By Ilana DeBare
Golden Gate Bird Alliance relies on volunteers. How many volunteers, you might ask? A few dozen? Maybe a hundred?
Try fourteen hundred — and that’s just in the first six months of 2015.
Saturday was our annual Volunteer Appreciation Picnic, held this year at Alameda’s Crown Memorial Beach, near the Return of the Terns tour site.
Luckily for us and our supply of sandwiches, all 1,400 didn’t show up. But those who did attend enjoyed a yummy picnic lunch, raffle prizes, warm sun and fresh Bay breezes, and glimpses of a flock of Brown Pelicans floating just offshore. Everyone also got our heartfelt thanks and one of our new Golden Gate Bird Alliance Burrowing Owl tote bags!
We awarded our 2015 Paul Covel Conservation Education Award to Herb and Randi Long, who have volunteered since 2009 in our Eco-Education program that each year introduces about 700 children from low-income elementary schools to nature.
Herb and Randi Long accept the Paul Covel Conservation Education Award from Eco-Education Director Anthony DeCicco
What else do Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers do, besides help lead Eco-Education field trips? Among other things:
Field trip leaders guide over 120 free bird walks each year, which are the first introduction to birding for many participants.
Docents help the public notice and appreciate the birds around them at Lake Merritt, the Bay Trail, Cesar Chavez Park, and downtown Oakland.
Volunteer Coordinator Noreen Weeden speaks to some of the picnic attendees
GGBA Executive Director Cindy Margulis thanks volunteers
Hundreds of people — both individuals and organized groups such as scouts, students, and workplace teams — help restore wildlife habitat with us at Pier 94, Golden Gate Park, Crissy Field, the Alameda Wildlife Refuge, and Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline.
Our San Francisco and East Bay conservation committees, along with our Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Reserve committee, study and speak out on local issues affecting birds and wildlife.
GGBA office volunteers do everything from update our membership database to organize our library of birding books.
A number of attendees managed to squeeze in both the picnic AND the Return of the Terns tour!
Endangered California Least Tern on eggs, viewed through wire fence on Return of the Terns bus tour at the Alameda Wildlife Refuge / Photo by Darlene McNulty
Volunteers are a key part of our communications program — photographing GGBA events and sharing gorgeous bird photos, writing articles for our blog and The Gull newsletter, and managing our Twitter and Meetup feeds.…

By Ilana DeBare
If you’ve been involved with Golden Gate Bird Alliance, you’ve probably heard a lot about the nesting colony of California Least Terns at Alameda Point. Our Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Reserve committee has worked on behalf of these tiny, endangered birds for thirty years – pressing for permanent protection of their nest site, helping the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service prepare the site for the terns’ arrival each spring, monitoring for predators, and educating the public.
Today’s blog post is about another East Bay colony of Least Terns – the one at Hayward Regional Shoreline.
Least Terns – the smallest member of the tern family, at just 8-9 inches and slightly over one ounce – were designated by the federal government as endangered in 1970, due to loss of habitat, disturbance of nest sites, and predation by other species of birds and mammals.
In 2001, the East Bay Regional Park District launched an effort to encourage Least Tern nesting on a 0.6-acre island in the shallow, brackish waters of Hayward Regional Shoreline.
Adult Least Tern and chick / Photo by Rick Lewis
Least Tern on nest with egg and chick / Photo by Rick Lewis
The tern island, viewed from the levee / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Over four years, 1,600 volunteers put in 20,000 hours creating the tern equivalent of a honeymoon resort, now known as Tern Town. First they had to remove all the non-native weeds covering the man-made island, since Least Terns look for flat, sandy nest sites where they can easily see their chicks and potential predators. The Park District added a layer of landscape fabric to limit weed growth, and on top of that placed 180 tons of sand, oyster shells, and rock salt.
The District installed little wood and ceramic shelters for the chicks, similar to what Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers install at the Alameda site each year. They also placed hand-painted Least Tern decoys on the island to signal, “Come on over! This is tern heaven!” And starting in 2005, they reinforced that message with a stereo system that continually plays tern courtship calls through the first half of nesting season.
The result? The densest concentration of Least Tern nests on the West Coast. The Alameda site remains larger – but Hayward has more successful nests per acre.
Least Tern chick with ceramic shelters / Photo by Rick Lewis
“We have up to 80 or 90 pairs on an island the size of an acre,” said David “Doc Quack” Riensche, the East Bay Regional Park District biologist overseeing the tern island.…

Note: This is the fifth 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
Imagine getting up most mornings between 3 and 4 a.m. to go see “chickens” doing their thing out in very cold weather – followed by long days of birding for nine straight days. That is a good description of the Colorado Grouse Tour organized by High Lonesome BirdTours and extremely well led by Kip Miller and Brett Ewald, which Lani and I were fortunate to join in early April.
In fact, we saw eight separate species of “chickens”, including Greater Prairie-Chicken, Lesser Prairie-Chicken, Gunnison’s Sage-Grouse (rare and an endangered species), Greater Sage-Grouse (the same as seen near Susanville on Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s March field trip), Sharp-tailed Grouse, Chukar, Dusky Grouse, and White-tailed Ptarmigan.
Our first early morning out to see Greater Prairie-Chicken was on Bledsoe Ranch, a huge private ranch of 64,000 acres or 100 square miles, with over 100 separate Greater Prairie-Chicken Leks. We left our motel very early in our two vans, parked right next to the Lek about 1/2 hour before it became light, and saw more than 35 Greater Prairie-Chickens, some within 25 to 30 feet of our vans.
It was an amazing show watching the males do their mating displays and dances, reminding me of some Native American dances that were in fact patterned after the “Chicken Dances.” It was quite cold: I was wearing three separate pairs of long underwear, two of which I wore at Everest Base Camp in 1985, plus 3 layers of coats, and I still shivered a bit.
Male Greater Sage-Grouse performs his courtship display for a female / Photo by Jeanne Stafford (USFWS)
George and Lani with Bob Bledsoe, owner of Bledsoe Ranch, which protects over 100 Prairie-Chicken leks. The land behind them includes the leks.
The next morning we were up again extremely early, and after driving over a half hour in the dark, transferred to a yellow school bus and drove a good bit of time out to a Lek where there were only three Lesser Prairie-Chicken males performing. (This species is being considered for Threatened or Endangered Listing.) We sat in the bus for around 45 minutes in the dark and cold with the windows open before we could make out the forms of the Lesser Prairie-Chickens displaying further away than the previous day.…

This year, Golden Gate Bird Alliance is awarding its Paul Covel Conservation Education award to Herb and Randi Long, two volunteers who have been pillars of our award-winning Eco-Education program since 2009. Eco-Ed works with 700 children from low-income elementary schools in Oakland, San Francisco and Richmond each year. With the 2015 Covel Award going to Herb and Randi, it seemed like a good time to share a “day in the life” of an Eco-Ed field trip — via a firsthand account and photos by our graphic designer.
By Eva Guralnick
I’ve designed Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s Gull newsletter and other materials since 2002, but until this spring I’d never checked out Eco-Ed for myself. I joined GGBA and Mr. Bonner’s fourth-grade class from Bayview Elementary School in Richmond on a Friday at Point Pinole and had a blast with the kids.
GGBA Eco-Education Director Anthony DeCicco started by gathering them all in a circle for some exercises to get some of their wiggles out and get them thinking about the day. Then he split them into one group for planting sticky monkey flower down by the shore with high school volunteer Henry, and two smaller groups for hiking. Anthony led one group and a volunteer led the other. The groups traded off later so everyone could get an equal turn at hiking and planting.
Stretching / Photo by Eva Guralnick
Photo by Eva Guralnick
The hiking groups spent some time learning how to effectively use binoculars and getting them adjusted for their eyes before we set out. Anthony led his group through some exercises to help them focus on different distances that I’ll have to use on my own young son. It took them about 10 minutes but they all got the hang of it.
Anthony’s group had success right away when a large hawk flew overhead and circled several times, giving them lots of opportunities to pick it up in their binoculars for a close look. The kids went nuts. This was the real deal! They scrambled to look through their guides. Anthony led them through the markings of the bird — “Did it have a black tail? Did it have a white breast?” — and they identified it as a Red-tailed Hawk. It came back for a few more circles.
Eco-ed Director Anthony DeCicco and students from Bayview Elementary / Photo by Eva Guralnick
Photo by Eva Guralnick
We headed into the open area and identified a female Western Bluebird, and then a few minutes later a male on a nearby bush.…

By Eddie Bartley
On a recent visit to Taiwan, we rejoined our friends and most excellent local wildlife guides Stone and Richard for what we affectionately referred to as our “Taiwan recon” tour. Our goals were to firm up plans for a Golden Gate Bird Alliance tour in October 2015 while improving our birding skills and photography of Taiwan’s wildlife. To say it was “fun” for us would be a colossal understatement. It was a trip chock full of beautiful wildlife, awesome scenery, delicious food, wonderful company, and surprise encounters.
Taiwan, at less than 1/10th the size of California, has recorded at least 626 bird species, more than 20 of which are endemics (only here). By Pacific Island standards, that number of endemic species is not all that impressive — neighboring Philippines with its many tiny islets boasts over 200 endemics. What is impressive however is the “absolutely gorgeous” factor of many of the Taiwan specialties and how relatively easy it is to see them. Many of the unique birds here are fairly common in their habitat. On this 10-day tour we were able to see all but one of the endemic birds and most of the endemic sub-species.
Swinhoe’s Pheasant, one of the many gorgeous birds found only In Taiwan / Photo by Noreen Weeden

Common names of uncommonly beautiful birds

As on many other islands, the common names of Taiwan’s endemic birds are often simply preceded by the current island name itself as in the Taiwan… Partridge, Barbet, Cupwing, Bush-Warbler, Fulvetta, Yuhina, Hwamei, Barwing or, the ultra-rosy “Taiwan Rosefinch,” a.k.a. “Rosyfinch.”
In some cases, the popular former name bestowed on this lovely sub-tropical locale by early Portuguese Sailors –“Isla Formosa”, meaning the “beautiful island” — is used, as in the sweet singing Formosan Whistling Thrush or the fabulously blue Formosan Magpie.

Formosan Magpie / Photo by Eddie Bartley
One of the more entertaining, confusing, and at times frustrating elements of assembling a list of birds you want to study or detect on a trip is that not all authorities are in agreement at any one time as to the common name. Nor do the authorities agree upon when a species deserves full species status or even sub-species designation. This is especially true of islands and other isolated populations. Scientific names are the most informative, and for birding Taiwan we use multiple field and reference guides. Primary among the resources are the most recent designations listed by the Bird Records Committee of the Wild Bird Federation of China and the Clements Checklist of the Birds of the World which recognizes 26 bird species as endemic and 70 endemic subspecies.…