Wingbeat Blog

By SFBBO Director of Regional Strategies Dr. Nathan Von Schmidt, Ph.D

Huge in scope, this series of reports comprehensively covers California’s nine regions (regional reports) plus statewide synthesis (statewide summary) and special topical areas (statewide topical reports) focused on environmental justice and marginalized communities.

This Fifth Assessment builds on past state assessments by updating the core reviews of climate science and vulnerabilities and undertaking a major effort to engage directly with local communities and California’s Native American Tribes in order to uplift their adaptation efforts to the state level. Since the cancellation of the federal National Climate Change Assessment, this report represents the most cutting-edge and comprehensive climate change assessment in the country.

SFBBO was a major contributor to this assessment under the banner of our new Climate Change program. I created and ran the statewide analysis workgroup that analyzed the climate change projections to understand how increasing temperatures and intensifying precipitation extremes were impacting communities and ecosystems across California’s nine regions. Because of this work, for the first time all of California’s nine regions have a consistent analysis framework and set of measures to allow state-wide comparison.

In addition, I lead-authored the Central Coast regional report, with a special emphasis on climate forecast and natural ecosystems, outreach to California Native American tribes, and listening sessions to migrant farmworkers on the mid-peninsula to understand their climate vulnerabilities.

Of course, SFBBO’s leading role in the assessment ensured birds would get their due attention! The most significant climate threats were related to our coastal ecosystems:

• Tidal marsh species like Ridgway’s Rail are imperiled as tidal marsh is projected to drown under sea level rise.

• Coast-nesting species like Black Oystercatchers and Snowy Plovers are even more imperiled, as they often occupy cliffs and cliff-backed beaches that have no space for coastal retreat from the rising seas.

These species’ habitats are therefore likely to shrink.

The report also highlights how the widespread collapse of kelp forests due to extreme marine heatwaves – which appear poised to strike again with the “super El Niño” now underway – have had cascading impacts on these marine systems, which depends on kelp wrack washing ashore to form the base of the coastal food web. These events have also caused major impacts to our fisheries, including the closure of red abalone fishery which was just extended to 2036 due to a failure of populations to recover.

In the face of such dire threats, however, the report highlights good news: We have solutions, and they’re being led by California’s Native American Tribes!

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been shown to help kelp forests recover more quickly from marine heatwaves. They appear to do this by protecting predators of sea urchins from over-fishing, which prevents the sea urchin populations from exploding during marine heatwaves and stripping kelp forests bare.

I worked with Chumash tribes of the Channel Islands to highlight their work establishing the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary in 2022, stretching from the Channel Islands north along the Santa Barbara Coast, which follows an innovative new federal-tribal co-stewardship framework: https://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/chumash-heritage/

Within this broader area, Chumash tribes are still working to establish two areas with even stricter state-level protections, Mishopshno (https://www.mishopshnompa.org/) and Point Sal (https://www.pointsalmpa.org/).

SFBBO is working to adapt our ecosystems to climate change here in San Francisco Bay as well.

Major investments in tidal marsh restoration, such as our work on the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, are projected to create tidal marshes resilient to sea level rise.

Similar efforts are being carried out across the California Coast, with the reports highlighting other major efforts like the ongoing restoration of Elkhorn Slough in Monterey Bay (https://elkhornslough.org/reserve/tidal-wetland-program/).

Restoration ecologists from Elkhorn Slough recently visited our Restoration Project to speak with SFBBO staff about how to inform their restoration designs. The remaining dry salt pannes within the Restoration Project that our Plover and Tern program helps manage and monitor provide key Snowy Plover habitat that is protected from the rising seas by levees.

We’ll discuss more of these findings in the coming months as the report rollout continues with brochures and special Birdy Hour talks. Stay tuned!

By SFBBO Director of Plover and Tern Science Maddy Schwarz

The Marine Mammal Center runs an environmental education program, Stewardship Saturday, where high school students from around the Bay Area sign up to spend a Saturday learning about a marine ecosystem and then take action to help that ecosystem.

This free program features rotating events along the Center’s 600-mile range exploring the science of the Center, learning more about ocean conservation, and connecting with local conservation communities.

In March 2025, the Center reached out to SFBBO to ask us to partner with them to educate youth about birds and conservation science. Together we developed a Stewardship Saturday curriculum that teaches students about Snowy Plovers, Least Terns, and other migratory seabirds. On Oct. 25 last year kids from several different high schools helped SFBBO manage a plover and tern breeding pond at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward by collecting chick shelters and putting them in storage for the winter.

After a successful event, the Marine Mammal Center offered SFBBO a tour of their facilities, which we gratefully accepted! To learn more about the Marine Mammal Center’s high school education program, please visit their website. To get involved in SFBBO’s volunteer and outreach programs, please visit our events page.  

The above photo of SFBBO Director of Plover and Tern Science Maddy Schwarz and a student participant was taken by Marine Mammal Center Marine Science Educator Kyra Kawamoto.

By SFBBO Board Member Karan Gathani

Wild & Scenic Film Festival

This was our fourth year straight tabling at the Scenic and Wild Film festival. The energy that the audience brings to this event is palpable and everyone attending is really looking to make a difference in their communities. So we try our best to find programs that they can contribute within SFBBO based on their interests. It was a busy event, with a high volume of visitors packed into one intense, 60-minute window. We successfully debuted “Birdle: Marsh Madness,” ran gameplay sessions for participants, and onboarded two new tabling volunteers.

Bird and Butterfly Festival

The event saw a high volume of families, particularly those with children under age ten. Our booth offered an interactive experience where participants delved into “Birdle: After Dark” and “Birdle: Marsh Madness” to discover the secrets of local nocturnal and marsh-dwelling avian species. Throughout the day, we fielded numerous inquiries from enthusiastic visitors eager to find the best local spots for observing birds like the Ridgway’s Rail and the Cinnamon Teal.

These hands-on activities, ranging from matching beak shapes to specific diets to identifying bird calls, create an instant bond between visitors and the natural world. This spark of inspiration allows the public to uncover the wonders of our local avian populations. From there, the experience evolves into a meaningful educational conversation about the importance of native plants and the critical restoration work conducted by SFBBO. We explain how revitalizing tidal marshes provides essential sanctuary for species at risk, such as the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse and the endangered Ridgway’s Rail. By the time they leave, our guests have a defined roadmap for stewardship—whether through active volunteering to enhance local habitats or by gaining a profound new respect for our ongoing conservation missions.

The success of our tabling efforts rests entirely on the tireless commitment and passion shown by our staff, board, and outreach team. I want to express my sincere appreciation for their invaluable contributions, as their support is the heartbeat that sustains our community engagement.

By SFBBO Director of Regional Strategies Dr. Nathan Van Schmidt

When SFBBO was founded in 1981, a central goal of the organization was to study how waterbird species were using the salt ponds of South San Francisco Bay. Those founding researchers had no idea that these salt ponds would become the site of the largest restoration effort on the U.S. Pacific Coast, the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. But they did immediately see the value of the hypersaline ecosystem for many waterbirds, including specialist species that normally only occurring in saline lakes like Mono Lake and the Great Salt Lake. These include Wilson’s and Red-necked Phalaropes, California and Bonaparte’s Gulls, and Eared Grebes. California Gulls breed locally, while the others participate in a hemispheric migratory network that connects saline lakes from Canada to Argentina.

That system of saline lakes is in crisis. Nearly all of these ecosystems in an extremely fragile due to decades of unsustainable water diversions. As a result, some like Lake Abert are drying out and functionally collapsing as an ecosystem when hit by drought. The salt ponds of San Francisco Bay may act as refuge in such years, though the influxes of avian refugees can significantly impact our own ecosystems.

As a result of this crisis, Dr. Nathan Van Schmidt, SFBBO’s Director of Regional Strategies, joined other leading phalarope researchers in signing scientific petition to list the Wilson’s Phalarope as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This was driven in part by documented 98% declines of this species locally. This winter, this action produced results: the federal government has officially agreed that a review of the species status was warranted and begun the review process. Agency heads and scientists across the Western U.S. are now forming a Core Workgroup to help conserve and manage populations of this unique shorebird.

To guide these conservation efforts, Dr. Van Schmidt just completed the first-ever rangewide model of phalarope migratory dynamics. Because the two species can be difficult to identify at a distance, estimating their relative population required developing a complex novel statistical model of their joint abundance and identification rates, which may in the future help improve population estimates for many other tricky species like yellowlegs. The model, which is still in peer review, uncovered more clearly than ever before what phalarope researchers had feared: the 2022 drought that brought Great Salt Lake to the brink of collapse corresponded with a huge decline in the global population of Wilson’s Phalarope. Future work aims to integrate information from partner researchers in South America, who Nathan met with in the 2024 International Workgroup meeting in Argentina, to create a full global model.

Great Salt Lake isn’t the only saline lake in trouble. Chronic low water levels persist at Mono Lake despite it being the only North American saline lake with a legal mandate to retain enough water for its ecosystem to function, which was set by the State Water Board in 1994. A new modelling report has confirmed that the ongoing lack of recovery is primarily due to unsustainable water diversions to Los Angeles. These conditions led to record-low breeding success and population declines of California Gulls in recent years, and a historic explosive growth of California Gulls displaced from Mono Lake to the Bay Area, which in turn has increased predation on sensitive breeding species like Snowy Plovers. This creates a thorny conservation challenge: if California Gulls are declining elsewhere, should they be re-listed by the state as a Species of Conservation Concern even if they are problematic for other sensitive waterbirds in San Francisco? We are keeping a close tabs on this situation with our gull abatement monitoring, which last year we expanded from just South Bay to also cover Suisun Marsh in North Bay and via a partnership with Scott Stevens lab in San Jose State University to band and GPS-track gulls to see where they are foraging. We are also watching how populations of California Gulls may be changing in response to the dire conditions at Mono Lake with our walkthrough community science surveys, which are taking place in early May.

Last month, Nathan wrote a letter to the State Water Board detailing these concerning trends and commenting on the results new model. As a result of these comments and those of our partner researchers in the Mono Lake Committee and Oikonos, the State Water Board is convening a public workshop on bird populations in early June and invited Nathan to present SFBBO’s findings at it. This hearing is expected to be one key step in reassessing whether Mono Lake’s water diversions are to be adjusted to meet sustainability needs for this critical ecosystem, potentially by the end of next year.

Given the complex connections we are seeing between what is happening here and across the intermountain West, and the significant management effort now underway to figure out how to save these unique ecosystems, SFBBO is rethinking how we are managing these long-term monitoring projects. Our new Saline Lakes Connections approach emphasizes the need to build on the foundation of our phalarope, gull walkthrough, and gull abatement projects with several new initiatives:

1) Work directly with managers, agencies, and other researchers across the Great Basin to provide technical expertise in how to manage phalarope and other saline specialist waterbird populations;

1) Partner with other researchers to extend our field research efforts beyond the confines of South San Francisco Bay, including developing new monitoring efforts at saline lakes across the West;

3) Integrate models of water supply and demand into our understanding of saline lake dynamics (as Nathan has done for California’s Central Coast) to better understand and predict how human water use drives the declines and recovery of waterbird populations.

These ambitious efforts will take time to come to fruition, but SFBBO is committed to tackling the challenge of conserving these unique and underappreciated ecosystems. 

By Guest Blogger Jesse Amital

The Birding Hotspots series grew out of these experiences. As a digital creator for SFBBO, I hope to introduce people at all stages of their birding journey to some of the Bay Area’s great local spots, along with a few tips on what to look for at each one. I’m also especially excited to highlight the work of local wildlife photographers and community members by sharing their images with a wider audience.

So far, the series has featured Vasona Reservoir, Shoreline Park, Seal Point Park, and Palo Alto Baylands. We would love to continue expanding to hotspots across the region—especially in the East Bay, North Bay, and San Francisco—and to collaborate with photographers who know and love these places. If you’re interested in sharing photos and tips from your favorite spot, please email us at outreach@sfbbo.org or send us a message on Facebook or Instagram.

I’ve already learned so much from our social media community (including a few well-earned, cheeky corrections), and I’m grateful for the thoughtful comments, feedback, and enthusiasm people have shared. If you haven’t yet, we hope you’ll explore the series, spend some time outside, and maybe even discover a new favorite place to watch birds!