Wingbeat Blog

We could not run the bird banding program at Coyote Creek Field Station without our volunteers.

More than 60 volunteers participate in this three-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year data collection program, contributing their time, expertise, and nimble fingers to increasing our understanding of local bird populations.

Their work directly feeds important research, such as the paper published last May showing that wildfire smoke changed bird health and behavior at CCFS.

This year, we monitored 328 Snowy Plover nests—our second highest total since we began in 2008, and just shy of the record set in 2017. It was a season full of both challenges and triumphs. We observed 510 chicks hatch, and despite the harsh reality of a 41% depredation rate—due to a mix of predators like ravens, harriers, red foxes, and feral cats—72 plover chicks fledged!

As for our banding efforts, we had one of our most successful seasons to date. A total of 232 chicks and 42 adults were banded, providing us with valuable data for ongoing research on dispersal, survival, reproductive success, and so much more. We look forward to exciting research, such as with our Motus tracking project in 2025!

Since 2005, Donna Nicoletti has been an active and dedicated member of our volunteer community, contributing her time to a wide range of science programs at SFBBO. Her first volunteer experience involved conducting power line surveys in Coyote Creek and she quickly became a key participant in colonial waterbird surveys, covering HEP and GUTE colonies across the Bay. In addition to these efforts, her work on the Pacific Flyway Shorebird Surveys and Western Snowy Plover conservation at Eden Landing has made a lasting impact on our mission. We are truly grateful for Donna’s unwavering commitment to our avian science programs and we wish her many great years of birding ahead in her new home beyond the bay area. Below is an interview, where she reflects on her time as a volunteer. 

On the eve of his retirement as a volunteer for SFBBO, we interviewed Chuck Coston to learn how he got involved in SFBBO and his most memorable experiences with us. Read below to see his responses. You can also read a great article about him in the local publication “Climate.” Thank you, Chuck, for your more than 30 years as a volunteer in our Colonial Waterbird and Outreach programs, it is because of people like you that we are able to meet our mission for birds, habitats, and communities!

Every year, SFBBO staff band close to 200 Western Snowy Plover chicks in an attempt to track individuals so we can assess survival and fledging rates. September is always an exciting time of year because the breeding season is over and large foraging flocks of juveniles are forming at the most popular ponds. This means staff have great opportunities to read lots of band combinations during one survey.

Back in July, we banded a brood that had hatched on a levee in Eden Landing Ecological Reserve. While banding the chicks, the male associated with the nest did a great job defending his chicks by performing a broken wing display next to us repeatedly. ​

As the incidence and intensity of wildfires continues to increase due to climate change and other factors, scientists are looking at long term data sets to understand the impact of these disasters on animals, including birds. 

Recently, researchers used two decades of bird banding data collected at our Coyote Creek Field Station (CCFS) to investigate how wildfire smoke has influenced the capture rates and body condition of passerines or near-passerine bird species. 

​SFBBO staff and volunteers are out in the current and former salt ponds of South San Francisco Bay and watching some of the most interesting shorebirds as they stop by during this summer migration: Wilson’s Phalaropes and Red-necked Phalaropes. Surveys undertaken over the past five years have found a species in a long-term ongoing population collapse, with contemporary counts 98% lower than the more than 40,000 birds observed in the 1980s and more than 50% lower than counts in the early 2000s.

These unique saline-specialist shorebirds stop in San Francisco Bay–as well as saline lakes throughout the Great Basin like Mono Lake, Lake Abert, and the Great Salt Lake–to forage and fatten up early in migration before making the rest of the long trip to their wintering grounds in South America. 

The most obvious explanation for their decline is that the transition of ponds managed for commercial salt production into lower-salinity ponds managed for wildlife under the South Bay Salt 

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. ​

This is the second of a series of blog posts by Dorian recounting his six-day Circa Bay Ride around the San Francisco Bay to raise awarenes about the health benefits of birding and raise money for SFBBO’s 2024 Spring Appeal. During the first day of his ride, he led bird walks at Coyote Point in San Mateo and the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve. 

I’m sorry for the delay in sharing about my ride in Wingbeat! While I was able to crank out a post on April 6th, time shortages prevented follow-ups on subsequent days. In brief, I’ve spent each of the days between April 7th and 11th biking and birding from 7am to 7pm and spent each night engaging the hosts who put me up as I rounded the Bay. 

​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.