Wingbeat Blog

​Scientists have identified the two biggest threats to biodiversity as land use change (which has driven historical extinctions) and climate change (predicted to drive the greatest future extinctions). As a bird observatory in a major metropolitan area, understanding how the loss of 90% of historical tidal wetlands in the Bay Area has impacted birds has always been a central focus of SFBBO’s research. And many of our programs are studying the impact of climate change on birds—from the  threats facing phalarope habitats under the worsening droughts to impacts on the timing of migration in songbirds. ​

​But climate change is bigger than the impact on bird species, affecting both nature and society in myriad ways. The impacts on social systems can in turn alter processes of land use change. For example, a major reason the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project is restoring tidal wetlands is not just to create habitats (though this is important!) but also to buffer our human communities against flood risk under sea level rise.

¡Estamos en primavera! La perfecta temporada para pajarear en la bahía.

In early March, we teamed up with Latino Outdoors to co-host a bilingual birding walk at Alviso Marina County Park.

​Participants spotted at least 18 species that included a mix of shorebirds, raptors, and songbirds. 

​Folks enjoyed a beautiful morning and front row seats to a rambunctious Northern Mockingbird, a mixed kettle of Turkey Vultures and White Pelicans riding thermals, and a Sora foraging within the slough.

​Why do Black-crowned Night Herons love city life? That was the question of one of SFBBO’s recent research efforts. Downtown areas in several cities of the Bay Area, including Oakland and Santa Rosa, have become unexpected homes for Black-crowned Night Herons. These striking birds once nested around Oakland’s Jack London Square and Lake Merritt parks, but tree and shrub trimming there in the past decades have pushed them to form nesting colonies in the trees of the Chinatown neighborhood.

​However, this has led to ongoing challenges for both the community and the birds, with their droppings covering sidewalks, businesses, and parked cars, and young herons sometimes falling onto busy streets. Efforts to relocate them back to Lake Merritt have had limited success, raising the question: what makes these urban trees so appealing to the herons?

On March 8 we hosted a very special Snowy Plover Mud Stomp volunteer day at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward to install cutting edge Motus technology.

Motus tags are a type of radio transmitter that send signals to nearby radio antennas. A single Motus station was established at Eden Landing in November 2021 which receives data from any tags on birds and other wildlife and some insects it picks up within 30 kilometers.

​On February 24th, 2025, the Landbirds Program opened our banding site at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge ‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma for 2025. The JR’O’O site floods each winter and is re-opened each spring, with the goal of restarting banding before the Wilson’s Warblers arrive for breeding. 

​SFBBO started bird banding at JR’O’O in 2018 in collaboration with then-undergraduate Julian Tattoni, and students have remained a big part of our presence there: the JR’O’O site is part of our involvement in the Student Opportunities in Avian Research initiative to give undergraduates from local universities and community colleges experience in ornithological field work.

​On February 6th, 2025, SFBBO’s Habitat Conservation team partnered with Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful to host San Jose State University’s Field Studies in Water Resource Management class at our restoration site near Mallard Slough and Pond A16 in Alviso.

​The students braved some wet, windy, and muddy conditions while adding 175 native plants to our restoration site. SFBBO staff and the students discussed some of the major conservation issues affecting San Francisco Bay’s tidal marshes. 

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!