Wingbeat Blog

​There is more to play than meets the eye. Play forms the foundation for life-long growth and development. That’s the message educator Chris Pancoast shares with parents, teachers, and the community through his Why Play programs and books. 
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The idea that kids gain valuable skills while …  

Babies! They’re everywhere this time of year – on the ground, in the trees, in holes, and especially on the water, though we don’t get to see those born in the far north, whose parents migrate through here in spring or fall, until they’re past their babyhood. Pointing out fledglings at the feeder or water dish – especially during  the period when they’re still flapping and begging and clearly demanding food from their parents – is an easy way to get young children interested in watching …

Sometimes we think the smallest children are too young to be introduced to birds. But from their first day, they’re learning by observation. My own parents claimed that my first real sentence came when I announced, from a highchair near the bird-feeder window, “Jaybird jump down!”

In I Am A Bird, Hope Lim introduces us to a small girl who loves riding on the back of her dad’s bicycle.“Every morning,” she says, “I fly like a bird on Daddy’s bike. I sing …

​“What kind of owl is that?” asks my young neighbor, listening to the soft “coo-COO-cooo-cooo” of a Mourning Dove and reminding me how little many of our children know about the birds around us. Dayna Lorentz, in the recent middle-grade novel Of a Feather, introduces two characters, a young Great Horned Owl and a middle grade girl, both struggling to find their places in the world under challenging conditions.  

​The owl, Second (named for his birth order, and taunted by his older sister, who has already fledged) is timid, slow in learning to hunt and …

I was given the opportunity to be able to attend, for the last two Wednesdays, the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory’s Waterfowl ID Workshop, through a scholarship fund. Going into the workshop, I truly had no idea, or any background knowledge about ducks.

I was not a very informed person, and despite me being a beginner through this workshop, I really was able to learn a lot, as well as develop a new sense of fondness for ducks in general.

​I was able to learn many different things, such as how to spot, and be able to tell which ducks are which, as well as learning about different types of ducks mating, and special characteristics that they have. 

​My favorite part to learn was about the “hybrid” ducks, and the ways that even ducks have evolved, and I very much enjoyed being able to see the diversity in the duck species, which I had never been exposed to before. I …

​It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that birding changed my life. I moved to San Francisco and ended up getting a job at Alcatraz Island, a National Park Site but also a bird sanctuary and colonial nesting site for hundreds of waterbirds.

I was working in visitor services and had never felt that parks and the outdoors were necessarily places that I belonged. I was born in Houston, Texas, to very poor teenage parents and I am Mexican-American. Growing up, I didn’t see myself in the people who were in these spaces.

​Working on Alcatraz changed that, when my first winter there a co-worker and I discovered a Peregrine Falcon on the water tower – though we didn’t know that’s what she was at the …

When I was eight years old, I became interested in songbirds. I enjoyed watching them fly and look for food. I began using field guides and Merlin Bird ID to identify birds. I felt proud when I found and identified a new bird that I had not seen before because I grew my knowledge of birds.

My third-grade science teacher, Ms. Luby, at Woodland School liked birds too and she helped me start a brochure on birds. My parents noticed my curiosity about birds too and began taking me to local birding events. I’ve attended festivals, guided hikes, birding classes, and bird banding events. Currently, I am … 

My absolute favorite thing about birding is the ability to step into the private lives of birds. I’ve watched Acorn Woodpeckers squabble en masse and have spent long enough staring at a California Towhee to discover that it picks through the leaf litter with a sudden jump instead of a polite scratch. Meanwhile, on trails and city streets I watch so many people rush past without ever knowing that was going on a few feet from them. 
 
But, observant as I am, there is so much I still don’t know about birds–one of those being how to identify waterfowl. Despite lots of experience with shorebirds, I never gave much thought to waterfowl. That’s why when I saw SFBBO’s Waterfowl Workshop with …

​My love of birds started from an early age. Birding allowed me to explore the diversity of birds and ponder their interesting behaviors and adaptations. It became a way to connect with and observe nature. When I discovered science, birds were not just a hobby anymore, but a passion and a career path. To me, science is a portal into understanding and advancing our knowledge of birds. 

​The Bird Sound Workshop was a nice blend of science and bird sound ID. I especially enjoyed learning about how birds sing and call (including how they produce two sounds at the same time), how and why sounds are learned or innate (and how this creates dialects of song), and the reasons for why a bird would call. This helped me better understand bird biology. When it came time to learn about individual species, understanding 

​In 2020, SFBBO conducted our first year of a new comprehensive phalarope survey program. Phalaropes are medium-sized shorebirds that pass through San Francisco Bay during spring and fall migration. Unlike other shorebirds that find food in the ground at the water’s edge, phalaropes eat small items at the surface of open water and often swim. Due to their use of open water, it is difficult to find and count phalaropes to understand population trends. This means …