Wingbeat Blog

Ulistac Natural Area is not as quiet as one would expect on a Saturday morning. The sound of rushing cars is replaced by the twitter of birds as I move farther towards the park’s interior. I made this trip to the meandering park in Santa Clara because I wanted to see one of the eBird birding hotspots mentioned in a recent data analysis by SFBBO volunteer Chris Johnson. The results of his analysis showed that the number of eBird checklists a site has can explain much of the variation in species number between birding locations. 

​Johnson used data from eBird to find the top birding locations …

​Are there Guinness Book of World Records collectors in your family? Are there poets, or poetry enthusiasts? Just in time for National Poetry Month, I discovered this highly unusual collection of poems, drawings, and superlatives about the bird world.  Which bird has the longest toes? The most feathers? The most accurate hearing? The most gruesome means of collecting prey? In Superlative Birds, Leslie Bulion as researched them all, creating verses that introduce birds both familiar and strange. 

​Each double-page spread contains a poem and, in smaller …

​For the past three years, I’ve been teaching an Urban Ecology class at RFK Community Schools in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. K-Town has one of the lowest percentages of tree cover in the city, and the school campus, built only nine years ago, is lined with concrete. In spite of these challenges–or maybe because of them–there is so much for students to observe and learn. On our last trip outside, we saw a Western Gull rip apart a discarded sandwich. Near the landscaped entrance to campus, house sparrows were hopping about looking for food. One student shouted, “A hawk!” and sure enough, a red-tailed hawk was soaring overhead. Another student informed the class of ​the location of its nest on the other side of the softball field.

​Durante los últimos tres años, he enseñado una clase de Ecología Urbana en las Escuelas Comunitarias RFK en el barrio de Koreatown en Los Ángeles. K-Town tiene uno de los porcentajes más bajos de cubierta de árbol en la ciudad, y el campus de la escuela, construido hace solo nueve años, está revestido de concreto. A pesar de estos desafíos, o tal vez debido a ellos, hay tanto que los estudiantes pueden observar y aprender. En nuestro último viaje afuera, vimos a una gaviota occidental comiendo un sándwich desechado. ​Cerca de la entrada ajardinada al campus, los gorriones hacían brincos buscando comida.Un estudiante gritó: “¡Un halcón!” Y, efectivamente, un halcón de cola roja se elevaba por encima. Otro estudiante informó a la clase la ubicación ​de su nido en el otro lado del campo de softball.

​The 2018 breeding season was an eventful one for Snowy Plovers here in the South San Francisco Bay. SFBBO staff faced cold and drizzly mornings to start the season, swarms of mosquitoes and triple digit temperatures in the middle of the summer, and long days in the field throughout. Our hard work paid off, as we monitored 269 nests in 22 ponds spread throughout the South Bay, with 79% of all nests found at Eden Landing. ​Pond E14, where we have invested a large amount of time and resources in recent years monitoring the large oyster shell enhancement, ​…

​When I was very small, one of the first birds I learned to recognize was the “English Sparrow,” as it was then called. Small and brown, unlike the colorful jays and cardinals at our feeders, it was a “downtown bird,” most often seen on sidewalks or in parking lots, especially where there were trash cans. I liked it because it was tame and approachable, and there were many of them, making them easy to recognize. So it was surprising to hear adults refer to it as “that bird,” in terms more pejorative than admiring.

​I was surprised again to learn from Jan Thornhill’s handsome picture book, The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow, …

​For almost 40 years, SFBBO has been deeply rooted in our Bay Area community. We were founded by professors from San Jose State University, are fueled by citizen scientists from cities around the Bay, and are supported by local people who donate goods and money to our cause. During the past few years, Bay Area corporations have become increasingly engaged in our work as volunteers and donors, and this year we plan to grow this engagement through our 2019 Corporate Campaign. 

The Colonial Waterbird Program is one of my favorite research projects at SFBBO. As one of our two longest running avian studies, it has produced a continuous data set that reaches back to the early 1980s. In addition, the project has covered vast geography from Morgan Hill to Alameda, from Pescadero to Livermore, and throughout most of the cities in between. This kind of information is rare and powerful because it tells us an important story about our region’s birds over time and gives us a chance to make decisions … 

Did you participate in the Christmas Bird Count? How many kids were along on your count? Did you count at night or by day, outdoors or from a window? The history of this important event is introduced, in simple picture-book format, in Counting Birds by Heidi Stemple. “Frank Chapman loved birds,” she says, and describes how he worried about the tradition of …

​Greetings from south of the equator! I’m currently teaching bird language in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador. There is such a passion here to protect the rare and endangered birds. I’m grateful to share bird language in Spanish because it connects local families to their natural world without the challenge of identifying the 1638 species of birds that live here! We can just listen and learn.

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 …