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.…

By Sharon Beals

It could have been the El-Nino-green willows billowing in the bird-songed breeze, or the buckeyes, their branches still full of stunning white blooms. Or maybe it was simply being out of school, and instead, standing on a tall-grassed path alongside a pooling creek, that inspired a round-faced eight-year-old boy to lower his binos and beam at me: “This is just so BEAUTIFUL!”

I’m still replaying this shared moment of joy in my mind, along with many others collected during two recent field trips to Arroyo Viejo Creek in Oakland with Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Eco-Education program.

The children – third graders from the Korematsu Discovery Academy — were there to learn about their local watershed, and I was there to document what might be some of GGBA’s most important work: providing environmental education to children in the underserved communities of East Oakland, North Richmond, and Southeast San Francisco where funding for science education in schools often falls short.

Marissa Ortega-Welch of GGBA and the Korematsu students. Photo by Sharon Beals

GGBA collaborates with teachers to introduce third, fourth, and fifth graders to the ecology of their local environments, first in their classrooms and schoolyards and then on field trips to nearby creeks, wetlands, and finally the Pacific Ocean. Students’ families are also invited on the trips to the ocean, and for many it is a first-time experience. Over the course of the year, the children get hands-on experience with habitat restoration. Since its start in 1999, the program has served over 15,000 students, plus thousands of family members.

Marissa Ortega-Welch, who has been leading Eco-Ed field trips for six years, was our teacher and guide for the day. She arrived with an eager tribe of children, teachers, aides, and a few parents via city bus. (GGBA’s tight budget can’t afford chartered buses.) In clearly enunciated Spanish and English, she introduced the Audubon volunteers who would aid and abet their curiosity that day and prescribed a few ground rules. Both of these outings were great lessons in science and nature vocabulary for this lapsed Spanish student!

The students were sorted into two groups that would rotate between the day’s activities. The nature walkers were shown how to use binoculars (find the bird first, then raise the binos to your eyes). They clustered around folding field guides showing local birds with the same fascination they might have given a new video game.…

By Leslie Lakes

Nearly eleven years ago, a friend told me about a special art auction that was being held by the Fortune Society in New York. What made this auction unique was that all the works were by incarcerated individuals – men and women serving sentences in prisons throughout the United States.  The artwork could be seen either on an online auction site, or at a live exhibition on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Approximately 250 pieces of original artwork in various media and sizes were available for sale via a bidding process for a period of five days.

I was living in New Jersey at the time and, as an artist myself, was intrigued. As I found out, the Fortune Society began in 1967 when David Rothenberg produced a play — Fortune in Men’s Eyes, about the harsh realities of living in prison – that mesmerized the audience and generated public discussion. Rothenberg went on to found the Fortune Society to support successful reentry of prisoners into society and alternatives to incarceration.

I perused the artwork in the auction and was amazed at the depth of sensitivity, skill, creativity, and ingenuity. The artists often relied on such minimal “art supplies” as hand-made paintbrushes fashioned from human hair, pigments made from dyes in M&M and Skittle candies, “oil paints” made from mixing peanut butter with candy dyes, and “washes” made from coffee and tea.

American Goldfinch by Keith Harward

I was so blown away that I asked the Fortune Society to provide me with the names and contact information of some of the incarcerated artists. That is what started, back in January 2006, my longtime and regular correspondence with artist Keith Harward. To date, I have over 250 letters from Keith, along with a slew of small (approximately 5×7 inch) charming drawings of… birds.

Birds galore. Birds of all kinds. What can I say? Keith loves birds!

Calliope Hummingbird by Keith Harward Baltimore Oriole by Keith Harward Tufted Titmouse by Keith Harward

Keith developed his connection to birds as a child in Greensboro, North Carolina, from backyard feeders and field guides. But before his incarceration, he’d never been an artist. As he phrases it, the only things he’d painted were “cars, houses and ‘the town.’ ”

Then in 1982, as a 27-year-old U.S. Navy sailor, he was charged with murdering a man and raping his wife. The killer was in fact another sailor on Keith’s ship.…