Be Your Own Bird & Help Migratory Birds

It's World Migratory Bird Day! Be Your Own Bird AND Help Birds - Buy "Be Your Own Bird"  and I'll donate half the proceeds to bird conservation efforts:

World Migratory Bird Day is an annual, UN-backed global awareness-raising and environmental education campaign focused on migratory birds and the need for international cooperation to conserve them.
"World Migratory Bird Day is celebrated each year to highlight the need for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats. More than 300 events in more than 60 countries to mark World Migratory Bird Day 2018 (registered on the website) will include bird festivals, education programmes, media events, bird watching trips, presentations, film screenings and a benefit concert to raise funds for international nature conservation. The Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement (AEWA) — two intergovernmental wildlife treaties administered by UN Environment — organize the campaign in cooperation with Environment for the Americas (EFTA). EFTA works with diverse partners to provide English and Spanish educational materials and information about birds and bird conservation throughout the Americas. Their programmes inspire children and adults to go outdoors, learn about birds, and participate in their conservation. www.worldmigratorybirdday.org/partners"

Osprey Nest Cam Awesomeness from Golden Gate Audubon

Whether you're an avid birder or just in need of some faith renewal, the new Osprey nest cam installed by Golden Gate Audubon last week offers a quick fix. Not only do you get a veritable birds-eye view, you get a great gander at the beautiful bay and city skyline.

GGA installed two high-definition cameras focused on a nest on a 75-foot-high inactive WW2 maritime crane on the Richmond shoreline. The cameras have infrared ability so the next can be viewed at night without disturbing the birds. There is a chat room on the web site, as well as educational materials on Ospreys and how to help them thrive, and even lesson plans for teachers of grades 7-12.

We've taken to leaving it on full-screen at random when we're home to view the beautiful birds in repose as well as feeding, preparing the nest, and mating (!). This weekend, the female laid its first egg so the action's just starting: Check it out at: http://sfbayospreys.org

Golden Gate Audubon is a founding member of the Bay Area Osprey Coalition, which includes organizations committed to helping this amazing raptor thrive!  Other members of the coalition include the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (a project of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy) and Mare Island Preserve, which hosts our signature S.F. Bay Ospreys Days festival each June.

 

Songwriters Deborah Crooks and Michael McNevin at The Lost Church Friday, February 17, 2017 7:30pm

A bright spot on the calendar this Friday, February 17, 2017, when I'll be doing a show at The Lost Church in San Francisco, with my friend, the imitable, and great, songwriter Michael McNevin. The show is also a celebration of our respective February birthdays, so we'll be playing songs covering the spectrum of our songwriting lives. We'll even have cake or pie (or both!) to celebrate that much more, and I'll be playing with a full band (yay!). Finally, we LOVE The Lost Church, one of San Francisco's best, intimate listening venues, and we LOVE YOU. Please join us (and save $5) by picking up tickets in advance! Your presence completes the evening. 

Tickets for $15 via tickefly HERE/$20 at the door. 

* I'll have a limited number of these awesome Nemo-designed posters, available for $5, as well. 

Bird Songs II: "I Like Birds" "Broken Wings Heal" and "Proud Penguin"

More selections from the world of contemporary bird-referencing songs. 

"I Like Birds" by The Eels
This punchy number caught my ear more than a decade ago when a friend turned me on to The Eels. No birder pretension here, just simple bird appreciation:

"I can't look at the rocket launch
The trophy wives of the astronauts
And I won't listen to their words
'Cause I like birds

I don't care for walking downtown
Crazy auto-car gonna mow me down
Look at all the people like cows in a herd
Well, I like birds

If you're small and on a search
I've got a feeder for you to perch on"

"Razor Wire" by Carolyn Aiken
There are bird references all over Aiken's latest recording, Broken Wings Heal, and the title track itself is a confident ode to healing. But "Razor Wire" is the heartbreaking gut punch of the album, a song I first heard live at The Freight a last summer:
"behind razor wire
sings a song bird
her heart beats strong
her spirit flies free
undaunted and sublime
she sings to the sun and the wind and the trees
she remembers in her dreams
Outside her confines
she knows what it’s like
flying tandem with her kind
free to dive and climb and be
and she…dreams
of the time she will fly
and readies her wings
calming her mind
knowing that all that stands between her and the sky
is time."

 
"Proud Penguin" by Jamie Purnell
Purnell is a Bay Area songwriter I met at FAR-West. He performed this song live the other night at the KC  Turner Presents Shhhongwriters Open Mic at Doc's Lab. A shorty and powerful ditty about flying, swimming, being only who you can be and self acceptance, I couldn't help but love it. 
"hey there seagull, it's fun to swim in the sea/I may not be able to fly, but I'm happy to be me."

Know of a fairly-recent (post-2000) "bird song" I should hear? Please email me! 

Bird Songs: "All Over Ohio", "Birds Fly South" & "Scarecrow"

photo by Don McCullough

As I'm one of those lifelong bird people (I considered a bird-related career path in college, studying natural history and working to release peregrine falcons for the Predatory Bird Research Group) I notice the actual and metaphorical birds wherever I am, and birds tend to show up routinely in my own writing. But even music lovers who are the most disinclined to ornithology know many bird-related songs: The Beatles "Blackbird," Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" and Skynyrd's "Freebird" (like it or not) are pretty much of the modern-day canon. At a concert last summer, I was struck again at how often birds appear in lyrics, even among songwriters that aren't really "birders." The past few months I've started "collecting" contemporary (post-2000) bird-referencing songs, and will be sharing my favorites here. Know of a fairly-recent "bird song" I should hear? Please email me. 
In the meantime, here's a sampling of some of my recent favorites: 
 
"All Over Ohio" by Over the Rhine
I swoon over the sensibilities of Over the Rhine in general, who call an Ohio farm home between their own musical peregrinations,  and whose lyrics bespeak their deep connection to place. They know their land deeply, as well as the creatures who share it. "All Over Ohio," sung in duet, is a long, lovely tour both of place and the birdly need to come and go: 

"And the starlings they were flying
Earlier today
Doing their maneuvers
Clouds of feathers on display
Makes me wanna kneel in prayer but
I’ve forgotten what to say
I’ll just name all the birds in Ohio
...

All I wanna be is a thousand black birds*
Bursting from a tree into the blue
Love – let it be not just a feeling
But the broken beauty
Of what we choose to do"

*Listen to an actual blackbird call HERE.
 

"Birds Fly South" by The Mastersons  
The Mastersons, an Austin-based duo, also evoke bird migration in the title track of their 2012 release, a song about their own need to move, the pull of the heart, the mystery and reasons  of why humans and animals pick up and go when they do. 
Birds fly south, before the cold
all night, I'm going to drive
New York's getting me down
run out of reason to hang around
that's why birds fly south, 
when it all comes down 
All night, I'm going to drive
Will you be, right by my side?


"Scarecrow" by Michael McNevin 
This is one of my all-time favorite songs for a lot of reasons: not only it it a great evocation of the behavior of gulls* (the species of sea bird I've projected upon this song), its a beautiful love song, period. I believe its won some awards, and I've a CD containing the song, but it's hard to find online to easily share.  Fortunately, for these purposes, there's this video (Track McNevin down at one of his shows or hit him up at Muddpuddle Music if you want your own copy.) I heard him sing it the first time I saw him perform and became an insta-fan. 
She's a sea bird I'm a scarecrow
She came to rest upon my elbow
She flys fast I watch the corn grow
Will she come back, well damned if I know
Damned if I know
 ...
She's a sea bird I'm a scarecrow
Will I turn to driftwood in the shallows?
Damned if I know, damned if I know

*Listen to an actual California gull call HERE.

 
(McNevin's also got a song called "Early Bird" worth giving a listen)

Hawk Hill Gypsy

One of my favorite 'reset' buttons is getting up to Hawk Hill in Marin County every couple weeks as a volunteer for Golden Gate Raptor Observatory. A 360-degree view of the Bay Area will put nearly everything back in perspective (plus helping track the Golden Gate Raptor migration not only restores my wonder but allows me to utilize some of my college-accredited field & ornithological skills). After a very full, long, fun weekend of music at FAR-West, I was back on the Hawk Hill Monday. Yesterday, our hours of counting were capped off by the release of a Red-Tail Hawk dubbed 'Gypsy' who will be tracked via Telemetry for clues on just how hawk spend their time. Hawk migration season runs into early December. Get up on the hill if you can! And find out more about GGRO at http://www.parksconservancy.org/programs/ggro/

A photo posted by Deborah Crooks (@deborahrcrooks) on Oct 19, 2015 at 4:31pm PDT

Then today I heard a great broadcast on NPR, with Terry Gross talking to wildlife photographer Gerrit Vyn and essayist Scott Weidensaul about some of the remarkable abilities of birds. Vyn and Weidensaul contributed to a new book about North American birds. Flights Of Fancy: Exploring The Songs And Pathways Of 'The Living Bird' http://n.pr/1KkI1HW

The Living Bird: 100 Years of Listening to Nature, by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Gerrit Vyn, Barbara Kingsolver, Scott Weidensaul and Lyanda Lynn Haupt

 

Read.Eat.Listen: Water & Weather

Some mornings are worth everything. Such was the case today, when after dropping Kwame at the airport, I stopped for a walk by "the birds" on the way home. That's what we've come to call the Elsie B Roemer Sanctuary on the west side of the east side of the island. The sun wasn't quite up, and everything was blue and pink, the only other folks on the trail were far and few between. The Sanctuary, however, was going off, a riot of Pelicans souring, Canada Geese honking, terns twittering and oyster catchers hueeping past. Alameda is a good place to be if you're not-so-secretly a bird geek.

I make a determination every week or so to get out to "the birds"  daily, but as I don't live in easy walking distance anymore, I often forget. The world is a wonder if you pause a moment to take it in. I'm reminding myself this as much as anyone else, who often forgets that all that I love is close by. Times like this morning are usually when I make the determination anew.

In the wake of the latest spate of climate change news  — thank you Obama for the Clean Power Plan — I've been reading up on sea level rise in California again. Many people have been trying to alert the masses to this eventuality for a few years now, and now word is really out. It's hard to imagine what this will mean for the place I call home. On a flood map, our little patch of island, is still that, an island, but the shore will be much closer. Then it will be easier to get out to "the birds"... if the birds are still having any of it...

Read: "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan. I've only surfed (or tried to) a couple of times— alas, even growing up in Santa Cruz County I never lost my fear of the cold, changeable ocean. That said, I love the ocean, its coast and have always loved surf culture...and I LOVE this book, and have barely been able to put it down this week. I get the feeling Finnegan, a longtime writer for The New Yorker who has had a life-long push-pull affair with surfing, could rewrite a phone book so it was engaging, but this really is a notable memoir. Anyone whose spent time on the California coast or in Hawaii will appreciate the insider's view Finnegan depicts so well, from the people, to the waters to the tortures and rewards of loving something deeply. 

Eat: Japanese Sweet Potato. A humble vegetable that gives. I can and do eat them straight up. This is a recipe that splits the difference: Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes

Listen: We saw Ray Wylie Hubbard at The Freight last week, my first time seeing this Texas musician. Been there, seen it all, looked-under-every-rock, not-afraid-to-say-anything gritty goodness.

Read.Eat.Listen: Between Seasons

Read: In the bird world, it's spring, and if you're paying attention to Bay Area falcon populations, you know peregrines have commenced nesting. I was a slight bit saddened to learn that our local Alameda pair of nesting peregrines set up house across the estuary, in Oakland, this year. Nonetheless, I'm getting another sort of falcon fix reading  "H is for Hawk", a memoir by falconer Helen Macdonald about training a Goshawk in the wake of her father's death. While the Goshawk is the star of this book, falons and falconry get my play.
Eat: As we've had very little in the way of typical winter weather here on the West Coast, eating with the seasons hasn't been much a helfpul concept for meal planning. Fortunately, this Ginger, Turmeric Spice Carrot Soup splits the winter/spring difference pretty well.

Listen:  Leading up the Lucinda Williams Tribute show in Berkeley last week, I was pretty much listening to Lucinda 24/7. Now that I've got a batch of her songs learned, I can turn to other sounds! Turns out that the big voiced, old soul Brandi Carlile released another batch of  clear-eyed songs earlier this month in the form of 'The Firewatcher's Daughter.' Take a listen to "The Eye"

 

Florida Postcard

I was delighted and privileged to have the opportunity to attend a conference the Florida Nature and Culture Center outside of Fort Lauderdale last weekend. The FNCC is situated on the border of the Everglades Wildlife Management Area so in between conference sessions on Buddhism, philosophy and everyday life, I took out my binoculars and checked out some of the local flora and fauna (ibis and black vultures and anhingas, oh my). Beauty and truth, always a winning combo....

Watching the sky, thinking of water

The preciousness of water is nowhere more apparent than in the desert. The air is dry, water bottles never seem to last very long, and every living thing is geared toward maximizing the resource. Last night, it rained a little bit, but by morning the sky was brilliantly clear, not a cloud in site. The ground, too, was dry. The ground, here, if not populated by cactus and tree, is sandy. (If we'd have shut our eyes during the last mile of a hike we did in JT National Park on Tuesday, we could have been walking on a beach!).  I thought maybe I'd been mistaken, then saw some holes in the sand were the water had dripped off the roof. I could be sure that ever plant in site had soaked up as much as possible.

I was very sad to read the news of birds washing up on the shores of Alameda (& Hayward & ) while I'm here in the desert. The bird sanctuaries and shores of the East Bay are what convinced me to call it home. And living on an island (albeit a little one) has brought me closer the the Bay waters than ever before. Now the Bay is my backyard, the water surface often my natural escape when I'm home in need of a little wildness, however vestigial.

I've been able to count I seeing a good number of avian life - scoters and coots, buffleheads and terns - when I venture outside. And then their are the mammals, Harbor Seals and even Bay Porpoises. The SF bay has recovered a lot of its natural history in recent years due to the efforts of groups like Save The Bay and Save Our Shores. It's also more heavily trafficked than ever, especially in recent weeks with the tankers getting backed up in anchorage as the longshoremen struck. Who knows what the cause is of this latest blight on the bay landscape, but it's a reminder how fragile things are, how even if there seems like a lot of clean water and a lot of birds, etc., the slightest disruption can be disastrous.
International Bird Rescue, one of the main organizations working on saving the contaminated birds, is looking more volunteers. If you're in the Bay Area, please consider giving them some love: bird-rescue.org

  

Autumnal Sky

Christopher Capell photo

The word equinox comes from the Latin words for "equal night." The fall and spring equinoxes are the only days of the year in which the Sun crosses the celestial equator.
From here on out, the temperatures begin to drop and the days start to get shorter than the nights. — Farmer's Almanac

Practice, life,  everything, about living, it seems, comes down to balance between opposites: light and dark, hard and soft, life and death, sweet and sour, male and female, heaven and earth.  The Autumnal equinox was Monday, providing a fine opportunity to stop a moment to marvel at the earth hanging in balance between all these poles.

I celebrated the equinox by planting my feet on the earth and looking up at the sky. After an early-morning practice in San Francisco with Peter Sanson, a visiting Certified Ashtanga teacher from New Zealand, I headed up Hawk Hill in Marin for my fortnightly stint as a Hawk Watch volunteer. By the time I left the studio, the sun was fully up, the sky was clear and bright blue, making a perfect backdrop for hundreds of migrating raptors. A half hour late to my shift, I barely had time to say hello to my hawk-watch team-mates as there were so many hawks in the sky: Cooper's Hawks, Sharp-shinned hawks, Broad-Winged hawks and more, there were hawks everywhere. The day would go by quickly as there was rarely a moment when the sky wasn't busy with migrating birds (and the hill full of both tourists enjoying a stellar view of San Francisco and other avid bird watchers). It was tremendous. It was was wonderful. 

Autumn Sky

By Charles Simic
 

In my great grandmother's time,   

All one needed was a broom   

To get to see places   

And give the geese a chase in the sky.   

               •

The stars know everything,   

So we try to read their minds.   

As distant as they are,   

We choose to whisper in their presence.   

               •

Oh Cynthia,   

Take a clock that has lost its hands   

For a ride.   

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity   

Where Time likes to stop now and then.   

               •

Come, lovers of dark corners,   

The sky says,   

And sit in one of my dark corners.   

There are tasty little zeroes   

In the peanut dish tonight.

 

Starling songs and the Hesitation Blues

Basically, I live in the suburbs. A few businesses operate nearby, but we're on a mostly residential grid, complete with sidewalks and a smattering of trees lining the streets. In the bird department, we get Western bluebirds and goldfinch, hummingbirds and house finches, brown towhees, crows and scrub jays. A predictable bunch of birds for Northern California,  whose songs I readily recognize. So I rushed to the window along with the cat when I suddenly heard a  racket one morning, both of us straining our necks to get a better look. Ah-ha, I saw, deflating slightly, a hundred or so starlings had alighted on the telephone wire in a sudden burst, singing and trilling and chattering away as only they know how. And do starlings know how to make a sound. While I was a little disappointed at finding these prolific and invasive birds in the spot containing my potential wonder of the day, I was nonetheless respectful of their ability to learn and recite the songs of other birds. Starlings are like the ultimate cover band, err,  flock. The European variety evidently haas 15-20 songs ( a whole set!) of other birds' songs that they've learned to imitate and are  ready to sing at any time. The even have local dialects of those songs.
I don't want to identify too closely with a starling, but thinking of starlings reminded me of a song that has become a stalwart in my long sets, 'Hesitation Blues.' (I may have mentioned the song here before ). A traditional song that's been adopted by popular writers (including WC Handy) in the early part of the 20th Century, versions of the tune have been covered by a whole bunch of folks since,  including Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin, varying its feel (blues, Western swing) and lyrics accordingly. I 'found' the song listening to the radio when the DJ played an hour's worth of Hesitation Blues versions. While I sometimes improv my own lyrics based on where I'm singing* (local dialect!)  I typically do a version using the lyrics Willie Nelson plays:

*KALX plays a very Berkeley-centric version I recorded of the song 'KALX Hesitation Blues' after playing a late-edition of KALX-Live in 2013.

Climate change, birds & wonder

I started my second year volunteering as a hawk watcher for Golden Gate Raptor Observatory a couple weeks back, which involves being part of a team tracking the fall migration of raptors, adding to a large effort "to inspire the preservation of California raptor populations." It's very hard not to be inspiring standing atop the Marin Headlands, looking over the amazing Bay Area, as the largest west coast migration goes flying by. I recommend anyone with a few hours to spare, get themselves up to Hawk Hill in the next few months.
I came off the hill yesterday, wonder restored, only to read the article Climate Change Will Disrupt Half of North America’s Bird Species, Study Says. The New York Times report on the National Audubon's findings that 'the ranges of some species are predicted to shrink at least 50 percent by 2080,' was chilling.  My momentary cold thought was that I was thankful I likely wouldn't be around to see it, as I don't know I could bear it. But the truth is, 'it' is happening now, it just might not be so obvious yet.

Climate change = shrinking habitat

 So much of my experience of being in place, of living, is affected by the birds around me: hearing the sound of a towhee peeping when I wake up, seeing a hawk learning to fly from a coastal stage, and watching Western bluebirds flitting along a fence line at the park provide context.  I see a bird and something in me remembers hey, the world is vast and marvelous beyond my wildest imaginings.
I know not everyone is this way.  I've lived in enough urban environments where the diversity of birds is slim to know that many people's life experience simply doesn't account for feathered animals, while my sensibility is shaped by having grown up in the country surrounded by trees and birds and insects. My family charted the seasons by swarming bees, returning swallows and Pyracantha-gorging waxwings. Volunteering to Hawk watch puts me back in that stream, which reminds me to care.

Back to the very uncomfortable topic of climate change, the UN is having a summit in New York in a couple of weeks, and climate activists are rallying to call for action. As environmental author and leader Bill McKibbon writes 'Marching doesn’t solve anything by itself. But movements can shift political power—in fact, little else ever does.'
You can sign up to march or donate to the cause here http://act.350.org/signup/readytomarch

Island living: In the stream

“When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor's gift” —Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

When I lived in Santa Cruz while attending UC Santa Cruz, I'd meet a friend at the harbor three mornings a week to row a zipper out into the bay for a good hour. Sitting atop the water in a kayak feels like being a duck or scoter. You're pretty much in the stream with everyone else, short of committing to swimming, eye-level with otters and seals, pelicans and gulls. But while I've enjoyed kayaking on and off in the years since, mostly on vacations to warm lovely places like New Zealand or Hawaii, I hadn't ever thought to get my own. Then I married a man with a decidedly nautical bent—if guitars aren't been played or read about boats are.  Late last year, he read about Oru Kayaks, which makes origami kayaks. Yes, you read that right. Origami. Oru makes kayaks out of single sheets of plastic that fold up into 25-lb boxes you can put in the car, on the boat or carry up a trail.  Their motto is 'from boat to box in 5 minutes' and since two boxed up Orus arrived on our doorstop we've started taking them out around Alameda, which between the bay and the estuary offers a lot of kayaking options.  The kayaks were a little stiff first out of the box —I've needed help getting mine fully assembled so I'm still aways from 5 minutes— but once together are light and watertight, and glide beautifully and silently over the water...like a duck.  

A couple weeks ago, I noticed a new mural while driving over the Park Street bridge. A few days ago I was visiting a friend who lives in Jingletown, the warehouse, live-work space, art and mosaic- (IMA used to be based here) filled neighborhood just over the estuary,  and discovered the mural was right up the street. Painted on the side of the Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale Warehouse, and within a few wing beats of the Peregrine Falcon-housing Fruitvale Bridge, it depicts several, mostly non-native species: a tropical bird I don't recognize, a chameleon and some elephants as well as the head of a condor.  The mural is bright and compelling as murals can be, but I'm flummoxed by the choice of subject matter (save for the elephants, given the building that serves as its canvas).  How cool would it have been to focus on native species? In any event, it's right by a waterfront park and the UCB boat launch so getting up close makes for a pleasant outing. Bring your binocs and look up for the falcons while you're at it— they're going to fledge soon — as well as the herons and gulls and ducks and other birds that frequent the estuary.

Of futurists and falcons

Glenn Nevill photo http://raptor-gallery.com/

A former coworker told me his father was a futurist. "You should look him up when you're in Austin," he said. This was a while ago now, close to a decade ago, when I was thinking of moving to Texas. I'd sometimes house-sit for a friend and live there for an odd week or 10 days at a time. So I did look him up, the futurist, and he took me to lunch.

He assured me that it was good to like a do a bunch of different things, so you don't get too attached or over-invested and get devastated when if something doesn't work out quite as you envisioned. I don't know if he was right, but I still take comfort in his words, especially on days which find me alternately in a yoga studio, writing a song at home and standing under a tree looking through binoculars as a couple of falcons wheel and turn in the sky.

One of my long-held passions are raptors and their conservation, a potential career path deferred decades ago to follow other threads of interest. Wednesday I drove to one end of Alameda to join a motley crew of bird lovers who knew a biologist was going to show up at 10:30 to band three not-yet-fledged peregrine falcons being reared on a local railroad bridge. Binoculars in hand and peering through spotting scopes, we settled into watching the biologists and a photographer as they ascended the tower and the parent falcons went berserk over the intruders. 

While we had an amazing view of falcons in flight, after a few minutes, it got uncomfortable watching the parent falcons flying themselves to near-exhaustion, careening back and forth in front of the trestle, cacking in the rising heat, following their instinctual drive to protect their young. I nearly started crying out of a helpless concern. At the same time, I was impressed with their vigilance. They tired but they didn't give up, taking rests and tag-teaming their assaults on the hard-hat wearing biologists.
Persistence is why peregrines are still here. After being nearly decimated by the affect of DDT in the 1970s, an intrepid network of falconers, biologists and bird lovers in tandem with the tenacious if endangered species worked their way back from the brink of extinction.
Futurists "explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present." Amid melting snow caps and my own doubts, I appreciate a good recovery story, which these falcons, once so threatened and now nesting in back of grocery stores and in city centers, symbolize to me.  

Read.Eat.Listen: Regeneration

I was dismayed, heartened, inspired and confused by the latest report by the UN on Climate Change. Dismayed that things are as bad as they are; heartened that experts are not shying away from the truth; inspired by the possibilities for taking action and confused at how and where to start on the individual level. The upshot is, of course, there's no more time to waste when it comes to taking action to slow climate change and no more excuses to be made: climate change is a man-made problem. We've a couple more decades, if that, to halt or slow the crisis. This lifetime. Right now. Where to begin when the problems — from fossil fuel use, to fracking, to plastics in the ocean, to rampant development —  have such momentum? Fortunately, there are many people on it. Now it's our turn to listen and believe that what we do today affects tomorrow and  that the affect can be beneficial. Toward that end, I've been so encouraged to see all the footage of hatching Peregrines from the 'nest-cams' set up around the Bay Area. By the 1970s, the Peregrine was an Endangered Species, a victim of rampant pesticide use, but with diligent efforts by biologists and a ban on DDT use, the falcon population recovered. Thirty years of combined legislation and action works. Now look at them go: 

Read: Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, a takes on climate change in novel form. "Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths." 
Plus, this article: UN Climate Report Charts Ways to Halt Global Warming

Eat: An afternoon snack at Piccino in Dogpatch the other day entailed a spring soup made with butter beans. Butter Beans, or Fava Beans, are those large, lovely kidney shaped beans that look engineered for presentation possibilities. They're also yummy. I've got my eye on this easy breezy spring salad of Fava Beans with Red Onion and Mint.

Listen: I've been on an Over the Rhine jag most of the year, I admire The Lone Bellow and I've been a fan of eTown since the 90s when I lived in Boulder and watched many a live taping. So I was delighted to see this Over the Rhine/Lone Bellow/eTones rendition of Slip Sliding Away. Beauty. Yes.

BioBlitz! Golden Gate National Parks, CA Friday-Saturday, March 28-29, 2014

LOTS of great events happening this weekend in the Bay Area. On the natural history and biodiversity front, Golden Gate National Parks is holding BioBlitz Festival, March 28-29, a 24-hour species count of the many inhabitants of GGNP. Birds and snakes and who knows what else (oh my!). 
Check it out at Crissy Field, Hawk Hill, Muir Beach and beyond....
"The three national park units that make up the Golden Gate National Parks encompass more than 80,000 acres and 91 miles of shoreline along the northern California coast. These parks are home to an amazing array of biodiversity, including over half of the bird species of North America and nearly one-third of California’s plant species!

To better understand, appreciate, and protect this natural treasure, the National Park Service, National Geographic, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and Presidio Trust are teaming up to host a 24-hour BioBlitz species count and two-day Biodiversity Festival, Friday-Saturday, March 28-29, 2014.

BioBlitz 2014 will take place in several national parks, including Muir Woods National Monument, Fort Point National Historic Site, and locations in Golden Gate National Recreation Area including the Giacomini wetlands, Muir Beach, the Marin Headlands, Crissy Field, the Presidio, Mori Point, and Rancho Corral de Tierra.

Part scientific endeavor, part festival, and part outdoor classroom, BioBlitz will bring together more than 300 leading scientists and naturalists from around the country, thousands of local community members of all ages, and more than 2,000 students from across the Bay Area."

Hear more about the Blitz, and how scientists are working year-round to catalog and conserve local biodiversity on KQED's Forum, as host Dave Iverson talked with guests John Francis, biologist and vice president of research, conservation and exploration at National Geographic, and Allen Fish, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy:

Hawk Hill during fall migration 

Spring Forward: The Birds are Back in Town

Driving into Alameda last week, we were pleased to see the local pair of peregrine falcons had resumed their posts at their bridge nest-site.  The annual falcon watch has heated up all over the Bay in recent weeks, as evidenced by the activity on  the WebCams the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has installed to keep tabs on the activity of breeding pairs of the once-endangered birds in San Francisco and San Jose.  If you're interested in falcon courtship, breeding and fledging behavior, look no further.  Both SF and SJ pairs produced their first eggs during the past week, with more expected.
"The peregrine falcon is an important indicator species. Its carefully recorded population trends can be instructive about ecosystem health. We closely monitor the occupancy and productivity of peregrine falcons at approximately twenty-five nests in our Greater San Francisco Bay study area, and we band nestlings at a sample of those sites to learn more about the longevity, nest site tenacity, and juvenile dispersal patterns of Central California peregrine falcons. Citizen scientists around the bay report sightings of banded falcons."

Wisdom Accrual: 16 notes to myself on my birthday

It's not a particularly big birthday this year, but it's far enough down the road that of course I'm taking stock after my latest turn around the sun. Have I learned anything useful past the 'all I learned in kindergarten?' Yes, some of those lessons carried through: daily painting (or art-making) sessions and naps are still a great idea. Bikes and birds are joyous things, being nice matters, and its best to watch out for boys like Charles Hoff who made a game of chasing girls by running them down and grabbing at them.
Mostly I learned in kindergarten that my existence was the tiny tip of a large iceberg of humanity stretching far beyond the scattered houses, canyon roads and apple orchards of our smallish town....which eventually led me through and to the BA, countless hours of post-graduate/extra-curricular study, 26 states, four continents, four guitars, two marriages, two houses, two cats, multiple dogs, multiple deaths, multiple therapies, multiple stitches, Catholicism, Buddhism, yoga, omnivorism, vegetarianism, veganism, pens, paper, art, music, bikes and birds to here, now.
What to make of this?
Notes from the road thus far:

1. Do your practice. (Everything is a practice, whether it's feeding the cat, chanting the sutra, taking a shower, loving your mate, facing the page, stepping on stage, etc. et al)
2. The forgiveness business. Even if it's painful as hell.
3. Have your feelings. 
4. Know what's yours.
5. Listen.
6. You can rewrite the story
7. Get clear. Be clear. (Are you in or out?)
8. Get out in nature. (The moon! The stars!)
9. Laugh.
10. Moderate consumption of all kinds.
11. Don't wait. 
12. It, everything, will change.
13. Honesty.
14. Gratitude.
15. Reverence. 
16. Love.

Wolves, now falcons: Staying the course for wildlife protection

"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival."—Wendell Berry  

As some folks know, my nature-loving self was pretty excited to realize peregrine falcons weren't only off the Endangered Species list, they were nesting right in my backyard. One of the great things about life is seeing how things develop and turn out over time (especially when things go well) and this was a great example: a population of a bird species rendered near-extinct by the use of dangerous pesticide had — over the course of several decades through the efforts of a team of committed people— been painstakingly recovered. But much like the paradoxal information about wolf populations in Wyoming I recently posted — it's now possible to hunt the once endangered, now recovered-but-still-tenuous animal — federal officials are no longer permitting rescues (by qualified ready-to-assist biologists) of peregrine chicks who fall from their nests into the San Francisco Bay, even though the peregrine is still a 'protected' species.  Huhh? 
 Evidently this is a 'local decision' by wildlife officials, but foreboding if one looks at the record of recent treatment of once-endangered animals. If you're like me and prefer to live in a world with wildlife left in it, and don't really see the sense in this decision, please write your protest to:

Ren Lohoefener, Regional Director, US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2800 Cottage Way, W-2606 Sacramento, CA 95825

Update: Sign the petition to Restore the Permit to Rescue Falcon Chicks https://www.change.org/petitions/us-fws-restore-the-permit-to-rescue-falcon-chicks-on-bridges#share

Other resources:
http://www.audubon.org/
ttp://www2.ucsc.edu/scpbrg/