by Environmental Education Specialist & Biologist Sirena Lao

SFBBO Science Director Maddy Schwarz

weeks SFBBO Science Director Maddy Schwarz and her team will share the latest banded plover re-sightings and a little about these adorable birds.

This week, SFBBO staff biologists began conducting Western Snowy Plover color-band resight surveys. These surveys are a vital step in assessing annual plover breeding success. Throughout the nesting season, SFBBO biologists banded 242 Snowy Plover chicks with a unique four-color band combination for each chick. After banding, the chicks were released and with any luck, fledged approximately 28 days later. Birds are at their most vulnerable when they are chicks, so a fledged bird represents successful recruitment into the population. Fledge rate is one of the key recovery metrics USFWS tracks to assess the health of the Western Snowy Plover population. Of the 242 chicks banded by SFBBO in 2023, so far we have confirmed that 49 birds have fledged by resighting their unique color-band combination in the field. This represents a 21 percent fledge rate, which is unfortunately a less successful year. In 2022 we observed a 34 percent fledge rate and in 2021 we observed a 32 percent fledge rate.

However, there is still time for that number to increase since SFBBO staff will be performing another week of resight surveys. Hopefully we will be able to confirm additional fledges like this bird we confirmed on August 22nd: violet over orange, yellow over blue, or VO:YB! This bird was one of the last chicks banded this season on July 19th at Eden Landing. It was seen again and photographed on September 19th on the same pond where it hatched. The first photo was taken right after it was banded when it was just a couple hours old. The second photo was taken on September 19th, all grown up and fully fledged!​

The bonus photo below is of another bird that isn’t a fledge from this year, but who doesn’t want to see more plover photos! For more information about our plover research or to get involved, please visit our website. 

During my introsem, I learned about the mechanics of a good photo, like the exposure triangle and the rule of thirds. But the photos I took were still painfully static, even the ones I snapped of hummingbirds – arguably the most dynamic little gems of the avian world. Not to mention, I constantly struggled with a photographer’s worst nightmare – having everything set up to take the perfect shot of a charismatic bird, only for my camera to focus on something else in the frame. 

At the very beginning of Sebastian’s focusing workshop, he opened by saying, “Focusing – it’s kind of the bane of our existence as wildlife photographers.” He showed two photos of a gorgeous Iberian lynx, starting with one where the camera had focused on the rock in front of it. “It’s the most endangered cat in the world. And, um, I didn’t get the focus right”, Sebastian said with an ironic smile as all of us laughed in the background. “So we’re gonna go from this, the shots we’ve all taken, to this, getting the focus spot on.”

The sense of total relief that spread through the group, even on Zoom, was palpable. Oh my gosh. Even professional photographers have these issues. He gets us!

I was smiling at the beginning of the workshop and smiling until the end. I’d recently switched to a Canon R7 over spring break, and was still getting used to the slightly overwhelming amount of new settings. Sebastian ran us through tips of using the exposure triangle to improve focus, using single focus points and backbutton focus, the best times of day for prime-focusing light, and so much more from both mechanical and non-mechanical standpoints. I came away with an infinitely better understanding of my camera and much more confidence in my ability to take the crisp shots I’ve been working for.

Maya Xu is a rising junior at Stanford University pursuing a biology degree in ecology and evolution. She is currently conducting an analysis of stable isotope and heavy metal compositions in the diets of the Hoover Tower peregrine falcons, and will co-instruct Stanford’s ornithology course in spring of 2024. She is a docent at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and a birding fanatic who leads monthly bird surveys for the preserve’s riparian area. ​

Last month, I spoke about SFBBO’s research on phalaropes at the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua in Lee Vining, California. Every year, conservationists with Mono Lake hold the Chautauqua as a special birding event with field trips and talks to celebrate the unique birds of Mono Lake and the eastern Sierras. This year was a particularly special event, hosting a “Phalarope Festival” to bring together scientists from across North and South America to host the first group meeting of an amazing collaboration we’ve built, the International Phalarope Working Group.

Phalaropes are very unique and understudied shorebirds. They’re small like a sandpiper, but unlike sandpipers that forage by probing in the mud, they prefer to herd prey by swimming in tight circles. There are only three species, which are exclusively found in the Americas: the Wilson’s Phalarope, the Red-necked Phalarope, and the Red Phalarope. While the Red Phalarope spends its time out at sea, the Wilson’s Phalarope and the Red-necked Phalarope are even more unusual in that they specialize in hypersaline lakes. … 

After breeding in Canada, they migrate down and stop at Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake, and other salt lakes to feed on abundant alkali flies and brine shrimp that flourish in the unusually salty waters. 

Because the man-made salt ponds of South San Francisco Bay are also hypersaline, they historically mimicked saline lakes in many respects, so phalaropes have also adapted to use San Francisco Bay as another migratory stopover! Historical surveys found peak counts of 40,000 Wilson’s Phalaropes foraging in southern San Francisco Bay in the 1980s. No matter what their migratory path, the phalaropes converge to overwinter alongside flamingos at Laguna Mar Chiquita in Argentia, the “Great Salt Lake of South America,” and the site of Argentina’s newest national park, Ansenuza National Park. Researchers at all of these sites have banded together into the International Phalarope Working Group to study and help protect these unusual and imperiled birds.

At the festival Ryan Carle from Mono Lake, Marcela Castellino and founding staff of Ansenuza National Park, and Great Salt Lake scientists gathered to both teach Chautauqua attendees about trends in their populations and to plan the next phase of our efforts to conserve these unique birds. 

With the help of our community scientist volunteer surveyors, SFBBO has been counting migratory phalaropes for the past several summers. This past year, we found something shocking: Wilson’s phalarope counts have declined 98% compared to the 1980s population, with less than 1,000 birds during the peak of migration. Sleuthing with historical eBird observations, we found the decline occurred mostly in the 1990s, though it has continued since. This is especially worrying because the Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake are imperiled by water diversions and climate change, with the Great Salt Lake on the verge of collapse before the unusually rainy winter rescued it. Because San Francisco Bay is so different, maintaining suitable habitat here could be key to increasing the overall population’s resilience to climate change.

Despite these challenges, we have high hopes for conserving and recovering phalarope populations. The creation of Ansenuza National Park was one major milestone, and SFBBO is currently working with the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project to figure out how to recover populations here in the Bay.

The people at the Phalarope Festival showed amazing enthusiasm for these shorebirds, bringing together conservationists and birders from California, Utah, and Argentina to not only strategize but also to celebrate. A bilingual song commemorating the intercontinental linkages created by the phalarope migration was sung by Ryan and Marcela. And an Argentinian artist, Franco “Vato” Cervato, painted a series of “sister murals” in Lee Vining to complement those he painted at the “sister lake” at Mar Chiquita. They serve as a lasting and beautiful physical reminder of the linkages that bind these diverse places together–not just our shared birds, but also our shared work, culture, and vision for the future. 

If you’d like to be involved in helping achieve that future, please email me at [email protected] to hear about how to volunteer to participate in our phalarope surveys!

Each warbler that our bird banders carefully swabbed for pollen, every phone call our biologists answered to share their knowledge, and each scientific paper our research teams contributed data to through meticulous weekly and monthly counts of hundreds or even thousands of individual avocets, stilts, and terns — each represents just one aspect of the attention to detail that SFBBO applies to help balance the needs of the entire natural community, human and non-human, in the Bay ​​Area​ and beyond. 

Here are a few examples of some of the recent ways SFBBO has contributed to understanding and strengthening that balance:
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Former SFBBO executive director Dr. Yiwei Wang and former science director Dr. Max Tarjan were co-authors (with four other researchers) on an article Habitat Use by Breeding Waterbirds in Relation to Tidal Marsh Restoration in the San Francisco Bay Estuary published in the June 2023 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. The article compares local populations of waterbird species such as Forster’s Terns and American Avocets between 2001 and 2019. As the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project process brings about large-scale tidal marsh restoration, understanding how the Project can best preserve places for these species to forage, breed, and roost while also improving tidal marsh habitat for the endangered Ridgway’s Rail and the salt marsh harvest mouse will be critical to its long term success. To learn more about SFBBO’s Tidal Marsh Restoration work see Tidal Marsh Habitat Restoration.
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SFBBO science director Dr. Katie LaBarbera was recently interviewed by Bay Nature magazine for her perspective on the science of adoptive parenting in birds. The story of two scrawny Red-tailed Hawk nestlings being “chick-napped” by an ambitious Bald Eagle mother kept hundreds of nature-oriented social media viewers on tenterhooks the past month as wildlife photographer Doug Gillard captured and shared hair-raising shots of the avian drama on social media. The tale of the baby Red-Tail “Tuffy” and their adoptive Bald Eagle sibling “Lola” is explored in this informative and engaging article, complete with Gillard’s photos of the complicated family interactions. Unfortunately, Tuffy was recently found deceased in the vicinity of the nest, leaving those following the story to hope a forensic analysis will shed light on the factors that led to their untimely demise. 

SFBBO volunteer bird banders at Coyote Creek Field Station in Milpitas and Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford University added a gooey new type of data to their research this winter when they collected fecal samples from over-wintering land bird species such as Fox Sparrows and Golden-crowned Sparrows. The samples were requested by a Bloomsburg University graduate student as part of a study on microplastic pollution. Microplastics (1um – 5 mm) and nanoplastics (<1um) have now been shown to affect bird health when they cause a syndrome known as “plasticosis” in some species. The tiny particles are produced as larger pieces of plastic from cosmetics, clothing and food packaging degrade, but don’t fully break down in the environment. Birds, and presumably other organisms, including humans, can ingest these tiny fragments, causing their digestive tissues to become abraded and scarred. In addition to causing damage, or fibrosis, the microplastics can enter the bloodstream and even cross the blood-brain barrier and placenta. One step in slowing or preventing this pollution is documenting how much is present in both wild species and in humans. Bird fecal samples collected by SFBBO will be compared with other locations to help assess the risks. 

By gently swabbing pollen grains from bird bills during the bird banding process, banders at SFBBO’s Coyote Creek Field Station and Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve are adding a powerful new dimension to the data scientists can obtain from each bird’s capture. The samples are sent for genetic analysis to the Songbirds As Pollinators Project (SaP), a partnership between the Institute for Bird Populations, which runs hundreds of MAPS bird banding stations in the US and Canada, and researchers at Colorado State University. SaP’s goals include determining how climate change may impact both bird and plant communities. Birds from the warbler and blackbird families, especially, are known to forage for nectar from flowers, which could transfer pollen from one location to another, especially during migration. Even a small amount of cross pollination could significantly enhance gene flow and improve the genetic health of plants in their favored species, which include plants in the diverse and widespread maple and plum families. As the widely documented decline in bee populations reduces the availability of insect pollinators for native trees and shrubs, wildlife ecologists would like to know whether birds might pick up some of the slack.
 
As an SFBBO volunteer citizen scientist, I know I am privileged to be able to contribute in even a small way to research experiences such as these. Trekking beside a muddy salt pond recently while attempting to count elusive tiny brown birds, I noted happily the way that all five of my senses were heightened and engaged by the work I was doing. Counting shorebirds or scraping bird poop samples out of a paper bag might not seem glamorous, and it’s hard to brag about these skills to friends who don’t even know (or care) that Fox Sparrows exist. But when I feel the grasp of a bird’s bill on my finger as I am affixing a tiny aluminum tag to its leg, when the summer sun baking a tidal flat stirs up a little wind that brushes my skin and sends a pungent smell up my nose, when I close my eyes to better discern the distant song of a Black-headed Grosbeak, I feel connected to the past, present, and future in ways that go far beyond my daily routine. I feel the tug of balancing a fully inclusive narrative, belayed not just by the sensory joy I can take in the present, but tethered philosophically to past explorers like Muir, and sending out tendrils of questions for future investigators who will read our journal articles, puzzle over our data tables, and examine our graphs and charts as they continue the adventure of seeking to understand, honor, and repair our relationships with natural communities. ​

Bird photography was key to my mental health during the pandemic. Some of my calmest moments the past few years have been spent at the edge of the Bay. I’m a passionate bird photographer, and my camera has helped me first to see birds and then to learn about their behavior and their habitats.  

Professionally and personally, I have spent several decades working on sustainability. In particular, I have been working and writing to help communities limit and reverse the damage from climate change. 
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“Sustainability”, “environment” and even “climate change” are abstract concepts, but watching a Great Egret take off always takes my breath away.

And watching Black-necked Stilts chase away predators to protect their young delights me. Through my camera, I try to help others see the beauty of birds in their habitats, and to understand that our future is intertwined with theirs.  

As you can imagine, I’m passionate about the work of SFBBO. We live in an area blessed with an extraordinary richness of natural areas in the heart of an urbanized area. Protecting the beauty and the integrity of natural habitats here is crucial to our long-term survival. But we can only protect those habitats if the people in the area know about and care about them.

SFBBO’s recently updated mission statement puts the word “community” at the center of our work. For me, protecting birds and their habitats requires us to be deeply engaged in helping our communities see the vital importance of birds and bird habitats to our own well-being. We need people to understand how climate change and urban development threaten the survival of birds. But even more important, we need people to value birds and their needs and understand how to protect habitats that are changing.  

SFBBO has a long history of building our understanding of birds and protecting habitats. Now, in a time of great change, this organization is vital to engaging our communities in protecting them. Please join me in supporting this wonderful organization by making a donation.

For more information about how to contribute your time, your talent and/or your treasure, please visit our website at localhost:8881/.

By ​Teen Volunteers Peter Covert, Lara Tseng, and Yunjiao (Grace) Xiao

We met over Zoom to decide on what project we wanted to work on together as a group. Since everyone had a strong interest in avian science and analyzing data, we decided to focus on SFBBO’s Colonial Waterbird Program data. Through the Colonial Waterbird Program, SFBBO biologists and volunteers have been tracking numbers of breeding herons, egrets, terns, gulls, and other birds that nest in colonies around the Bay Area since 1982. This program provided us with a large body of data and a variety of ideas for how we could interpret it.
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WHAT WE DID & WHAT WE FOUND

We studied 26 well-established colonies of various shorebirds and other waterbirds (interactive map). For each of these sites, we collected data on which plants the birds nested on. We tried to identify the plants by collecting photographs and notes from Colonial Waterbird Program volunteers while also using various outside identification resources such as iNaturalist. From here, we were able to observe certain trends between the birds and their nesting tree species. 
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We found that there was no significant difference between the preferred tree for each studied bird species. However, we did notice a high percentage of colonies using Eucalyptus trees (which are nonnative) for nesting sites. For other plants, the usage was roughly evenly split between native and nonnative plant genera.

​WHY DO THESE RESULTS MATTER?
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Our results find relevance in the environmental debate over whether Eucalyptus in the Bay Area should be removed. Currently, the debate for and against the removal centers around two issues: the potential fire hazard that trees of the genus Eucalyptus present, and the threat it poses to native mixed-woodland biodiversity. Since our study shows that these trees are widely used by native waterbird populations, it might be worth considering retaining certain swaths of Eucalyptus intact to sustain healthy riparian communities. More investigation is needed to determine the best practices for conserving our native biodiversity and ensuring public safety. It would also be interesting to compare the data of bird-tree pairings with the local tree distribution to find a baseline of the relative local abundance of each tree species. This can give us a clearer picture of trends that might exist between bird species or across regions.
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SOME CHALLENGES WE ENCOUNTERED

When conducting this study, we encountered challenges that could impact the results. First, identifying the plant species was difficult in many cases due to unavailability of photos or poor quality of photos. When we could not identify the plant species, we excluded the site from our study, which could bias the results. The Colonial Waterbird Program also relies on volunteers to record colonies present at different sites throughout the Bay Area, and lack of volunteer availability can affect the consistency of the data. For example, COVID-19 restrictions impacted the ability of volunteers to assess all the sites. Due to these challenges, we ended up with a small sample size, so our results might not be representative of overall trends in the Bay Area. Nonetheless, our study provides an example of how long-term data collection by scientists and community members can be used to explore questions relevant to avian conservation.
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Read the full project report here. Thanks to the other Teen Volunteer Program members who helped work on the early stages of this project: Sierra Glassman, Vayun Tiwari, Philip Yang, Sebastien Jeantet, Sahithi Adiraju, and Royce Lee.

By Guest Blogger Wendy Gibbons

The joys of sharing scientific research, bird banding, and gathering over taco dinners proved irresistible to adventurers in the world of avian conservation science, including SFBBO senior landbird biologist Dan Wenny, research affiliate Julian Tattoni, and volunteer Wendy Gibbons, this May. Wenny, Tattoni and Gibbons experienced this winning combination during the 2023 meeting of the Western Bird Banding Association (WBBA) meeting outside of Santa Clarita, California. The WBBA is a scientific organization that encourages and promotes bird banding as a tool to study the biology and migration of western birds. 

The three made the trip south from the Bay Area to join over 40 other bird banders from the western United States and Canada, including Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Idaho. 

Tattoni presented the results of their research study on the timing of bird molt for 11 bird species at SFBBO’s Coyote Creek Field Station. Tattoni’s study, which they collaborated on with SFBBO science director Katie LaBarbera and Stanford biologist J. Nicholas Hendershot, showed that some bird species, including Bushtits, Song Sparrows, Common Yellowthroats, and Chestnut-backed Chickadees, appear to adjust the timing of when they replace their worn-out feathers each year if hot, dry conditions unfavorable to raising a family occur. Such conditions are predicted to be more frequent under climate change. ​

If you would like to learn more, please click on the following photos.

A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Bear Divide Banding Station, which opened in 2021 to research the spectacular dawn flights of thousands of migrating birds funneling through a narrow pass in the San Gabriel Mountains. Gibbons, Tattoni, and Wenny were able to witness over a thousand Vaux’s swifts, several hundred Hermit warblers, Townsend’s warblers, Lazuli Buntings, and Western Tanagers as well as numerous other species making their way north to their breeding grounds.

Presentations included research on antbird recruitment in mixed-species flocks in French Guiana, the development of 3-dimensional virtual bird specimens at Occidental College, and the ‘secret lives’ of Herring and Greater Black-backed gulls on Appledore Island, Maine. The increased use and development of MOTUS radio towers, which SFBBO has recently pioneered in the Bay Area to track bird migrants, was also explored in depth at the meeting. Next year’s conference is already being discussed, and with luck SFBBO’s research on bird population health and migration will once again be shared with the broader scientific community to help build and strengthen collaborative efforts in bird conservation science.

If you would like to learn more, please click on the following photos.

If you would like to learn more about Bear Divide, please check out these articles on the LA Times: 
SoCal’s secret birding spot where you can watch 130 species fly through
This dirt parking lot in the San Gabriel Mountains is a magnet for migrating birds 

Wendy Gibbons works as a science writer and educator when she is taking a break from her valued pastimes banding birds, studying data science, and causing good trouble.

By Guest Blogger & SFBBO Board Member Debbie Wong​

“Wow, hello handsome!” I was talking to the male Townsend’s Warbler that I took out of the bag. It is always a mixture of mystery, surprise, and anticipation when processing (and banding) a bird that you didn’t personally extract from the mist net.

​This gorgeous male (see photo below) that we met on February 8 was the first of its species we saw this year, a sign of spring. After so many cancellations and delays due to recent rain and cold temperatures, SFBBO’s Coyote Creek Field Station, CCFS, where I have worked as a volunteer bander for over 20 years, is slowly resuming its operation.

Granted, the damage and aftermath of the winter rainstorms are still with us (it’s still muddy and too slippery to walk in some net lanes), but banding has partially resumed.

My motivation to become a bird bander was sparked by my love of birds. My continuous commitment is renewed by the big data and the big picture that bird banding information helps us to understand about birds, their habitat, the effects of climate change, and the interconnectedness on the blue planet we all live on. We are all earthlings, like the birds, and borders and nationalities don’t matter when it comes to the earth’s wellbeing. 

CCFS is just one of the programs at the San Francisco Bay Observatory, an organization that has been operating in the South Bay for over 40 years. We also conduct other avian research, do tidal marsh restoration, carry out bird colony surveys and monitoring, offer educational programs for school kids, and make our research and data available to university students. SFBBO is a place where everyone can help, can participate, if you have a few hours to spare. Don’t miss our amazing Birdy Hours where science is discussed in a fun and lively manner.

My decades of affiliation with SFBBO began in volunteerism with avian disease prevention. Like so many other volunteers, once you get to know more about SFBBO and its various missions and programs, one can’t help but to participate more. I didn’t know my volunteering as a bird bander would last over two decades, and I didn’t expect to join the Board, as I did in 2021, but I am glad to contribute my experience in high tech management as the Secretary of the Board and as a member of the Board Executive Committee. With the team effort from other Board members, we strive to maintain the core values of SFBBO and to venture into new areas to meet rising challenges, including the impacts of climate change and the need for environmental justice. 

After two years on the Board, I am honored and impressed to be working side by side with other Board members, dedicated staff members, and countless volunteers who made SFBBO what it is today. Change is constant. SFBBO isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago, and that’s a good thing. We are currently working on a Strategic Plan for the next few years. We value your opinion and your participation in shaping our efforts to promote sustainability in the Bay Area and beyond. For more information about how to get involved, please visit our website at localhost:8881/.