Wingbeat Blog

​Last month, I lead a very enjoyable walk for SFBBO at Ulistac Natural Area in Santa Clara on Bird Language. As I looked around the circle of twenty students that day, I made an observation I often make on bird walks: we’re all over 50 old! Well, not quite. I noticed a few seeds of change: three parents had brought their teens.  

“Is this going to be another boring walk just naming the birds we see?” muttered one teen before returning back to her cell phone. ​

​Bird migration is a puzzle for many children.  Why do they leave? Where do they go? How do they know when to do it, and how do they find their way? Only in the past century have scientists begun to understand this process, and only in recent years have tracking devices evolved to such an extent that they can precisely track an individual bird to learn more about … 

​Planes fly over Warm Springs heading north every 20 minutes and the cows there are apparently very itchy. Those are two of the unexpected insights we gleaned from the motion sensor cameras we use to record Burrowing Owl activity at Warm Springs in Fremont this year. It turns out that the camera posts, and the cameras themselves, are delightful scratching posts, at least for the cows. For one particular camera placed at Warm Springs last year, it took just a few hours for the cows to bend the post and dislodge the camera, leaving it on the ground facing …

​For the past several months, I have co-lead mindfulness birding walks with SFBBO for Veteran women who attend a residential trauma treatment program. Typically, they have experienced multiple types of trauma from different life stages as well as co-occurring issues such as depression, substance use, and chronic pain. Women often talk about a profound fear and disconnection from themselves, others, and the world around them as a result of their past traumatic experiences. Reconnecting requires willingness and  …

​During the 2018 breeding season, Federally Endangered California Least Terns returned to breed at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward for the second year in a row! We were ecstatic for them to return, not only because Least Terns have limited breeding sites across their range, but also because past research, including our own monitoring in 2017, has indicated that Snowy Plovers benefit from nesting in close proximity to Least Terns.

​​This is due to the aggressive “mobbing” defense that tern colonies employ whenever an avian predator approaches too close to the … 

​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 observing nature. I still remember father’s sea sick whisper of advice, after one of his particularly rough sea voyages, “Don’t study animals, Jeff, study PLANTS, because they don’t move around!” So in college I minored in botany. Birds especially intimidated me: too fast, always backlit, and with multiple songs and molting plumages.

In my middle-aged years, I began studying with Jon Young, author of the bird language bible, What the Robin Knows. I learned that …

​What comes to mind when you hear the word “otter?” I commonly think of a cute, fuzzy animal that uses rocks to open up oysters, the sea otter. Many people also picture the sea otter, but few seem to imagine their sleeker counterpart, the river otter. 

​Ever since I started interning at SFBBO six months ago, I’ve heard about the organization’s science talks but never had the opportunity to attend one until the River Otter Talk on July 19. Though the topic seemed to lack an obvious correlation to bird conservation, I was curious to learn about other conservation efforts in the Bay Area. In … 

Are you “HEP to the Jive?” Only readers of a certain vintage (like us!) will recognize this jazz age pun! “Hep to the jive” was 40’s Jazz musician Cab Calloway’s expression meaning “in the know” or a “cool cat!” The HEP Survey is SFBBO’s Heron Egret Project – part of their “very cool” Colonial Waterbird Program, putting biologists “in the know” about Bay Area waterbirds’ habits and trends.

​Ten years ago, my wife Barbara and I retired from thirty years of workers compensation claims management and launched much loved travel and citizen science work centered around birds. One of our …

Some of the most important tools our scientists use to conduct research on Bay Area birds are the vehicles they drive across levees and dirt roads to reach the plovers, water birds, and tidal marshes they study and protect. Unfortunately, these vehicles are also some of the most expensive!

​That’s why we are always especially grateful to supporters who donate their used trucks or other four-wheel-drive vehicles to SFBBO. Two recent donors who did just that are Jonathan and Christine Slocomb-Zack, who donated their old Pathfinder Nissan truck to us this spring …

As the young daughter of a biologist, I was always amazed when my father, driving at 50 mph, would say, “Look, there’s a Red-tailed Hawk.” Whipping around to look at the bird on a telephone pole rapidly fading behind us, I always asked, “How can you tell that it’s a Red-tail and not a Red-shouldered?”

In Hawk Rising, Maria Gianferrari doesn’t answer that question, but for young birders she and illustrator Brian Floca provide a window into the life of a Red-tail family – mother on the nest with downy chicks, father out hunting for food, missing, trying again. The book includes …