How Birds Make a Living on the Coast

I took a picture of the poster below a few years back, when I had biked with my buddy Diony up to Point Reyes National Seashore. A generous acquaintance named Dale, whom I'd met at a large sustainability festival that November, offered us a floor to sleep on, which was something we greatly appreciated. We rode the 35 (or so) miles in the rain. 

Marin County weather - phone screenshot, December 19, 2010.

The next morning, we would meet up with another group of fellow birders to participate in the Christmas Bird Count, patrolling the uplands and shorelines near our assigned portion of the count circle: Abbott's Lagoon. That would also be fairly physically taxing, but rewarding, of course. The round trip by bike and dawn-to-dusk birding we did that weekend is another story.


The poster hangs in the researcher housing near the Bear Valley Visitor Center at Point Reyes. In some ways, I like places like this better than visitor centers. I lived in housing like this for a short spell at Santa Ana NWR when I served my first AmeriCorps term in 1997. (Dale was also serving an AmeriCorps term.) There were so many similarities: ordinary, non-matching furniture in simple arrangements; miniblinds; wall-to-wall carpeting; discarded reading material about local natural history, and wall decorations like maps and this poster. And this one had an outdated, but still apparently used, Nintendo video game system plugged into an old crappy TV. This adds another layer of interest: a researcher's brainless escape from long days of physically and mentally challenging field research.

How Birds Make a Living on the Coast poster. Categories/strategies:  Scavengers; Predators; Seed-Eaters; Insect-Eaters; Fish-Eaters; Dabbling Ducks; Diving Ducks; Food-Strainers; Invertebrate-Eaters.

I thought of this poster a few days ago. I was birding at Crissy Lagoon in the Presidio, leading my monthly bird walk for volunteers in our community-based volunteer habitat restoration program. We saw a rare bird, a northern waterthrush, so I returned later with our office camera, wanting to capture the rarity. While waiting for the waterthrush to reappear (which, eventually he did, and luckily has for other photographers who can do a much better job of capturing it), I had good chances to look at and photograph some marsh birds. Shorebird migration has brought curlews, willets, sandpipers, and plovers to the marsh. This creates a golden opportunity to teach the concepts described in the poster...which I did to two passersby during our bird walk. I had them look through the spotting scope that we were using. The long-billed curlew's bill is simply too long not to talk about. (By the way, the curlew is about chicken-sized, at least.)

Willet and long-billed curlew, Crissy Lagoon, August 30, 2013.

Getting back to the poster, if I could find one I'd buy a few copies. I have looked. It contains so much information in such a great format.

A few details (some blurry and poor-quality -- my bad!) from the poster are below.

Poster details (clockwise from upper left): bills designed to probe to different mud depths; belted kingfisher's fish swallowing technique; heron's fish swallowing technique; black skimmer's dining method and longer lower mandible.

The Mighty Bay

Here is a photo I took on a rare pause as I biked across the Golden Gate Bridge a few weeks ago. It's two frames, stitched together digitally and then cropped to look square. The stitch job is pretty bad, but if you blur your eyes it doesn't matter much.

As I shot this, I thought to myself the caption: "The Morning Commute."

Morning commute, June 2013, San Francisco (stitch of two images).

Of all the photographs shot from the Golden Gate Bridge, how many can capture the glorious might of the Bay? Lately I've been thinking about the Gate itself: not as a deep ocean channel, but rather as a fantastically monstrous river. The mouth of many rivers that gushes out to the ocean, and gushes back in, bringing life in and out with it.

That's not actually the case; it's an estuary, a complex system mixed with both salt and freshwater. I have visited two estuaries where the salinity and purity is just right to permit the survival of a marine microorganism that produces "bioluminescense", or naturally produced light (it's completely unbelievable). I've read that this was once the case for San Francisco Bay -- early explorers documented it.

40% of California's surface area (and a bit of Oregon's) drains into the Bay. Take a minute to appreciate this:

I appreciate the Golden Gate Bridge -- it enables an astounding bike commute for me. But because of the Bridge, the Golden Gate itself is too often overlooked. 

I'm OK with that, though. Sometimes I'm just getting across the bridge myself without appreciating the environs. Sometimes I'm getting blasted by wind and less than fully appreciative of that. But sometimes I stop and peer over to see the porpoises, terns, and cormorants swimming below me. They are some of the benefactors of the tremendous supply of sustenance that gushes on the current under the bridge, mostly unseen to the human eye.

Blossom Petals

Petals from blossoms that littered the back porch in March have now turned to pears that fall when the wind gusts. I tasted one today that had fallen two days ago, and it was marvelous.

Pear blossom petals on the back porch, Spring 2013.

The neighborhood is full of plum trees given away by stains on the pavement below them. (I learned from the purple finches that the blossoms were tasty, mildly sweet.) Some trees have mounds of rotting brown/red plums that give off a boozy smell as you approach. If you look carefully through them, you can find ones that have just fallen and are perfect to eat, only a little bruised after having been released by the tree. But I only eat one or two on my walks now, having eaten up to a dozen on each walk for the last month.

One tree in the neighborhood is a cherry. The only way to harvest them is by shaking, listening and watching for the few that fall, and chasing them before they disappear into dirt or poison oak leaves. After giving the tree a gentle shake, I hold out my open hand in vain, but one day I will have the luck to have one land upon it.

Blackberries are ripe. Days are longer. It is easier to meet our neighbors now.

The Ordinary Extraordinary Junco

A fairly recent series of videos released from a multi-partner project team dedicated to studying and educating the world on the dark-eyed junco recently caught my attention. 

The series of eight videos is 88 minutes long, and can be watched piecemeal. 

http://juncoproject.org/

The subject of the project is a bird that you may be familiar with, and if not, I bet you'll notice in your surroundings after watching the videos. 

These videos provide insight into modern-day field ornithology about one particular species. As you'll see, with as much as people know about birds, each discovery in nature spawns a new series of questions. 

Below is a photo I recently took of an Oregon Junco in the Presidio. Plain, yet beautiful...ordinary, yet extraordinary. 

I have my own personal connection to the junco because I shot one for no reason when I was about 10 years old. It was winter in Wisconsin. The bird, hopping innocently on the ground, was fully entrusted to the safety of the environs of our backyard feeder. I hid around the house corner with my BB gun and fired. My aim was good, and it instantly died. I walked to pick it up, and I studied it. That one action taught me so much about the fragility of life, the consequences of a senseless action, the weight of a bird, the softness of feathers.

I don't think I talked to anyone about that act that day. In fact, I don't think I talked to anyone about it until about a year ago. I have been too ashamed. Yet, I might be learning that that one action was probably one of the formative moments that led me to a lifetime of working to help nature while teaching people what I can along the way.

Dark-eyed (Oregon) junco, Presidio, June 2012.