By Ilana DeBare
Windy, windy, windy!
The 2014 San Francisco Christmas Bird Count will be remembered for its strong winds, which reached as high as 60 mph in some parts of the Bay Area.
One participant sustained a hand injury from wind-blown tree debris. The Ocean Beach/Zoo count team couldn’t count in Pine Lake Park (Stern Grove) due to a fallen tree there.
But about 150 intrepid counters braved the wind and the chill temperatures on Tuesday December 30 to document a preliminary total of 183 species – just short of last year’s record of 184.
The count covered a 15-mile-wide circle extending from the Presidio and Fort Mason south to San Francisco International Airport, Pacifica, and the Crystal Springs reservoir area in San Mateo County. Afterwards, participants gathered for a festive and delicious dinner at the Log Cabin in the Presidio.
Fort Funston sea watch / Photo by Christopher Reiger
SF’s hills offer beautiful views as well as birding / Photo by Marissa Ortega-Welch
The Crystal Springs area team breaks for lunch. / Photo by Noreen Weeden
Among the highlights of this year’s count, which was the 115^th CBC nationally and the 32^nd consecutive count in San Francisco:

• The famed Rustic Bunting in Golden Gate Park was found. (Collective sigh of relief.) The team had spent 45 minutes looking for it, when a photographer with “one of those 5 foot lenses” got the team on a bird that turned out to be the bunting.
• Josiah Clark’s team at the Presidio reported a great flyover: 19 Tundra Swans and one Greater White-Fronted Goose. They also managed to see a Nelson’s Sharp-Tailed Sparrow.
• Bob Power’s team found two Ancient Murrelets and one Brown Booby over the Sutro Baths/Cliff House area.
• The Lake Merced team found 50 White-throated Swifts furiously foraging and a flock of Tri-colored Blackbirds, as well as a Tropical Kingbird, Cassin’s Auklet, Great Tailed Grackle and a Yellow-Shafted Flicker.
• The Eastern Golden Gate Park team had dueting Great Horned Owls and a nice group of 148 Band-Tailed Pigeons. Plus that Rustic Bunting!
• Varied Thrush were abundant, as they had been in the Oakland CBC several weeks earlier. The Eastern Golden Gate Park team spotted 124 Varied Thrush – even higher than their American Robin count of 88.

One of the many Varied Thrushes sighted / Photo by Bob Gunderson

• The Ocean Beach/Zoo team spied threatened Western Snowy Plovers overwintering along the beach, as well as a Species of Special Concern, Burrowing Owl.

…

Bay Nature magazine recently ran an online column on what birds do in the rain, by San Francisco consulting naturalist Josiah Clark. We liked it so much that we’re reprinting it! (With permission of course.)
By Josiah Clark

The sea gives birth to the storm and it’s the seabirds that feel it first. With instincts any sailor would envy, seabirds sense and flee from the storm front, often arriving in numbers days before the weather makes landfall. Larger pelagic birds somehow retain their independence from land, toughing out even the most raging of storms. In these conditions it is the smaller pelagic birds that are brought to the brink. With less mass and running on tighter energy budgets, murrelets, phalaropes, and the aptly-named Storm Petrels near land are signs of an uncommonly torn-up ocean beyond the horizon.

Closer to shore, gulls, pelicans, and loons stream south over wave and bluff in a darkening sky, avoiding the worst of the storm’s wrath. But when seabirds get unlucky, exhausted, and too wet, they are at the mercy of the current. At the Golden Gate on an incoming tide it means getting sucked into the Bay. This accounts for many of the only East and South Bay records for truly pelagic birds. Despite their remarkable instincts and endurance, countless seabirds of many types perish during extreme winter storms. But only a fraction of their corpses can be found at the high tide line after any big storm.

As for land birds, if the rain is not too heavy nor too cold, most birds will keep feeding. Stalwart Christmas bird counters regularly go birding in the rain, and there is often sustained activity with plenty to look at even in heavy rain if you know where to look. But what happens to them when it’s pouring, say, for days?

The water-shedding micro-structures of flight feathers shed droplets off the birds’ back. An oil gland at the base of the tail helps keep the feathers zipped up water-tight. The inner insulating layers of down feathers are kept dry and able to be fluffed up with air, holding in body heat.

Feather repelling rain / Photo by Rick Lewis

If I were a bird I would want to go inside a dry stump. As it turns out, only birds that nest in cavities are likely to have that luxury. Flocks of Pygmy Nuthatches pack into chiseled holes in dead snags like clown cars, where they seem to embody the meaning of “cozy”.…

By Nancy Johnston

Birders quickly learn to use bird bills to help identify species. Bird tongues, if we could easily see them, would also be helpful in identifying species. This blog is to whet your tongue about bird tongues and highlight the diversity that evolution has brought to avian tongues.

First, most birds have pretty prosaic tongues. They look somewhat similar to ours but can have some interesting extra features. As shown in Figure 1, the tips can be fringed or split and the root of the tongue may have backward-facing barbs. It is not clear if the fraying or splitting helps in acquiring and eating food, but the backward-facing barbs are useful for moving food to the gullet. This is needed because birds don’t swallow the way we do. These tongues vary quite a bit in width, thickness, amount of fraying, barbs and their placement, etc. (Note: Drawings are not to scale.)

Figure 1: (A) Northern Mockingbird, (B) Say’s Phoebe, (C) American Kestrel, (D) Anna’s Hummingbird (partial), (E) Nuttall’s Woodpecker, (F) Acorn Woodpecker. Drawings by L.L. Gardner, 1925

Species such as woodpeckers and hummingbirds have more interesting tongues.  Most of these birds have tongues that can extend far outside their bill (Figure 2).  For these birds, the boney/cartilaginous apparatus that supports the tongue wraps around the skull under the skin, usually terminating in the right nostril (Figure 3).  Extending their tongues lets hummingbirds reach into flowers for nectar or lets woodpeckers get insects from crevices in trees.

In the case of woodpeckers (Figure 4), the tip of their tongue can also be barbed or covered in sticky fluid that helps them capture insects. Sapsuckers have shorter tongues with hair-like structures for gathering sap from trees.

Figure 2: Hummingbird with tongue extended and furled together. Photo by Bob Lewis, www.wingbeats.org.
Figure 3: Pictures of the tongue and the supporting apparatus (red). A: shows how the horns go around the skull and terminate in the right nostril, e.g., Northern Flicker. B: shows how the horns can go around the eye, e.g., picus. Modification of a picture from etc.usf.edu/clipart/ Figure 4: Red-bellied Woodpecker tongue tip showing the rear-facing barbs used for extracting larvae from trees. Photo by Chris Kargel, www.livingstonbirds.com/photos/red-bellied_woodpecker/

Birds that filter out food particles from mud and water have the most complicated-looking tongues.  Their tongues have papillae (barb-like or hair-like structures) of various sizes and shapes that help strain out food particles.…

By Ilana DeBare
The Bay Area’s welcome rainstorms let up for 24 hours on Sunday… just long enough for more than 200 birders to have a fabulous Oakland Christmas Bird Count.
Sunday December 14 marked the start of the 115th year of Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, and the 74th such count in Oakland.
Registration in advance came to 287 people, a new record for Oakland. Last year the Oakland count was the fourth largest in North America, and this year’s count is likely to be in the top five again.
With logistical planning that practically rivaled D-Day, count organizers Bob Lewis and Dave Quady sent 29 teams out into the field to tally birds on the bay and shoreline, on hilltops and in ravines, at cemeteries, college campuses, parking lots, city streets, and golf courses.
Then about 130 participants gathered to celebrate and compare notes over dinner at Northbrae Community Church in Berkeley.
The preliminary, incomplete tally was 176 species — short of the Oakland record of 183, but still a respectable total.
San Leandro Bay count team. Photo by Nancy Johnston.
Counting at Lake Merritt. Photo by Ilana DeBare
Lots of scaup but no Tufted Duck on Lake Merritt. Photo by Ilana DeBare
Notable this year were large numbers of Acorn Woodpeckers and Varied Thrushes, species that are not typically common in most of the Oakland count circle. The Tilden North count team spotted 74 Varied Thrushes, while Tilden South spotted 118!
“There were Acorn Woodpeckers all over,” count organizer Dave Quady said. “It’s probably due to some combination of a prolific breeding year and a shortage of acorns east of us” (where the birds are more typically found).
The count was featured in vivid news coverage by the San Francisco Chronicle, Contra Costa Times, and Channel 7.
It drew both longtime birders and people who were new to the CBC.
On the longtime end of things, the Merritt College team was made up of Anthony Fisher, his two brothers, and his nephew. The Fishers grew up in that neighborhood and used to bird there as kids when Campus Drive was a meadow rather than a subdivision.
“It was a rolling meadow above the quarry, with snags and Western Bluebirds nesting in them,” Fisher recalled.
Fisher family count team at Merritt College / Photo by Ilana DeBare
On the newer end of things, this was the first count for Susanna Kwan, who started birding last January and joined the Mills College count team.…

By George Peyton
The longtime skipper of the North Boat, Ed Jepsen, was an excellent sailor and navigator, and even taught classes for the U.S. Coast Guard. However, one day many years ago, we sailed into a phenomenon that could have led to the death of Ed’s then-wife.
It was a clear and cold day for the Oakland Christmas Count, and the North Boat was headed north from the Bay Bridge paralleling the eastern shore of Treasure Island.
Ed’s wife loved the outdoors and birds and had come to love being out in the Jepsens’ boat. But by that time her health confined her to a wheelchair, where she was enjoying the expansive view from the back deck.
Suddenly, the prow of the North Boat lurched substantially upward into the air as we emerged from the calm waters behind Treasure Island and encountered a very strong rising tide coming into the Bay from the Golden Gate.
Scaup on SF Bay / Photo by U.S. Geological Survey
We all grabbed onto something to steady ourselves. But right away I noticed that the wheelchair did not have its brakes fully engaged and was rolling rapidly toward the rear of the boat — with Ms. Jepsen in it.
I remember jumping and grabbing the arm of the wheelchair. Fortunately one of our other bird spotters did likewise, just before it hit the back railing, where it could have thrown Ms. Jepsen out and into the water.
We could hardly believe what had happened and how fortunate we were that a tragedy had not occurred. Naturally our minds were at least temporarily off of counting birds.
Another extremely memorable North Boat experience took place on another cold, clear day that was quite windy. We had rounded the south side of Yerba Buena Island and passed under the Bay Bridge heading north on the San Francisco side, scanning the small rocky beaches at the base of the island’s steep cliffs for birds.
Yerba Buena Island, with Oakland and Alameda in the background and San Francisco across the bridge to the right
Suddenly, Pete White called out that he had seen something strange on the beach that looked a little like a human body. He asked Ed Jepsen to come about and get closer, so that we could better see what was on that small beach.
I ran over to the railing and, sure enough, my binoculars showed a dead body washed up on the beach.…