By Bonnie Brown

When I heard about the Waterbird Docent Program on Alcatraz last year, I knew it was the volunteer opportunity for me. I have swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco many times for fun and have often seen birds during those swims. Actually, swimming in San Francisco Bay was one of the ways I became interested in birding. The other was a volunteer trip I took to Tanzania years ago, where we saw so many colorful, exotic, and beautiful birds. I was just amazed and it stuck with me.

A friend and I signed up for the 2015 Master Birding class offered by Golden Gate Bird Alliance and California Academy of Sciences. It’s a year-long program and was a fantastic learning experience. One of the requirements was to put in 100 volunteer hours over a two-year period. Volunteering is fun and if you like birds, I can’t think of a better place to volunteer than Alcatraz, where you can help visitors from all over the world learn a little about the bird life.

Alcatraz National Park is a large and important breeding colony for several different egret, heron, and seabird species including Western Gulls. The island is home to the San Francisco Bay’s only Brandt’s Cormorant colony and one of its most important Black-crowned Night-heron colonies.   You can get up close and personal with the birds in their rookeries, especially the Snowy Egrets. Nesting season runs from April through August. It’s an awesome time to visit and observe avian natural history.

An almost National Geographic moment with Snowy Egrets on Alcatraz, by Bonnie Brown

How does one get involved? Well, first you reach out to the Docent Coordinator, then you attend a mandatory and very interesting eight-hour training on the Rock in the springtime. Finally you commit to approximately eight hours of volunteering each month. The Docent Coordinator is Ed Ryken, edwbear@earthlink.net.

Volunteers sign up using a group Yahoo calendar, and newcomers can choose to pair up with experienced volunteers.  The National Park Service is friendly, accommodating, and very appreciative of volunteers. You get access to the staff quarters and kitchen. All equipment is available free to the volunteers – scope, tripod, binoculars, radios, brochures, counters, and the carts to lug all this equipment up and down the hills of Alcatraz. You’re also outfitted with official clothing, as demonstrated in the picture below.

Fashionable docent attire!

The Alcatraz docent program has three goals: 1) increase awareness for Alcatraz waterbirds, 2) generate appreciation for nesting waterbird species through interpretation, and 3) reduce potential human impact on the birds and their habitat.…

By Pauline Grant

When I returned recently from North Carolina with a stink bug loose in my suitcase, I did not immediately toss it out the window. I placed it under a jar on my kitchen counter. A few days later, I fed it a tiny piece of cracker and a few grains of sugar. (Surely bugs eat what we eat!) Each morning I would move the jar to check if it was still alive. After ten days under the jar, someone suggested I feed it a piece of leaf. Four weeks later it is still alive. What possessed me to want to observe the captured stink bug? Hanging out with kids in nature!

This fall I had the opportunity to volunteer with Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Eco-Education program and to co-lead (with Eugenia Caldwell) a bird walk for children at Las Gallinas Storage Ponds in Marin. The exuberance of both these groups of children is clear reassurance that real life, physical life, is still far more exciting than screen life.

GGBA’s Eco-Education program provides nature-focused field trips and classroom activities to about 700 children from low-income elementary schools each year. I volunteered with the San Francisco part of the program, which includes field trips to GGBA’s shoreline habitat restoration site at Pier 94.

From 10 a.m. when the big yellow school bus dropped off twenty 4^th graders, until they left at 2:15 p.m., there was laughter, squealing, and continuous questions about the marine, plant, and bird life. Meanwhile, the Las Gallinas bird walk – which took place on a weekend and was open to the general public — lasted an extra thirty minutes due to the inquisitiveness of the young participants.

Eco-Education students learn to use binoculars at Pier 94. Photo by Pauline Grant. Anthony DeCicco helps Eco-Education students plant native plants at Pier 94, by Pauline Grant An Eco-Education volunteer and student at Pier 94, by Pauline Grant

The training to be a GGBA Eco-Education volunteer is brief – a single three-hour session at the site in San Francisco or the East Bay where you prefer to volunteer. Throughout the school year, one can commit as many or as few hours as one wants. Anthony DeCicco, the Youth Education Director for GGBA, provides the training in a very relaxed manner and offers a lot of tips for behavior management.

It’s important to note that many of the kids on these school field trips are unfamiliar with how to behave in a fragile natural environment because they have not visited one before.…

By Ilana DeBare

Bay Area residents will receive a sparkling nighttime gift this month when the Bay Lights art installation on the Bay Bridge goes live again permanently.

Bay Area birds are getting a gift too – a reduction in light pollution along the western span of the Bay Bridge.

This month, as an outgrowth of the Bay Lights rekindling, CalTrans replaced the old bulbs lighting the bridge roadway with new LED fixtures that are both more energy-efficient and more narrowly targeted on the traffic lanes.

The new LED fixtures are good for birds and wildlife in several ways:

• Much less nighttime light will spill over onto Bay waters, decreasing the disturbance to resting water birds and other marine life.
• Reduced glare from fixed lighting will be better for overhead migrating birds that rely on seeing the stars to navigate.
• Finally, greater energy efficiency means less of a contribution to climate change, a major threat to wildlife in coming decades.

The lighting improvements grew out of a year-long partnership between Golden Gate Bird Alliance, Caltrans, and Illuminate, the sponsor of the Bay Lights public art installation.

Bay Lights stretching from SF to Yerba Buena Island, by James Ewing Surf Scoter, one of many birds that rest and feed on the Bay waters, by Glen Tepke

“This is a great example of creative people from the public and private sector collaborating to do something wonderful for people and for wildlife in a way that’s a model for the rest of the country,” said Golden Gate Bird Alliance Executive Director Cindy Margulis.

“Our relationship with Audubon is proof positive that art and the environment can work together in big beautiful ways,” said Ben Davis, CEO and founder of Illuminate.

Bay Lights – a monumental, computer-driven display of moving lights on the cables of the Bay Bridge, between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island – was first mounted in March 2013. Created by artist Leo Villareal, the project was originally planned as a temporary two-year installation and shut down in March 2015.

But public response was so enthusiastic that organizers raised $4 million to turn it into a permanent feature of the bridge, to be maintained by CalTrans for at least the next decade. On January 30, Bay Lights will be re-kindled as part of the festivities leading up to the Super Bowl.

Golden Gate Bird Alliance approached the Bay Lights organizers more than a year ago about the project’s potential impacts on wildlife.…

Editor’s: This article is excerpted from the latest issue of Bay Nature magazine. To read the complete article, click here.

By Kim Todd

Lobos Creek trailhead in the Presidio looks wild. Flushed orange monkey flower, sage, and coyote bush spill over re-created sand dunes. Nearby, the creek empties into the ocean. But close your eyes. A water truck pulls up to a stop sign with a mechanical whine. Car engines growl, foghorns moan, a distant airplane whirs. The noise, which never stops even though it’s barely 7 a.m., makes it clear you’re in the middle of the city.

In the parking lot, a white-crowned sparrow perches at the top of an evergreen tree next to a pickup truck and sings, launching a quick patter: whistle, buzz, two-part trill, and a scattering of notes. It’s music familiar to city dwellers, even if they couldn’t name it. The song is key to the white crown’s survival, helping him attract a mate and defend the territory around his nest, warning off other males with his vocal vigor. But the notes are almost drowned out as a bus sighs to a halt. Thanks to recent restoration efforts, the bird is surrounded by plants, such as lupine, that evolved here over centuries, along with the sparrow. But there is no restoring the silence, and the noise grows year by year. What will it take for white crowns like this one to survive in this new soundscape? What will it take to be heard?

Biologists David Luther and Kate Gentry record white-crowned sparrow songs and calls at the Lobos Creek dunes in the Presidio. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknech.

Down the boardwalk, David Luther, a quiet-voiced, rusty-haired biologist from George Mason University in Virginia, is trying to find out.

“In the past ten years or so, there has been mounting evidence of how human noise is affecting these birds,” says Luther. Not just birds, he adds, but other animals, too. Studies in the developing field of “acoustic ecology” show whales, crickets, and frogs altering their behavior in response to man-made sounds. While some flee the cacophony, others adjust their internal clocks. Along a river near the Madrid airport, nightingales and European goldfinches sing earlier in the morning before the roar of the planes starts up. In Sheffield, England, robin redbreasts in noise-cluttered areas have started to sing at night. The whole “dawn chorus” has moved away from dawn.…

Editor’s Note: Thirteen years ago, Bruce Mast began writing our monthly Observations column, a roundup of rare and unusual bird sightings throughout the Bay Area. Since then a lot has changed in the world, including the rise of online resources such as listservs and eBird for tracking rare bird sightings. With his final 2015 column, Bruce is retiring Observations and moving on to other forms of involvement with GGBA. (For instance, he will be leading a reprise of his fabulous Birds & Wine in Sonoma County field trip in April for Birdathon 2016!)

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Bruce for his dedicated and meticulous work on Observations all these years. Thanks to his writing, many of us could enjoy rare sightings vicariously even during times when we weren’t able to get out in the field. His past columns and annual data summaries will remain archived and available on our web site. Following is a note from Bruce and his final column for 2015.

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Observations, October 16 – December 31, 2015

By Bruce Mast

This column represents the final rare bird roundup for 2015. It also represents the final Observations column, period, at least in this format. After 13 years and 115 columns, your loyal correspondent is ready to retire. Conversations with the Gull editorial board led to the conclusion that the rise of eBird has rendered this format of systematically documenting rarities obsolete. So with the start of the new year, it’s time to shift my energies to field trips and an occasional blog post of topical interest. I hope to see you in the field! 

Ducks to Herons

Tufted Ducks visited MRN on Nov. 27 at Abbotts Lagoon, PRNS (MD) and on Dec. 19-25 along the east shore of Tomales Bay (SC; ER, NR). The region’s 3rd Tufted Duck turned up Dec. 17 at Clifton Court Forebay, CC (AL, RB). A seawatch along the Great Highway in SF on Oct. 24 was treated to a Yellow-billed Loon (Gavia adamsii) flying south (PS).

Birders aboard a repositioning cruise located a Laysan Albatross in both SF and SM waters on Dec. 1 (mob). Short-tailed Shearwaters came within seawatching distance of shore on Nov. 1 at Moss Beach, SM (RT) and on Dec. 4 at Bodega Head, SON (SC).

There have been at least 8 Brown Boobies along our coast this fall and Boobies continued to be reported regularly along the SM and SF coasts.…