recognized as a forerunner of modern field guides.
Bewick’s Wren by John James Audubon, Plate 18 in his Birds of America
The Bewick’s was formerly beloved as the “house wren” of the Appalachians and the Midwest, but the species today has almost disappeared east of the Mississippi. Ironically, competition from the actual, later-arriving House Wren has been partly responsible for its steep decline in the east and parts of its traditional range in the west.…

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.…