Community scientists keeping an eye on the sky

This story aired in the November 27, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.

Every fall, tens of thousands of birds fly south along the Pacific coast in search of more hospitable winter climates. Most bird species prefer to fly over land, not water. So that narrow bit of water at the Golden Gate is a natural bottleneck, the shortest distance between Marin and San Francisco as they fly south.

For the past forty years, a group of volunteers have gone to the Marin Headlands, and kept their dedicated eyes on the sky to count raptors.

This year, a shake-up in the staff of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory — or GGRO — threatened the volunteer programs, and led to a gap in data reporting during peak migration season. But the community of volunteers kept showing up.

STORY TRANSCRIPT

REPORTER: It’s a bright, clear morning and Holly Thomas has opted to walk the scenic route up to Hawk Hill.

HOLLY THOMAS: One of the reasons for doing the long way is just because you see the whole Marin Headlands, and it’s really pretty.

REPORTER: She points west, toward the coast.

THOMAS: I especially like the view over towards Point Bonita, Point Bonita Lighthouse. That right there that we’re seeing right now is one of my very favorite views in the whole world.

REPORTER: We’re walking up to an observation deck some 900 feet above the Golden Gate Bridge for a day of birding. Holly has been a volunteer with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory’s Hawkwatch program since 2011. Every fall, the group keeps track of the number of raptors flying by — birds of prey like hawks, falcons, and turkey vultures. She explains that for some species, the Headlands provide a comfortable home for the colder months.

THOMAS: So some are already settled in and they’ve got their winter territories. We’ve been seeing a lot of kestrels. There’s probably half a dozen territorial kestrels that we can more or less identify from Hawk Hill.

REPORTER: A few weeks earlier, Holly was on the hill for a very rare sighting: a juvenile Mississippi Kite that had flown far off its course.

THOMAS: The fourth one that’s been spotted according to the records that have been kept. That’s since the program was started 40 years ago. Average of one every ten years? That’s not a common bird.

REPORTER: From mid August through early December, over 200 volunteers come together for community science — watching the birds they love, and providing a wealth of information to researchers and biologists in this field.

At the top of the hill, the team unloads their gear. Each hawk watcher carries their own pair of binoculars. A few high-resolution spotting scopes are set up on tripods.

The team divides the airspace into four quadrants, one in each cardinal direction. Today’s day-leader Mary Kenney lays out posters in each section, which show the landscape, labeled with the names of landmarks in view. She explains how the posters help the team locate, identify, and count the birds.

MARY KENNEY: For new volunteers, it’s one of the things that they need to study. Personally what I tell people is learn a few, just a few to get you started. Like the obvious ones, Rodeo Beach, Mount Tam.

KENNEY: Start out by learning three, four. That’s really helpful because you can tell me whether it’s right or left, if a hawk is flying, right or left of Rodeo Lagoon. That helps me. Is it against the hillside or is it in the sky. That helps me find it.

REPORTER: The hawk watchers have developed a shorthand that allows them to collaborate as they scan the sky. They are constantly communicating with one another, calling out for assistance to make an ID.

John Davis, a mechanic from Oakland, comes to the hill with one of the largest camera lenses I’ve ever seen. As we talk, I learn that – up here – a bird sighting will interrupt almost any conversation, or train of thought.

JOHN DAVIS: Well, there is quadrant integrity that we need to maintain, and everyone is responsible for their spot. But if something pretty fantastic shows up… there’s an accip going away…

[Sound of camera shutter snapping]

REPORTER: An accipiter — a genus of smaller, round-winged hawks. This one’s a sharp-shinned hawk, one of 12 the group will see today.

REPORTER: The GGRO was established in the early 1980s, to monitor raptor populations in California. Its website keeps a record of the daily counts, and the season totals provide useful data to biologists. With over 40 years of data, scientists can spot trends over time — changes in population can indicate larger factors at play.

But this year, during five weeks of peak migration — the count is blank.

In September, the GGRO’s parent organization, the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, abruptly announced that it was pausing Hawkwatch. Two GGRO staff members were suddenly gone from their positions, and volunteers were left concerned about the future of the program.

Dan Foldes has been volunteering with Hawkwatch for over a decade.

DAN FOLDES: Suddenly our two fearless leaders, who we all love so much and respect so much. They weren’t there, and no one knew why. It was, it was hard. It still is hard.

REPORTER: The Parks Conservancy did not comment directly on the staffing change.

But Hawkwatch volunteers just kept coming up to Hawk Hill; they knew what to do, even without staff support. And — thanks to Holly Thomas’s computer savvy — they’ve managed to maintain the bird count.

THOMAS: I know how to use Excel. I gave people, like, this template Excel form that they could fill out based on their hand filled paper data sheets. We were trying to do pretty much the same thing that we’ve done all along.

REPORTER: That unofficial data has been passed on to GGRO to update the website’s official count, when staffing allows. But much of the data that scientists and researchers use comes from the GGRO’s banding program.

Banding is the process of catching a wild bird and attaching a small bracelet to its foot, so it can be identified again in the future. Studying the same bird over time provides information that can shed light on the species as a whole. Longtime volunteer Step Wilson provided insight into the process.

STEP WILSON: While the bird’s in hand, these banders are taking, sometimes blood samples so that they can get a lot of information on them. They’re looking at their fat, their health, the sex that you can’t always know necessarily just by counting.

REPORTER: Volunteer banders receive extensive training. New trainees must complete a two-year program, learning how to safely trap and band birds, before joining the team. The knowledge is passed from one group of volunteers to the next.

WILSON: You can’t just, you know, pass it on in a moment, you know, it’s so layered. It’s like an apprenticeship. It’s like the old timey days where father teaches son, or mother teaches daughter how to do something. And, that’s the way this operation is run for 40 couple years.

REPORTER: The data gathered through the banding program has contributed to years of scientific research and publications. Of the 39 peer-reviewed studies published by the GGRO, 29 relied heavily on banding data.

REPORTER: While the Hawkwatch bird counting program has resumed, the Parks Conservancy confirmed that banding has been paused for the remainder of the year.

John Davis explains why volunteers are anxious to have all community science programs back up and running as soon as possible.

DAVIS: We might not have any idea of how someone in 20 years uses data that we collected over the last 40. Something related to climate change, something related to pesticide use, something related to something we’ve introduced to the environment that we don’t even realize we’ve done yet.

REPORTER: In an email to KALW, The Parks Conservancy says they are committed to the mission of the GGRO, and to restarting the banding program as soon as is feasible.

This post was originally published on here