​I joined the SFBBO Habitats program as a seasonal (part-time) ecologist in the summer of 2016. At the time, I only had a vague understanding of the tidal marsh wetland-upland transitions the program works to restore. This was partly because most San Francisco Bay area residents overlook the Bay: the hills surrounding the bay are charismatic and relatively unblemished, while the margin of the bay often butts up against major freeways and sometimes smells funny. However, the Habitats Program soon taught me to appreciate this often overlooked resource. The boat trips we took to our different restoration sites ...

​It’s hard to believe that the Avian Disease Prevention Program season is half over! From June through November, we patrol Artesian and Guadalupe Sloughs by boat for the cities of San Jose and Sunnyvale who are required to monitor for avian botulism in order to release treated fresh water from their facilities. During these weekly boat surveys, I am joined by one or two volunteers, who help me by scooping up all the dead vertebrates and sick or injured birds we come across.

We began monitoring the South Bay sloughs for avian botulism in 1982. Since then, there have been six large die-offs of waterbirds and ...

​Last month, I lead a very enjoyable walk for SFBBO at Ulistac Natural Area in Santa Clara on Bird Language. As I looked around the circle of twenty students that day, I made an observation I often make on bird walks: we’re all over 50 old! Well, not quite. I noticed a few seeds of change: three parents had brought their teens.  

“Is this going to be another boring walk just naming the birds we see?” muttered one teen before returning back to her cell phone. ​

​Bird migration is a puzzle for many children.  Why do they leave? Where do they go? How do they know when to do it, and how do they find their way? Only in the past century have scientists begun to understand this process, and only in recent years have tracking devices evolved to such an extent that they can precisely track an individual bird to learn more about ... 

​Planes fly over Warm Springs heading north every 20 minutes and the cows there are apparently very itchy. Those are two of the unexpected insights we gleaned from the motion sensor cameras we use to record Burrowing Owl activity at Warm Springs in Fremont this year. It turns out that the camera posts, and the cameras themselves, are delightful scratching posts, at least for the cows. For one particular camera placed at Warm Springs last year, it took just a few hours for the cows to bend the post and dislodge the camera, leaving it on the ground facing ...

​For the past several months, I have co-lead mindfulness birding walks with SFBBO for Veteran women who attend a residential trauma treatment program. Typically, they have experienced multiple types of trauma from different life stages as well as co-occurring issues such as depression, substance use, and chronic pain. Women often talk about a profound fear and disconnection from themselves, others, and the world around them as a result of their past traumatic experiences. Reconnecting requires willingness and  ...

​I grew up with a marine biologist father. So I was always at home poking about in the tide pools, walking in the woods, and observing nature. I still remember father’s sea sick whisper of advice, after one of his particularly rough sea voyages, “Don’t study animals, Jeff, study PLANTS, because they don’t move around!” So in college I minored in botany. Birds especially intimidated me: too fast, always backlit, and with multiple songs and molting plumages.

In my middle-aged years, I began studying with Jon Young, author of the bird language bible, What the Robin Knows. I learned that ...

​During the 2018 breeding season, Federally Endangered California Least Terns returned to breed at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward for the second year in a row! We were ecstatic for them to return, not only because Least Terns have limited breeding sites across their range, but also because past research, including our own monitoring in 2017, has indicated that Snowy Plovers benefit from nesting in close proximity to Least Terns.

​​This is due to the aggressive “mobbing” defense that tern colonies employ whenever an avian predator approaches too close to the ... 

​What comes to mind when you hear the word "otter?" I commonly think of a cute, fuzzy animal that uses rocks to open up oysters, the sea otter. Many people also picture the sea otter, but few seem to imagine their sleeker counterpart, the river otter. 

​Ever since I started interning at SFBBO six months ago, I've heard about the organization’s science talks but never had the opportunity to attend one until the River Otter Talk on July 19. Though the topic seemed to lack an obvious correlation to bird conservation, I was curious to learn about other conservation efforts in the Bay Area. In ... 

Are you “HEP to the Jive?” Only readers of a certain vintage (like us!) will recognize this jazz age pun! “Hep to the jive” was 40’s Jazz musician Cab Calloway’s expression meaning “in the know” or a “cool cat!” The HEP Survey is SFBBO’s Heron Egret Project – part of their “very cool” Colonial Waterbird Program, putting biologists “in the know” about Bay Area waterbirds’ habits and trends.

​Ten years ago, my wife Barbara and I retired from thirty years of workers compensation claims management and launched much loved travel and citizen science work centered around birds. One of our ...