In this month's Wingbeat e-newsletter, read about our recent Volunteer Appreciation Party; welcome back Senior Ecologist Eric Lynch to the tidal marsh habitats team; find out how to volunteer in our phalarope research; learn how we celebrated World Migratory Bird Day with a scavenger hunt and photo contest with our partners at the Wildlife Refuge; find out how students at St. Thomas the Apostle School and Captain Jason M. Dahl Elementary learned about birds and science; check out ED Yiwei Wang's podcast interview with Nature's Archive; and get an update on our Birdy Hour Speaker Series and other events!

In this month's Wingbeat e-newsletter, read about our Volunteer Appreciation Party; find out how students at Visionary Arts are creating a bird mural for the South Bay Yacht Club; give to our Spring Appeal; participate our Virtual Bird Day Fest with the Wildlife Refuge for World Migratory Bird Day; read about our partnership with Bay Trail Confidential; learn how students from Bessie Carmichael Elementary, Hillbrook School, and Grimmer Elementary learned about birds and science; read about our search for a new ED; and discover what is new in our Birdy Hour Speaker Series and other community events!

Sometimes we think the smallest children are too young to be introduced to birds. But from their first day, they’re learning by observation. My own parents claimed that my first real sentence came when I announced, from a highchair near the bird-feeder window, “Jaybird jump down!”

In I Am A Bird, Hope Lim introduces us to a small girl who loves riding on the back of her dad’s bicycle.“Every morning,” she says, “I fly like a bird on Daddy’s bike. I sing ...

In this month's Wingbeat e-newsletter, read about a research paper we published about the social behavior of birds in the Journal of Ornithology; find out how our new mist net at CCFS will help us discover how high flying birds use space; learn how we have expanded the number of sites we monitor for Snowy Plovers; read how students at J. Haley Durham Elementary School are designing ways to  protect migratory birds; celebrate our grant from Applied Materials to serve the Boys & Girls Club; welcome new outreach interns Koryna Boudinot and Samuel Funakoshi and thank board member Kiana Said; and get an update about our Birdy Hours and other events! 

​“What kind of owl is that?” asks my young neighbor, listening to the soft “coo-COO-cooo-cooo” of a Mourning Dove and reminding me how little many of our children know about the birds around us. Dayna Lorentz, in the recent middle-grade novel Of a Feather, introduces two characters, a young Great Horned Owl and a middle grade girl, both struggling to find their places in the world under challenging conditions.  

​The owl, Second (named for his birth order, and taunted by his older sister, who has already fledged) is timid, slow in learning to hunt and ...

In this month's Wingbeat e-newsletter, visit our colonial waterbird site to see results from our 2020 surveys and learn about our phalarope research; read about a memorial gift that supports workshop scholarships for students from underserved communities; join our Spring 2021 Bird Photo Big Day; learn about our volunteer opportunities and the new Birding the Bay Trail brochure; celebrate a grant from Cargill to support outreach, plovers, and landbirds; welcome board members Deanna DeCasto, Karan Gathani, Sheri Scheldorf, and Debbie Wong; welcome back biologist Parker Kaye; thank landbird intern Hongyu Li; and get an update about our Birdy Hours and other events!

​It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that birding changed my life. I moved to San Francisco and ended up getting a job at Alcatraz Island, a National Park Site but also a bird sanctuary and colonial nesting site for hundreds of waterbirds.

I was working in visitor services and had never felt that parks and the outdoors were necessarily places that I belonged. I was born in Houston, Texas, to very poor teenage parents and I am Mexican-American. Growing up, I didn’t see myself in the people who were in these spaces.

​Working on Alcatraz changed that, when my first winter there a co-worker and I discovered a Peregrine Falcon on the water tower - though we didn’t know that’s what she was at the ...

My absolute favorite thing about birding is the ability to step into the private lives of birds. I’ve watched Acorn Woodpeckers squabble en masse and have spent long enough staring at a California Towhee to discover that it picks through the leaf litter with a sudden jump instead of a polite scratch. Meanwhile, on trails and city streets I watch so many people rush past without ever knowing that was going on a few feet from them. 
 
But, observant as I am, there is so much I still don’t know about birds--one of those being how to identify waterfowl. Despite lots of experience with shorebirds, I never gave much thought to waterfowl. That’s why when I saw SFBBO’s Waterfowl Workshop with ...