For more than 40 years, SFBBO biologists and community science volunteers have studied passerines and other landbirds through bird banding research at our Coyote Creek Field Station (CCFS), which sits in the middle of an old restoration site in the South Bay.

​On March 2nd, Producer Molly McCrea from KPIX, a local affiliate of CBS News, visited our banding station to see our scientists and volunteers in action, talk about climate change, learn about our new Motus wildlife tracking technology, and capture video of the beautiful avian species we aim to protect. ​

​On March 28th this year, I co-authored and signed a petition for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list Wilson’s Phalaropes as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The petition was coordinated and submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity (read their press release here). 

This work is a culmination of two decades of waterbird surveys biologists at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory have conducted in San Francisco Bay, including five years of focused summer phalarope surveys carried out with the help of our dedicated team of volunteer community scientists. In the 1980s, during days of peak migration San Francisco Bay had around 40,000 Wilson’s Phalaropes foraging on salt ponds here in order to gain enough fat reserves to continue their migration to wintering grounds to South America.

​Last month, I  returned from a trip to Argentina, where I met with scientists at the International Phalarope Working Group Meeting at Laguna Mar Chaquita, the main wintering ground for Wilson’s Phalaropes, where I had the chance to visit and survey for these interesting birds.

​At the bilingual meeting, phalarope researchers from across North and South America shared results from the past ...