By Ilana DeBare
One of my favorite parts of working at Golden Gate Bird Alliance is helping curate our annual Birds of the San Francisco Bay photo calendar.
Our 2016 calendar was just released this month, with stunning photos by over 30 of the Bay Area’s best bird photographers. Because I love working on it so much, I thought it might be fun to share the process behind it.
This is our fourth annual calendar. Former GGBA Development Director Lisa Owens Viani came up with the idea – a calendar that, like Golden Gate Bird Alliance, would focus on local Bay Area birds. Lisa also set very high production standards, envisioning a calendar that people would be proud to own or gift, not one of those cheap throw-away ones that come in the mail for free.
We typically put out a call for photos in late spring, and choose them in early July. This year we received over 200 submissions from more than 70 photographers. We had many, many fabulous photos — shorebirds in flight, owls on branches, nestlings being fed, songbirds with their beaks open in song… the full variety of Bay Area avian life.
Western Screech Owls by Sue Petterson – the main March image
Forster’s Tern feeding a chick by Donald Dvorak – the main July image
We want the calendars to have broad appeal – both to experienced birders and to people who simply love nature – so we typically seek a range of birding experience in our curators. This year, our judging team was made up of me (Communications Director for GGBA, so I use a LOT of bird photos all the time!), our office manager Monica Moore (a non-birder), and GGBA member Krista Jordan (a communications professional who is taking our year-long Master Birder class).
Monica and Krista review some of the submitted photos / Photo by Ilana DeBare
This was NOT one of the judges. Photo by Ilana DeBare
What do we look for? There’s no simple formula. The main thing is the “wow” factor – photos that you look at and say “wow.” Photos that will bring joy and inspiration hanging on your wall.
Of course we look for technical quality (not blurry, appealing composition, good detail on feathers and eyes etc.), interesting behaviors, and a variety of species and types of birds. We seek a mix of close-up and wide-angle shots. We try to feature birds that weren’t highlighted the previous year.…

By Ilana DeBare
One of our favorite shorebirds is back for the winter… and in Alameda, at least, they are finding a safer roosting site than in the past thanks to teamwork by Golden Gate Bird Alliance and the East Bay Regional Park District.
Western Snowy Plovers are tiny shorebirds (just 1.2 to 2 ounces) that winter on many Bay Area beaches. The smallest birds in the plover family, most migrate inland for summer breeding, although a small number also breed here.
There are only an estimated 2,500 Snowy Plovers on the Pacific Coast; the federal government listed the western population as threatened in 1993. One of the challenges they face is that the flat sandy beaches where they roost have been overtaken by development and human recreation. It can be almost impossible for plovers to roost on urban shorelines without being flushed by off-leash dogs or joggers.
Why are secure roosting sites important? Casual passersby often think, “What’s the big deal? If a dog chases them, they can fly up and then settle right back down.”
Snowy Plover at Crown Beach, September 2015, by Allen Hirsch
But roosting is in fact an essential activity for shorebirds like plovers. Their breeding cycle is intensive and exhausting: Snowy Plovers are polyamorous, and the female may mate with several males and lay up to three clutches of eggs in three different locations a single season. She leaves after the eggs hatch, and then the male takes on sole responsibility for tending  the young.
“You can imagine that’s a pretty intensive expenditure of energy by both the females and the males,” says Cindy Margulis, Executive Director of Golden Gate Bird Alliance. “They have this flurry of breeding activity, then they have to rest and begin to rebuild their energy stores during the winter. That’s where the problem with roost sites occurs.”
Snowy Plovers can be hard to spot in the sand. Crown Beach, September 2015, by Allen Hirsch
When you have busy beaches with scores of dogs and hundreds of pedestrians flushing birds over and over throughout the day, it’s impossible for them to rest. Some of the disturbance is unintentional: Plovers, which roost in shallow indentations in the sand, blend in so well that beachgoers often don’t notice them until they practically step on them.
This is where people can help – and in the case of the Alameda plovers, have helped.
Two years ago, GGBA members doing a shorebird survey noticed roosting plovers on Alameda’s Crown Beach.…

By Pamela Llewellyn
When people visit from out of town and ask, “Where’s the best place to go birding?” I always have to pause and collect my thoughts.  San Francisco Bay is one of the richest and most diverse places to bird along the California coast — one of the major foraging, resting, and over-wintering spots along the Pacific Flyway.
Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont is one of my all-time favorite East Bay birding locations, due to the variety of habitats supporting diverse groups of both flora and fauna.  But it also has a rich cultural history.
The East Bay’s original inhabitants were ancestors of the Ohlone Indians, hunters and gatherers whose skills enabled them to live well off the land’s natural ounty.  At that time Tule elk, California Condors, sea otters, and fish were abundant.  Some of the rich wetlands that sustained them are preserved at Coyote Hills, along with 2,000-year old Tuibun Ohlone Indian shellmound sites.
The park’s varied history also includes Mission and settler ranching and farming activities, salt production, a duck hunting club, a dairy, rock quarrying, a military NIKE missile site, and a biosonar research facility.  Coyote Hills Regional Park was dedicated to public use in 1967 and is presently comprised of nearly 978 acres of open space.
There is not a dull time of year to bird at Coyote Hills: Each season offers a unique glimpse into the life of birds.
Spring in Coyote Hills is a very busy time of year.  Upon entering the park, the road passes through grasslands and marsh where Northern Harriers (formerly known as Marsh Hawks) soar over the reeds in search of food, or do roller-coaster loops and food hand-offs mid-air air to impress a potential mate.
Coyote Hills in the spring / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Coyote Hills during a spring sunset / Photo by Jerry Ting (East Bay Regional Park District)
Pied-billed Grebe at Coyote Hills / Photo by Pamela Llewellyn
Marsh Wrens chatter their staccato song out in the marshes, while Bewick’s Wrens sing melodiously from branches up on the hillside.  If you park at the Visitor Center and walk up to Hoot Hollow, you might catch a glimpse of the resident Great-horned Owl family with their newly fledged young.   Or if you walk out further into the marshes you may hear the lovely Common Yellowthroats, perched in among the reeds, singing to define territory for their families.…

Note: This is the seventh in a series of occasional blog posts by GGBA member George Peyton about his other half Lani Rumbaoa’s effort to see over 600 bird species in the Lower 48 states in 2015.
By George Peyton
In planning Lani’s Big Year, it became evident that a key to reaching her goal was making the absolute maximum use of spring. During spring, birds are in bright plumage, often singing so they are more easily located, and sometimes concentrated in relatively small areas along migratory pathways such as High Island, Texas, or Magee Marsh, Ohio.
Out of this developed a solid four-week trip to ten states, from Maine to Mississippi to Minnesota, with Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Tennessee, and North Dakota thrown in — an all-out effort to hit as many key bird locations as possible before the crucial spring birding period faded into the much duller and slower Summer.
I realized that birding all-out day after day for four weeks would be totally exhausting, so I included a large Peyton Family Reunion in Mississippi, followed by a long weekend at my 55th Reunion at Princeton, both of which did wonders in giving us a breaks from the 12+ hours of birding each day.
We started on May 11, flying to Detroit and then driving down to the Toledo, Ohio, area, in order to be reasonably close to Magee Marsh, a legendary “Migrant Trap” where the “Biggest Week of Birding” was drawing thousands of birders from around the U.S. and the world. When I first went to Magee Marsh four years ago, I simply could not believe it. In my 66 years of birding, this was the most amazing place to bird in the United States that I had ever been.
Picture this: A half-mile-long five-foot-wide boardwalk going through a wooded swamp 250 yards from the shore of Lake Erie, with at any given time between 350 and 1,000+ birders on that boardwalk.
Magee Marsh crowd / Photo from www.mageemarsh.org
It sounds insane, and it is! Sometimes you have to be a blocking back pushing through the crowds of birders and forests of scopes and gigantic Bazooka-looking cameras on tripods — mostly Canons — pointed in every direction. Why in the world would any mentally competent birder ever endure this mass of humanity and constant traffic jam?
The answer is the amazing variety of birds, particularly warblers, often very close, often at eye level, not infrequently singing their hearts out, and for the most part totally oblivious to all of the crazy birders nearby.…

By Steve and Carol Lombardi
In April, we joined five other Golden Gate Bird Alliance members on a nine-day birding adventure to the South Texas coast and the lower Rio Grande Valley. Eddie Bartley and Noreen Weeden of NatureTrip, both longtime GGBA members, were our excellent, well-organized guides.
The South Texas coast is a top birding destination in the spring because of the migrant “fall-out” – tens of thousands of birds descending for rest and food after their long flight north over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Highlights of the trip included

• 222 species on our list. Lots of warblers and other neotropical migrants, helped in part by the migrant fall-out at South Padre Island: One of those “Over here! Over there! And over there!” mornings.
• Thirty different spots visited, including state parks, roadside rests, beach towns, and wildlife refuges. We traversed the southeast corner of the state, starting in Corpus Christie, going south to the South Padre Island/Brownsville area, up the Rio Grande Valley as far as McAllen, and back to Corpus.
• Nine days of good accommodations, including five very nice 3-star hotels and a bunch of very, very good meals—yes, even vegetarian!
• Good weather (for the humans). The area can be uncomfortably hot this time of year. Instead, we had cold fronts, which kept the daytime weather temperate and cloudy and contributed to the fall-outs we witnessed.

The gulf coast is definitely a tourist destination, as is apparent from the architecture. But they also take their birding seriously. Local conservation groups have purchased woodlots and marshes in the middle of neighborhoods to protect them from development and provide habitat. Result: Great birding with on-street parking.
This spiffy natural habitat—created
within the residential area—also wins the Most Adjectives In A Plaque Award.
We spent our first day of the trip in and around Port Aransas, across the bay from Corpus Christie on Mustang Island. We were treated to great close-up views of migrating shorebirds on the beaches and neotropical migrants in the nearby woodlots. As Californians, we were pretty well bundled up against the expected bugs. So we were bemused (well, shocked, really) to see many of the local folks out birding in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. We hit half a dozen well-known spots in this area and—among other lessons—grasped the difference between Laughing and Franklin’s Gulls.
After a rain delay that forced us to kill some time in a German bakery (oh, woe is us), we headed south toward Brownsville and South Padre Island, where we spent three nights.…