​Why do Black-crowned Night Herons love city life? That was the question of one of SFBBO's recent research efforts. Downtown areas in several cities of the Bay Area, including Oakland and Santa Rosa, have become unexpected homes for Black-crowned Night Herons. These striking birds once nested around Oakland's Jack London Square and Lake Merritt parks, but tree and shrub trimming there in the past decades have pushed them to form nesting colonies in the trees of the Chinatown neighborhood.

​However, this has led to ongoing challenges for both the community and the birds, with their droppings covering sidewalks, businesses, and parked cars, and young herons sometimes falling onto busy streets. Efforts to relocate them back to Lake Merritt have had limited success, raising the question: what makes these urban trees so appealing to the herons?

On March 8 we hosted a very special Snowy Plover Mud Stomp volunteer day at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward to install cutting edge Motus technology.

Motus tags are a type of radio transmitter that send signals to nearby radio antennas. A single Motus station was established at Eden Landing in November 2021 which receives data from any tags on birds and other wildlife and some insects it picks up within 30 kilometers.