2023: Wild Premium Edition

A BAY AREA NEWS GROUP PREMIUM EDITION 2023

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Lindsay lore E X P LO R E T H E BAY A R E A’ S W I L D ( L I F E ) S I D E

A peregrine romance

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Avian adventures

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Zoo fantasias PAG E 36

Wily coyotes PAG E 66

Left: A sleepy coyote takes a break in Pioneer Park at San Francisco’s Coit Tower.

The otter half

Protecting the puma

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C OV E R I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J U I I S H I DA

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SECTION EDITORS

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Jackie Burrell Randy McMullen

David Jack Browning Chris Gotsill

Sarah Dussault Laura Oda Doug Duran

Sue Gilmore

JANE TYSKA/STAFF ARCHIVES

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An utterly amazing otter revival 4

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Human tough love, surrogate mom care get sick or stranded pups back to the wild

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PHOTOS BY DOUG DUR AN

nside the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a crowd has gathered around the otter exhibit, watching the animals do somersaults in the water and paddle on their backs while clutching toys.

“Aren’t they fun?” one woman asks her companion. “Bonk,” a pint-sized spectator says, as one otter bumps heads with another.

“Bonk, bonk.”

But upstairs, past locked doors and an office marked SORAC — Sea Otter Research and Conservation — a different kind of otter action is happening.

Aquarium staffers use nets to wrangle three otters from a tank into plastic kennels, so they can remove mussel shells and other food debris from their fur.

These are not the crowd-pleasing otters of downstairs.

These are wild animals, brought in as pups after stranding or becoming sick. They were raised at the aquarium with minimal human contact and fiercely dodge to avoid the nets.

“We actually want them to associate this (process) as a negative interaction with humans,” says Sandrine Hazan, the aquarium’s stranding and rehabilitation manager for sea otters. She helps haul up one otter, noting, “We got the problem child first, that’s good.

She just likes to climb onto the nets and make it that much more difficult to get her.”

The aquarium hopes to soon release this group of otters back into the wild, where they will join an estimated 3,000 southern sea otters living off the coast of

Above: Marine biologists prepare to release a sea otter into a pool at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Left: The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s otter program is responsible for reestablishing much of Northern California’s critically endangered southern sea otter population.

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California. The fact that there are that many is a testament to the species’ stunning recovery.

Eighteenth-century fur traders seeking their lush pelts cut the population down so completely that by the early 1900s, the otters were presumed extinct. It wasn’t until 1914, when a few dozen were spotted off Big Sur, that people realized, despite all odds, the otters were hanging on.

Conservationists working with the government have since protected and grown the otter population, perhaps none more effectively than the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Since the 1980s, the aquarium has reared otter pups found stranded or sick in the wild, initially using methods best described as learning by doing.

“Young pups are so dependent on their mother’s care that when they strand, and you are there caring for them as their mother would, they bond with you that strongly,” says Teri Nicholson, senior research biologist at the aquarium. “They consider you as their mother, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”

Nicholson and others used this maternal connection to guide young animals around their natural environment. They took pups on free-diving swims through kelp forests, collecting urchins and crabs and handing them over to the hungry youngsters. They practiced staying buoyant on the surface together, opening clams while floating on the waves, and taught them how to pound shells against rocks to crack them open (otters like to use tools).

The researchers raised the pups in inflatable kiddie pools and on waterbeds. For a time, a staffer had one living at home in their bathtub. “The caretakers became quite familiar,” notes the aquarium’s historical literature, dryly, “with the piercing scream a young otter makes.”

Though well-intentioned, direct human-to-otter contact came at a cost.

“Often a strong bond would endure in the wild after release — especially as our coastlines became more crowded — result-

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Top: From left, sea otter rehabilitation specialist Katie Finch, intern Anna Jackson and volunteer Tammy Slenkovich weigh one of the sea otters in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s otter rehabilitation program.

Bottom and right: The sea otter exhibit is one of the aquarium’s most popular attractions.

Web cams and a live stream let otter fans keep tabs on the playful creatures, even at a distance.

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ing in persistent interactions with humans,” says Nicholson. “So the minute we had an opportunity to try other methods, we pivoted.”

Those new methods are on display today, as a staffer dons a poncho and darkened, full-face welder’s mask. Looking like a B-movie psychopath, she goes into an ICU room and starts fluffing an orphaned pup’s fur with her fingers, mimicking the grooming behavior a mom would do at this age.

“The idea with the disguise is it creates this amorphous shape that masks the human form,” says Hazan. “We don’t want them to form a bond, because then you have to deal with separation anxiety, and it can be difficult for them.”

It turns out that having wild otters grow familiar with people is not a great thing.

“What we don’t want is when they’re released back into the wild, they’re approaching humans, jumping on kayaks,” Hazan says. “If that were to happen, they would potentially have to be recaptured and (be) unable to be released back into the wild.”

Despite how fun it sounds, you actually don’t want an otter on your kayak. Aquarium staffers wear heavy Kevlar gloves when handling otters. Even so, Hazan’s hands have bite marks.

Otters, she says, “are very charismatic and adorable, but they’re also dangerous. If they want something, they’re going to use their teeth or their paws to try to get it. And the way they play or roughhouse, they can inflict injury even without being aggressive.”

So rescued otters in the program are effectively blinded to the sight, sounds and smells of humans, which raises the question — who’s actually doing the hard work of raising the pups? Other otters, naturally.

In the 1990s, aquarium staff working in the field noticed adult female otters caring for youngsters even when they weren’t bio-

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logically related. In 2001, they got a chance to observe this behavior in a controlled setting, when they simultaneously had an otter mom lose a pup to stillbirth and received an orphaned pup from a local beach.

“Both animals were in distress — the female at the aquarium was vocalizing for her dead pup, and the orphaned pup we’d picked up was vocalizing for its mother,” says Nicholson. “So we introduced them, and within minutes, the two resembled a natural mother-pup pair.”

That quickly became the new way of doing things. Now, when a pup is discovered helpless in the wild, the aquarium typically pairs it up with one of the otters from the public exhibit. The two go into

Despite chilly water temperatures, sea otters stay warm, thanks to their dense, twolayer fur, which contains more than a million hairs per square inch.

a private tank together, where the surrogate otter mom teaches the pup skills it needs to survive outside. After the pup is released into local waters, the mom goes back on exhibit until the next time duty calls.

Some of the surrogates have raised more than a dozen wild pups. But do they actually enjoy it?

“Each female is different, and each introduction between mom and pup is different. Just like we all feel different on different days,” says Nicholson. “Sometimes the bond can happen immediately, and on other occasions, it can take more time. We’ve had mother-pup pairs who have switched pups.”

Otter fathers are not involved,

because — as in the wild — they’re not really needed at this point.

“Not unlike many mammal populations, the female is the primary caregiver, and the male contributes his sperm,” Nicholson says. “The males are holding territories, mating with other females, while females are just rearing their young.”

Seventy-five percent of the pups reared in the surrogacy program go on to establish themselves in the wild and contribute to the population’s growth. The results are on shining display in the Elkhorn Slough, a 7-mile-long body of water just north of Monterey. The aquarium used to release otters here, because it’s sheltered and has no sharks, but the slough has reached capacity now.

On a recent afternoon, southern sea otters spanned all sides of the water, doing somersaults to remove parasites and clean their fur, sticking paws up to warm in the sun, wrapping themselves in eelgrass to take little naps. You could see some otter mothers — distinguishable due to nose scars incurred during mating — demonstrate behaviors to pups, including grooming and cracking clam shells.

It’s thought surrogate otters have contributed to more than 50 percent of the population growth in Elkhorn. And the slough has benefited from the otters’ presence — they’ve kept other species from overpopulating and doing damage and boosted the growth of native eelgrass beds, which in turn, act as carbon sinks.

“As that population built up in Elkhorn Slough, we saw a lot of improvements in ecosystem health in just that area,” says Cara Field, medical director at the Marine Mammal Center in Marin.

“There’s a lot of interest in helping to restore our entire (Pacific) coastline to a more healthy ecosystem. And otters might have a really significant role to play in that. That’s what we are theorizing, anyway, those of us who are interested in otter reintroduction.”

Back at the aquarium in their permanent homes, surrogate moms never get to see the benefits they’ve made to the Monterey Bay landscape. But they have their little pleasures. Take Rosa, a surrogate mom who has reared an incredible 15 pups.

“She was a phenomenal surrogate, very consistent from pup to pup in how maternal she was,” says Hazan.

At 23 years of age, Rosa is now retired. And what is retirement like for an otter?

“I mean, luxury,” Hazan says.

“You get whatever you want, all the crab you want. You don’t have to deal with any annoying pups — you don’t have to take care of anybody. You can be grumpy and irritable and decide you don’t want to eat something one day, and then like that something the next day.

Everything will be catered to you, so it’s pretty amazing.”

Monterey Bay Aquarium marine biologist Sandrine Hazan, left, and sea otter rehabilitation specialist Katie Finch release a sea otter pup back into its pool after checking its weight and other vitals.

Eventually, the rehabilitated otter will be released into the wild in Monterey Bay.

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No tedium at this aquarium

Sea nettle jellyfish swim in their tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey. DOUG DURAN/STAFF

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Tide pool diving is just one of Monterey’s fun things B Y J O H N M E TCA L F E

You could spend an entire day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and not run out of stuff to do, thanks to behind-the-scenes tours, animal feedings and opportunities to get wet. Here are five awesome ways to maximize your time at the aquarium (and you’ll no doubt find others): E X P LO R E A N E W D E E P-S E A E X H I B I T Giant isopods scurry like roly-poly bugs in a touch tank.

Japanese spider crabs the size of Labrador retrievers stalk a whale skeleton. Glasslike jellies crackle with electric-rainbow lights. Into the Deep, which opened in 2022, features the largest collection of deep-sea animals in all North America — you’ll find awe in this weird environment lurking around every darkened corner.

DIVE WITH AQ UA R I U M S TA F F

Want to immerse your child, literally, in the wonders of the ocean? You can with surface-diving excursions in the Great Tide Pool right outside the aquarium.

For $150 plus admission, staffers will give kids ages 8 to 13 lessons in dry-suit scuba diving and guide them through the diverse wildlife that exists in the shallows.

Afterward, they get a dive log and a warming cup of hot chocolate.

(Typically held from mid-June through Labor Day.) GET HAPPY WITH PENGUINS

There’s something mood-lifting about standing in front of the African penguin environment.

Looking like wobbly bowling pins with flippers, many of the birds have paired up into couples, and the romance spreads across species — on a recent visit, a man proposed to his partner in front of

the penguins. Get there at feeding time, and you’ll learn plenty of interesting facts, including that the birds can defecate 3 feet away by “projectile pooping.”

WITNESS A FEEDING FRENZY

Ever see hundreds, perhaps thousands of fish swarm a diver like a massive fish-nado? That’s the scene at feeding time in the aquarium’s Kelp Forest, when a brave naturalist descends into the tank to scatter grub and give live commentary in front of gathered crowds. An equally impressive feeding takes place in the Open Sea exhibit, with huge tuna and hammerhead sharks, and if you want to expand beyond fish, there are mealtimes with penguins and sea otters, too.

When African penguins swim, they use their wings as flippers.

TYSON V. RININGER/MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM

TA K E A B E H I N D -T H ES C E N E S TO U R Ever wonder what’s behind the aquarium’s locked doors? Book a backstage tour — at noon, 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. daily, for $24 plus admission — and you get to find out.

Staffers demonstrate how they prepare food for more than 10,000 animals and guide you around the labyrinthine network of pipes channeling water to exhibits. They might relate stories from the aquarium’s olden days or highlight off-display marine creatures. One gem on a recent visit was a tank loaded with the tiniest of jellyfish.

Details: Aquarium is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily at 886 Cannery Row, Monterey; tickets range from $44.95 (child) to $59.95 (adult), montereybayaquarium.org.

It’s difficult to tell who’s watching whom, the aquarium visitors or the giant sea bass in the Kelp Forest exhibit.

DOUG DURAN/STAFF

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An ever-evolving theater of life plays out along the ‘Coasts of California’

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BY E L L I OT T A L M O N D

he California coastline is a geologically sculpted masterpiece jagging and jutting for 1,100 head-turning miles.

It starts with the Tortilla Wall poking into the sea at the U.S.-Mexico border and angles northwest to what some describe as California’s loneliest beach — a wild stretch of yellow grassy dunes, hard sand and chunks of driftwood at Pelican State Beach this side of Oregon.

Don’t bother trying to define this heterogeneous seaboard through a single stretch of shore. It has been carved into disparate sections that speak to California’s richness.

But the Bay Area is as good as any place to launch an exploration of the landscape and wildlife. The 100-mile strand from Santa Cruz to Point Reyes National Seashore has towering, forested mountains, plunging brittle bluffs and steep, chaparral-covered canyons brimming with wildlife. It has rickety piers, historic lighthouses and a marine sanctuary filled with elephant seals, sea lions and predatory white sharks.

Atmospheric moisture creates ghostly summer tableaus, when cottony fog conceals rocky coves, sandy beaches and the narrow opening to San Francisco Bay. It was on just such an overcast morning recently that Oakland author Obi Kaufmann visited Mussel Rock, a Daly City beach of geological significance. Kaufmann, 50, is an artist, poet and one of the foremost communicators of what California landmass represents. His latest in a series of extraordinary field atlases is “The Coasts of California” (Heyday, $55), which

Author and illustrator Obi Kaufmann surveys Daly City’s Mussel Rock Beach, a rugged part of California’s 1,200-mile coastline featured in his latest atlas, “The Coasts of California.”

KARL MONDON/STAFF

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tells the multilayered story of the shoreline through visually striking watercolor paintings and maps, insightful conceptualizations and doctoral-level proficiency in the natural sciences.

“Inexpressible fertility” is how one early explorer described the Bay Area, Kaufmann writes. “Over a thousand species of animals still make their home here in this place that is now as ecologically compromised as it is fathomlessly beautiful. Metropolitan industry has overtaken most of the Bay, yet on its margins, hundreds of thousands of birds still recognize this essential landing spot on their annual migrations up and down the Pacific Flyway.”

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I’ve experienced an abundance of plant and animal life throughout decades of tramping on Bay Area coastal trails, beaches and parks, such as San Bruno Mountain State and County Park. The book describes it as 2,416 acres of habitat for 662 plant species, 42 butterflies, 195 birds, five bumblebees, 30 ant species, 24 mammals, 13 reptiles and six amphibians.

Kaufmann writes that the Half Moon Bay coast has an evolutionarily significant unit of coho and steelhead salmon; the tiny tidewater goby found in the brackish water of lagoons, estuaries and marshes; and the red-legged frog.

The redwood forests above the Pacific are potential habitats in

Above: Upper Alamere Falls flows off the bluffs in Marin County toward the Pacific Ocean.

KARL MONDON/STAFF

Left: A northern elephant seal pup rests with its mother along a beach at Año Nuevo State Park in Pescadero.

ARIC CRABB/STAFF

the southernmost range of the marbled murrelet, an old-growthnesting seabird.

Such field notes scratch the surface of what thrives in the wind-whipped littoral. I’m awash with wonder when the artichoke, pumpkin and berry fields of Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties come into view on Highway 1 below riparian ridgelines of redwoods and eucalyptus trees. I revel in ascending above the old, moss-covered evergreens of Muir Woods National Monument before dropping into Stinson Beach along the lush Dipsea Trail.

Then there is Mussel Rock, a sea stack on the Daly City/Pacifica borderline where the San Andreas Fault first intersects with the ocean, where the worlds of the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate come together uniquely. Mussel Rock is the

virtual epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

“What am I thinking at Mussel Rock?” Kaufmann says, repeating my question. “I’m thinking of how this place has changed so many times. How it ended and began, ended and began again and again.

California has always been a perilous place. Always up for a fundamental geological rebound. That reassembly is not going to stop.”

Three-story high Mussel Rock has come to evince a geologic timekeeper. Kaufmann said the Pacific Plate would continue to push north at this intersection and eventually rip California in two in the next 5 to 10 million years.

Perhaps not many visitors at the edge of land consider such weighty forecasts while watching paragliders catch bubbles of rising air to soar from sea cliffs. Below them, wind-whipped waves march

Alamere Falls draws a crowd of hikers as it flows off the bluffs of Marin County into the Pacific Ocean.

KARL MONDON/STAFF

toward shore before folding into an ephemeral foam as if prepared at nearby Philz Coffee.

“The Coasts of California” declares the theater of life plays out on a geologic stage: “The restless, fractured earth between the continental and oceanic plates that constitutes California’s borderland of terrestrial and marine ecology influences biogeography, or the distribution of life, more than any other physical factor.”

Significant coastal landmarks exist beyond Mussel Rock.

Kaufmann directs me to where the land splits in two along the San Andreas Fault in Tomales Bay. The fault, he says, “is key to understanding the evolutionary island that is California.”

The tectonic boundary between Point Reyes and the rest of North America divides two land masses.

Oceanic soil covers one side of

Tomales Bay and continental loam soil on the other.

“You have the Bishop pine forests looking across to the inland farmlands of West Marin,” says Kaufmann, whose next book explores the California deserts.

“Throw land policy on top of that, and you get a very dramatic shift in policy within just a mile.”

The book uses geology to outline the historical arc of the coast.

Kaufmann writes that the shoreline forms “a laboratory of inquiry into the much larger question of our continued place, and rank, in the biosphere.”

It’s part of the broad concepts he and fellow author Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, broach in their video podcast “Place & Purpose,” which explores how the ancient natural world connects to modern California.

Meanwhile, “The Coasts of California” also presents details at a granular level for every imaginable precinct. “Even in those seemingly violent landscapes where the relentless wave action pummels the shoreline, so, too, do we have life finding purchase in every crevasse,” Kaufmann says.

“Even in grains of sand, there are ancient ecologies at work. Niche nutrients are available for a vast array of biodiversity.”

Striking an optimistic tone, Kaufmann says the California coast enjoys a high rate of endemism — the state of a species found only in a single defined geographic location.

The Pacific oceanfront is at the heart of the vibrant social, cultural, political and economic fabrics that make the Golden State a global innovator and lead authors and artists to weave a distinctly Californian narrative.

“I wonder if it is the coastline that is the state’s nervous system,” Kaufmann says. “In many ways, as we think of our attitude toward self and society, between the public and the private, between rights and responsibilities, the coast of California calls all that into specific focus. It’s a landless piece of the most important land in California.”

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Homes dot the ridges and rugged bluffs of Pacifica.

Something about the endless horizon forever calls to me. As a child, I explored intertidal pools to find science-fiction-looking creatures clinging to slippery rocks and rode the frothy whitewater of the Laguna Beach shorebreak on a belly board. Decades later, I surfed waves rolled like filo dough at the private Hollister Ranch north of Santa Barbara and once followed a whale hugging the storm-battered shoreline in the remote Lost Coast of Humboldt.

“We can’t help but feel like there is an inkling of the transcendent,” Kaufmann says. “It is wired in us.

The California sunset is one of the most romantic views in the world.”

The timelessness of the coast is evoked on a trek to Alamere Falls in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

The 40-foot cascade attracts hordes from the Bay Area metropolis because of its rarity — a tidefall flowing directly into the ocean.

California has only two such marvels. The other is the even more popular McWay Falls in the heart of Big Sur. I usually approach Alamere Falls from the outskirts of Bolinas. It offers cinematic views of Drakes Bay and ecosystems of lakes, prairies and dunes.

Vegetation such as coast shrubs, golden poppies, Indian paintbrush and Douglas firs blanket the solid ARTWORK FROM “THE COASTS OF CALIFORNIA: A CALIFORNIA FIELD ATLAS” BY OBI KAUFMANN, REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM HEYDAY.

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KARL MONDON/STAFF

bedrock of granite that originated in the southern Sierra Nevada about 100 million years ago.

Inhabitants include bobcats, deer, foxes, quail and various waterfowl. Pelican Lake and Double Point are protected areas for harbor seals to breed and give birth.

The 6-mile trail ends at an open meadow, where Wildcat Campground lies defenseless against bracing sea gales. In 2020, the Woodward Fire scorched almost 5,000 acres reaching Wildcat Beach, near where the waterfall splashes over rugged sandstone cliffs.

The National Park Service advises against climbing the vertical escarpments as a timesaving alternative route to the falls. Rangers say visitors are injured weekly. And I have suffered from contact with poison oak on the shortcut. So, I prefer hiking the official trail to the untamed beach where migrating whales, dolphins and multitudes of sea life live offshore.

Point Reyes feels primeval. Then thoughts of the grinding of overlapping plates in the convergent boundary remind me of the constant change underfoot.

I shelve such conjecture to gulp salty air, as spray from Alamere Falls catches sea gusts to shower me. It feels good.

For now, the California coast is dear.

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The amorous adventures of Annie the falcon is the stuff of Bay Area legend B Y J OA N M O R R I S

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was clear from the start: Annie was going to be a star.

In late 2016, people began noticing a pair of peregrine falcons flying around the UC Berkeley campus. The birds weren’t being secretive, says biologist Sean Peterson, but it still took a while to narrow down where they might be roosting: atop the iconic Campanile bell tower.

With permission from the university, a small handful of volunteers climbed a hidden spiral staircase concealed in one of the Campanile’s columns. The passageway was so narrow, the intrepid explorers had to push their backpacks ahead of themselves.

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At the top, they found a small opening covered by wooden slats — and a pair of piercing yellow eyes staring back at them. It was Annie, sitting on the torn sandbags that served as her nest.

Since then, Annie and her mates have captured the attention of a wide audience. Thousands of people from around the world watch the web cams installed on the Campanile, following every dramatic moment in the falcons’ lives — including some complicated love triangles.

“I think people have a really strong desire to connect with nature in general,” says Peterson, who was one of the original volunteers, “and here you have this iconic bird right there in the middle of one of the biggest

Annie, a peregrine falcon, has a devoted fan following online, thanks to the webcams installed atop UC Berkeley’s Campanile.

FRAME FROM WEBCAM/ CAL FALCONS

campuses in the world. It’s a little bit of wildness people can see.”

Many of Annie’s online followers have taken a personal interest in the birds. They celebrate each egg hatching, mourn the loss of chicks and follow and comment on every avian development on social media — yes, of course, Cal Falcons has its own social media.

But it’s Annie’s love life that garners the most discussion and sometimes, clutching of pearls.

Annie and her original mate, Grinnell, seemed the perfect pair. But in October 2021, he was injured while fighting off would-be interlopers and taken to Walnut Creek’s Lindsay Wildlife Rehabilitation Hospital to recuperate. In Grinnell’s absence, another male began putting moves on Annie, and much to the horror of online watchers, Annie started responding.

The chatter on Cal Falcons’ Facebook page was filled with speculation. Would Grinnell be able to win Annie back? Would he even try? Who was this upstart falcon, anyway?

Those questions were answered a few weeks later when the now-recovered Grinnell returned to the Campanile, drove off Annie’s would-be suitor and resumed his place in Annie’s heart. In early 2022, Annie laid two eggs and was on track to lay a third, when Grinnell apparently was struck by a car and died.

While his many fans mourned Grinnell’s death, a new male — Alden — quickly entered the picture and began courting Annie, bringing her food as she sat on the nest. Annie, perhaps knowing the eggs stood no chance if she didn’t have a mate to help her, immediately accepted the newcomer.

Two days after he entered the picture, she laid a third egg. Alden did a wonderful job stepping in as father and provider to the two chicks that hatched, Lindsay and Grinnell Jr. Falcon fans accepted him, too, but last November, Alden disappeared. There’s speculation that he may have fallen victim to a bird flu that was prevalent in shorebirds — Alden’s favorite prey

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Above: Grinnell, left, perched at the top of the Campanile at UC Berkeley in 2021, was Annie’s first mate.

After Grinnell was fatally struck by a car early in 2022, Alden, right, came into Annie’s life.

Below: Annie tends to her newly hatched baby chicks on April 12.

Annie and Lou aren’t the only peregrine falcon celebrities around the Bay Area, of course. Falcons have been spotted flying near Hoover Tower at Stanford and roosting atop San Jose City Hall, as well as at Mount Diablo, which has two known mated pairs.

Nearly 50 peregrine chicks were born at PG&E’s former Beale Street building in San Francisco between 2004 and 2021, when the building was sold, and their offspring continue to pop up. One of them — Grace — was the falcon-in-residence at San Jose City Hall from 2019 until 2022.

Watch San Jose’s newest peregrine family via webcam at www.facebook. com/SanJoseCityHallFalcons. Learn more about the Cal Falcons and watch the Campanile livestream at www.facebook.com/CalFalconCam and https://calfalcons.berkeley.edu.

And if you happen to ramble around Alcatraz, you may spot one of Annie and Grinnell’s offspring, a female named Lawrencium, nicknamed Larry, who hatched in 2018, raising the couple’s grandchicks on the island.

Annie, seen here with Lou in March, is named after naturalist Annie Alexander, who founded the UC Museum of Paleontology and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. FRAMES FROM WEBCAM/CAL FALCONS

— that year.

Annie had no shortage of new suitors, showing that the peregrine falcon, once so endangered that the entire state was home to just two mated pairs, is making a strong comeback.

Lou managed to win Annie’s heart, and the pair produced three chicks in 2023.

Cal Falcon volunteers appreciate all the interest Annie attracts, although some observers get a little too involved. When some online viewers became convinced the chicks weren’t getting enough food, they called Animal Control.

“They’re not pets,” Peterson says, “even though a lot of people assume ownership of them. I’m just glad people have such very strong associations, and I hope that will lead them to appreciate wildlife.”

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Raptors to the rescue Fast-flying falcons keep vineyards clear of other, grape-grabbing birds S TO R Y BY JA S O N M A S T R O D O N ATO

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PHOTOS BY K ARL MONDON

n a damp and gray Friday at Bouchaine Vineyards, Rebecca Rosen looked up, noticed the handful of ravens circling above her and lobbed an insult.

“Jerks!” she yelled.

They flew together, swirling and squawking as she walked to the trunk of her Tesla Model S and pulled out the box.

There, she hides her ammo: a 6-year-old Harris’ hawk named Rocky, a 17-year-old falcon named E.B. and a 4-year-old spectacled owl named Hootbert, whose only job is to perch himself on a chair and let some tipsy wine tasters snap a photo.

Rocky is the real threat. Rosen pulled him out of the box, removed his hood and loosened his strap.

Free at last, Rocky soared to the roof of the Bouchaine tasting room and perched high enough to scan the vineyard. His mere existence is enough to irritate the ravens.

Armed with long legs, a wingspan of almost 4 feet and an air of unspeakable confidence, Rocky has an aura that demands respect.

The raven family knows it; they met one of Rocky’s siblings just last week, when the bird chased the ravens out of a tree at nearby Stanley Ranch.

On this particular spring day, Rocky wasn’t hunting. He was at Bouchaine as part of a weekly

Above: The 17-year-old falcon E.B. is one of Falconer Rebecca Rosen’s birds that she uses to help protect Bouchaine Vineyards in Napa from grape-eating birds.

Left: Rosen works with Rocky, a 6-year-old Harris’ hawk.

falconry demonstration, a fun attraction for wine club members and, more importantly, a stoic symbol of what’s soon to come: another summer at the vineyard, where Rosen’s hawks and falcons will work the fields, shooing away pesky house finches, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds and starlings hoping to feast on millions of dollars worth of grapes.

“I like to start at the end of a lag season, which varies year by year, but is usually the end of June or early July, before the pinot grapes start to color up,” said Rosen, an Arizona falconer who moved to Napa a few years ago as business picked up. “It takes about two weeks to change the behavior patterns of birds. It’s easier to get birds out when there’s nothing to eat than to get them out after they’ve started eating.”

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Rosen owns 20 different birds, mostly falcons and hawks, which she deploys strategically, depending on the job.

Hawks are typically reserved for the work that requires the most grit. They’ll often catch their prey, but they make for bad abatement birds, because they’ll get bored — or literally fed up after eating — and basically start sleeping on the job.

Falcons are the bird of choice for most vineyard gigs. Rosen has a handful, including a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on the planet. The bird can dive at speeds upwards of 200 mph.

“These birds are like projectiles,” Rosen said. “Like a projectile, they don’t need to be big, they just need to be fast and hit in just the right spot. That’s why the (fear) response to a falcon is so strong. They’re like the shark fin in the water.”

Mostly, though, Rocky and his friends are there to fly above the vineyard, intimidate the grape-eating birds and send them somewhere else.

In Napa, falcons are nature’s pesticide. They’re a potent force.

It’s called “a landscape of fear effect,” said Sara Foss, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “When a predator is present, the prey will behave differently. They spend less time gorging themselves and have to be careful.”

Foss ran a study in 2013 that reintroduced the New Zealand falcon into native habitats where European birds were running amok with few predators to control them. The results for the local vineyards were remarkable: Grape damage was reduced by nearly 70 percent.

Wild raptors can be spotted in the skies above Napa, but trained birds like Rosen’s can play a big role, too.

“The trained birds can be effective,” Foss said. “And mainFalconer Rebecca Rosen unhoods E.B., a 17-year-old falcon, she uses to help protect Bouchaine Vineyards in Napa from grape-eating birds.

KARL MONDON/STAFF

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taining those wild populations or supporting them will keep the pest species at a lower level.”

Bouchaine president Chris Kajani has not totaled up exactly how many grapes have been saved

by Rosen’s falcons over the years, but she knows it’s a big number.

Kajani met Rosen in late 2015, just as Bouchaine was preparing for a late harvest of chardonnay grapes. Over the course of 48 hours, a flock of birds came through and “took every berry off the vine,” Kajani said. “There was nothing left.”

Rosen has worked for the winery ever since. It’s one of several Napa vineyards she counts as

clients, charging anywhere from $400 to $1,500 a day, depending on the difficulty of the job. It might seem expensive, but not once Kajani starts doing the math.

“We do somewhere around 200, 250 tons of grapes,” she says.

“Let’s say we (lose) 10 percent.

That’s 25 tons, 165 gallons a ton, about 2.4 gallons a case, over 1,700 cases that we don’t make. If our average case price is around $500, that’s $859,000 (per year).”

Rosen nearly fell over.

“I should be charging more!” she said.

Bouchaine prides itself on running an eco-friendly operation, but how it thrived without

“ These birds are like projectiles.

Like a projectile, they don’t need to be big, they just need to be fast and hit in just the right spot.

That’s why the (fear) response to a falcon is so strong. They’re like the shark fin in the water.”

Bouchaine Vineyards president Chris Kajani hired falconer Rebecca Rosen in 2015 after a flock of birds came through and “took every berry off the vine.” Rosen has worked for the winery ever since.

Falconer Rebecca Rosen

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falcons is a mystery to Kajani. The 87-acre plot is bordered by rows of telephone poles that run down the long sides of the land. Before the falcons arrived, flocks upon flocks of birds would perch atop the telephone wires, she said, just waiting for the grapes to ripen so they could dive in and eat their fill.

But the use of falconry at vineyards isn’t as widespread as one might think — or hope, said Aaron Fishleder, vice president at Cakebread Cellars, another Rosen client.

“There’s a lot of other technology,” Fishleder said. “But some of it is causing consternation and issues with the community around the vineyards.”

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Among those other methods, cannon fire — yes, cannon fire — doesn’t work. The marauding birds get so comfortable with it, they go right back to their feeding spot when the sound dissipates.

The flimsy, metallic pieces of tape that are supposed to scare birds away? They’re a joke at this point.

Netting can be helpful, but birds will often find an opening near the bottom, then get trapped inside.

“The falcons are great, because they don’t make loud noises,” Fishleder said. “Nobody traps birds. They aren’t shiny pieces of tape. They’re just natural birds, flying around and doing what they’re doing.”

Left: Chris Kajani, president and winemaker at Bouchaine Vineyards in Napa talks about her use of falconers to protect grapes from hungry birds.

Above: A spectacled owl named Hootbert stares down visitors at Bouchaine Vineyards in Napa.

Falconer Rebecca Rosen transports the hawks, falcons and owls she uses to protect Bouchaine Vineyards in Napa from grape-eating birds in May.

The movement toward more environmental winemaking isn’t just some eco trend or branding thing, said CalPoly Humboldt wildlife professor Matthew Johnson, who studies birds in vineyard settings.

Studies in the 1990s found that it was actually less expensive to go organic with wine grapes than to use pesticides or rodenticides, adding financial incentive to what was already a groundswell of support for green solutions.

“A lot of the really high-end, elite grape growers are going organic,” Johnson said.

Falcons alone can’t save vineyards. But they’re a part of a larger ecosystem that can function naturally if given the chance.

Back in the ’80s, a lot of growers began installing nest boxes to entice barn owls to make a home among the vineyards. Owls eat the voles, mice and gophers that are prevalent in Napa, and while the rodents don’t eat the grapes, they chew the stalks and damage the vines.

“We’ve calculated on average a full family of barn owls — adults plus three or four offspring — will eat about 3,400 rodents in the course of a year,” said Johnson, who studies barn owls at 65 different Napa vineyards. “Some of these vineyards will have 10, 20, even 30 nest boxes. So you’re talking about 100,000 rodents removed. It’s pretty remarkable.”

If the falcons and hawks are scaring away the grape-eating birds, and the owls are eating the vine- and stalk-damaging rodents, what remains to be done?

“We are studying — for the first time — the bluebird and swallow boxes,” Johnson said.

Why would a vineyard want to attract more birds? Because bluebirds and swallows don’t binge-eat grapes by the flockload.

But they do eat insects.

“Birds aren’t necessarily a bad thing,” said Rosen. “You just have to decide. Yes, bluebirds eat grapes, too. But they tend to operate in pairs or small groups. They don’t come in a plague of 2,000 and wipe out your vineyard.

“So it’s up to the individual vineyard manager to decide at what point are birds a problem.

Because they’re a part of the ecosystem. And nature loves balance.”

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A SA FE H A R BOR

BY MARTHA ROSS

I

n some ways, the daily scene outside this specialty E.R. resembles other hospitals, with cars rushing into the parking lot to bring in sick and injured patients.

But at Walnut Creek’s Lindsay Wildlife Experience, a nationally renowned museum and wildlife hospital, the arriving patients are native birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians, tucked in cardboard boxes or wrapped in towels and blankets and carried by humans. On a recent day, it was a worker for a tree-trimming company who delivered a young, severely injured red-tailed hawk.

The veterinary staff members meet the patients outside to assess their condition, then bring them into the hospital, where they do all they can to save them.

If the animals make it through the first 24 hours, they have an 80 percent chance of survival. The goal is to rehabilitate and return these patients to their habitats, although some won’t be able to go back, due to injuries, such as damaged wings, that would make it impossible for them to hunt or escape predators.

Some of these rehabbed patients who can’t return to the wild stay on at the Lindsay museum as “Animal Ambassadors.” They’re the real stars of the museum, with their survival stories providing insights into Bay Area native species and the challenges they face from people encroaching on their habitats.

The Lindsay museum was founded in 1955 by Alexander “Sandy” Lindsay, a nature enthusiast who collected local specimens in his garage. Today, the museum is housed in a gleaming, 28,000-square-foot building at the edge of Walnut Creek’s Larkey Park and includes the hospital, exhibit hall, educational program space and a growing number of indoor and outdoor aviaries for its resident owls, hawks, a bald eagle and other raptors.

The first of its kind in the nation when it opened in 1970, the hospital remains the largest such rehabilitation center in the country. It treats more than 5,000 injured, sick or orphaned wild animals each year as part of the museum’s mission “to connect people with wildlife to inspire responsibility and respect for the world we share.”

For the 100,000 children and adults who visit each year, meeting the animal ambassadors is the highlight of their trip. Here are three must-sees.

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D R AG O N , T H E W H I T E-TA I L E D K I T E Graceful, snow-white hawks like Dragon get their name from the way they hover, kitelike, over open fields, scanning for prey.

Dragon first came to the Lindsay hospital in 2017, as a young bird fallen from her nest. She did well enough during her brief stay that she appeared ready to return to the wild. But two months later, the unusually docile kite was back after a collision with a building window left her with a neurological injury. With her piercing call and eyes that will turn blood red at full maturity, Dragon continues to undergo treatment and rehabilitation at Lindsay.

The museum at the Lindsay Wildlife Experience is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Wednesday-Sunday at 1931 First Ave. in Walnut Creek. Admission is $13-$15; https://lindsaywildlife.org/.

T Y R O, T H E A L B I N O R AT T L E S N A K E Tyro had a couple of strikes against him before he arrived at the hospital in 2018 — the first being that he’s a Northern Pacific rattlesnake. A homeowner who discovered him in a backyard violently attacked him with a tree trimmer, apparently driven by misplaced fears about rattlesnakes’ danger to humans. In fact, rattlesnakes tend to be shy and do all they can to avoid people.

The attack on Tyro almost killed him. It damaged his eye, broke his jaw and left him with multiple cuts across his pearly white body. His forked tongue also fell out, a loss that would have made it difficult for him to hunt for food. The other strike? Tyro’s albinism. The condition makes snakes vulnerable to the sun and to predators, because the snakes are unable to blend in with their surroundings.

In his enclosure at the Lindsay, Tyro is a calm and curious snake, who rarely rattles to signal he feels threatened, even if his keepers are cleaning nearby enclosures. Instead, he often raises his head to “periscope” — to watch and see what’s going on. “He’s a survivor,” says wildlife encounters manager Lauren Amy.

Animal survivors educate humans at the Lindsay Wildlife Experience

AT SA , BA L D E AG L E Atsa is one of Lindsay’s more glamorous ambassadors, given that bald eagles are the national bird and serve as spiritual symbols for many Native American peoples. Atsa, whose name means “eagle” in Navajo, arrived at Lindsay in 2016 when she was 13 from a Missouri bird sanctuary. She was rescued as a young eagle from a narrow ravine in northern Wisconsin, two weeks after a windstorm destroyed her nest. Her parents apparently kept her alive by dropping food to her. Unfortunately, the delay in rescuing her meant that her broken wing never healed properly. In her aviary at Lindsay, Atsa gets around by jumping from branch to branch on powerful legs.

Among many things, she represents one of the great success stories of the American environmental movement. The U.S. population of bald eagles plummeted in the 1960s and 1970s, due to DDT. Once the pesticide was banned and the species was fully protected under the Endangered Species Act, bald eagle numbers rebounded to the point that they were removed from the endangered species list in 2007.

Veterinarian Allison Daugherty, Marcia Metzler and Melissa Richard, from right, examined a 3-month-old eaglet at Walnut Creek’s Lindsay Wildlife Rehabilitation Hospital in 2018. Known by local bird watchers as “Lucky,” the eaglet had fallen from its nest in a redwood tree near Curtner Elementary School in Milpitas.

JANE TYSKA/STAFF

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A BIRDWATCHER’S PAYOFF IS

WONDER OF DISCOVERY

THE

S TO R Y B Y N I C H O L A S B E L A R D E S I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y D AV I D D O R A N

So you want to try birdwatching, or as some of us call it, birding.

Something about our feathered friends has grabbed your attention. A great-horned owl, perhaps, hooting outside your window after dusk. Or an American robin slurping worms from your lawn. Maybe you spied a group of birdwatchers at the park across the street, hot on the trail of a rare warbler and, well, you want in on the action.

Could be you simply overheard the ongoing debate of birb, borb or floof. Translation: which bird is cute, which bird is round, which bird is fluffy? You will have opinions on this — I know I do.

Or maybe you’ve had a “spark bird,” a creature so magnificent, it sparked your interest in birding.

BirdNote, a popular radio show, provides wonderful two-minute stories on how birds capture our imaginations. When I was on the show, I told interviewer Mark Bramhill my spark bird was a Vermillion Flycatcher, a glorious ruby. It’s a shining jewel of plumage and attitude. This bird is a show-off. Within a few months of spotting my first one, I was hooked.

Soon, I was tweeting endless images of birds I’d seen. That’s how “BirdNote” found me. And that was my first lesson in the benefit of birding: Capturing our excitement about nature can help lure others into the same appreciation for birds and the discovery that they can inform your life, send you on adventures, involve you in mystery.

The thing about birding is anyone can do it. Old, young, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. And you can bird just about anywhere: a park, a city street, a forest, along a shore, deep within a nature preserve.

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A snowy egret balances above the waterline in a lagoon near the Martinez Marina.

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

TO O L S O F B I R D I N G Get yourself a copy of “The Sibley Guide to Birds: Second Edition,” which brims with wonderful drawings as well as quick reference guides for how to examine field marks and body types.

Lightweight birding “bins” — binoculars — make all the difference. The full wealth of bird colors can’t be seen without binoculars. And that bird perched 50 yards away in a tree? You won’t see every field mark and might not be able to see if it has stripes on its tail. Bins range from a low-end $50 pair to get you in the game up to thousands of dollars. I found my $450 Zeiss on “The Audubon Guide to Buying Binoculars.” That $50 pair is listed there, too.

Let’s talk apps, too, because we’re in a birding revolution. Tech is rapidly approaching the ability to fully identify all birds within your listening range, and apps like Merlin Bird ID can help you identify birds you’re hearing and seeing. From what I’ve seen, it’s about 80 percent accurate. Your experience and common sense will help you know when any app is fooling you. That jackhammer a mile away? It’s not a Pileated Woodpecker, no matter what your phone says.

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Above: Driftwood provides a perfect perch for a white-crowned sparrow to take in the sights at Alameda Point. LAURA A. ODA/STAFF Right: Ducks fly over the marsh at Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Park in Oakland. RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF

You’ll spot scrub jays and other birds at Lake Berryessa in Napa County.

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

Sign up for eBird or iNaturalist so you can log birds from trails and submit your checklists for approval by county moderators. Logging birds helps you keep track of your lists, your overall counts at hotspots (in your county, state, country) and life birds (bird species you’ve seen over time). You can also use your phone to record birdsong and upload your audio.

Keeping online bird lists also connects you to the greater birding collective. The data you provide helps ornithologists un-

derstand migration patterns and nesting habits and connects you to other birders.

A camera helps you capture the sights and provide proof, especially when you find a rarity. I use a Nikon P950 point-and-shoot that has a built-in super zoom. It literally has a “birding” setting. It isn’t perfect, but it’s light and it does the job. (I used to take pics through my binoculars with my iPhone, too.)

B I R D I N G A DV E N T U R E S

You can stick to your backyard for your birdventures, if you’d like. Put out a dish of water or buy a bird bath, hang bird feeders, then peek out your windows and log all your feathered friends.

Or you can go all in, hike up mountain trails, walk boardwalks and grassland trails, hit nature preserves and state parks — with a friend or a whole group of fellow birders. Local birding groups — Audubon, MeetUps and more — organize outings, hold classes and offer field trips to local parks and preserves.

Most of my adventures are either solo or with one or two other birders. Recently, I joined Kai Mills, 23, a bird nest surveyor from Lafayette, to go birding at a nature preserve and a botanical garden along the central California coast. We were joined by Mike Bush, 70, a retired lecturer for horticulture and crop science who has been a director of botanical gardens in such places as Singa-

pore, Bermuda and Oklahoma City. I met both of these experts while searching for birds.

At Sweet Springs Nature Preserve in Los Osos, I began telling Mills about a bird seen at the preserve, a real mystery. It was a half dark-eyed junco, half white-crowned sparrow — an intergeneric hybrid so rare there was no way to log it except as a generic sparrow species. Doing so loses this bird in eBird’s system.

It becomes a nothing, an anomaly. Just as I mentioned the bird, Mills spotted it foraging at the base of a tree. Slightly larger than a junco, it shared field marks of both species. Even its song was a strange, junco-like trill that ended in “zeet zeet zeet.”

It felt like a victory to even find this bird — and that sense of discovery is half the appeal of birding.

Mills started birding when he was 12, back in Lafayette, where he’d visit a rare swamp sparrow every weekend. “I respotted it after it was originally found,” he said. “After that, I was the first to find it every year for five winters.”

He told me how he watched it join a sparrow flock and forage along reeds. “I knew its habits, where it would be at different times of the day.”

He said it was rewarding showing other birders that sparrow.

He said it helped form his birding habits, and it’s why he stresses the importance of frequenting your local spaces.

“Find a local birding spot you really love,” he said, when we discussed advice for new birders.

“You can familiarize yourself with common birds and their songs that way. Do that before you start chasing other species.”

I took that advice to heart. I regularly visit a park near my home, and last year found a golden-winged warbler, a bird so rare, it has been logged less than a hundred times in California. It’s only because I know that park so well, all its birds and birdsong, that I was able to be in position to spot this little bird foraging in a lemon tree.

Ask yourself: What might I discover?

Here’s the thing: Birding can be consuming. You might aim for a

RESOURCES Audubon Society: Find Audubon guides to birding binoculars and other resources, including local chapters and some tongue-in-cheek explanations on the difference between borbs and floofs, at audubon.org. The Golden Gate Audubon Society, for example, offers 150 field trips per year to parks ranging from Lafayette’s Briones Regional Park to Pacifica’s Pedro Valley; https://goldengateaudubon. org/. The Santa Clara Valley chapter offers birding field trips at Palo Alto Baylands, Charleston Slough and more; https://scvas.org.

SF Bay Bird Observatory: Learn more about Bay Area birdwatching locations and avian wildlife at www. youtube.com/ @SFBayBirdObservatory/. eBird: Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird helps passionate birders and newbies alike find birding hotspots, track their finds and share their discoveries with fellow birders and the scientific community; ebird. org. iNaturalist: This digital tool, a joint effort from the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you document not only Bay Area birds but flora and fauna of all kinds and share it with others; inaturalist.org.

Merlin Bird ID: This free app from the Cornell Lab helps you identify birds and bird songs, save birds to your life list and explore lists of birds near you; merlin.allaboutbirds.org.

BirdNote: These two-minute daily radio shows are broadcast on 250 NPR stations and via podcast.

Listen at www.birdnote.org.

Big Year — that’s what birders call a challenge to identify as many species as possible within a single calendar year and within a specific geographic area like a county, state, maybe even a five-mile radius from where you live — but it’s not really a game.

So make your birdventures count. Make them fun. Fill them with knowledge and wonder.

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Happy birding trails to you!

Here are five that afford sightings aplenty B Y M A R T H A R O S S A N D J I M H A R R I N G TO N

When famed Central Park birder Christian Cooper wrote that watching birds in the wild opens a window “into the wondrous,” he could have been describing Big Junior and her amazing story of birth, bonding, tragedy and survival.

Big Junior is the female in a pair of bald eagles who established a nest this winter at Alameda’s Corica Park Golf Course. But on March 21, when a catastrophic “bomb cyclone” storm lashed the Bay Area with hurricane-force winds, the eagles’ egg was knocked from the nest.

Rick Lewis, a Corica Park neighbor and Golden Gate Audubon Society eagle expert, began tracking Big Junior and her partner after discovering their nest on Dec. 29. Lewis and his fellow monitors found the egg on the ground after the storm.

“We were devastated,” he says.

Above: Rick Lewis, left, and Doug Henderson, right, lead a bird watching trip at the Corica Park golf course in Alameda.

Left: A bald eagle lands near its mate along the San Leandro channel in Alameda on February 7 ARIC CRABB/STAFF

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more eggs this season and doesn’t know if the eagles will make the golf course their permanent home. However, its canals are filled with carp for them to feast on all year, and Big Junior doesn’t seem bothered by the proximity of people. While the couple remain, they offer a window into the devotion of birds known to mate for life.

“This pair is pretty strongly bonded,” Lewis said. “Typical male: This guy is gone five days at a time, but when he comes back, they make a beeline for each other. Even when they’re sitting in different trees at other ends of the golf course, they keep each other in sight.”

The golf course is only accessible to birdwatchers via an Audubon Society walk. Find guided walks and tips on how to see the eagles off-property at https://goldengateaudubon.org.

Meanwhile, here are four more prime birding trails to explore.

Above: A red-winged blackbird holds a grasshopper in its beak at a colony site near Los Vaqueros Reservoir. Below: A black-necked stilt visits Mountain View’s Charleston Slough in May. ARIC CRABB/STAFF; DAI SUGANO/ STAFF

LO S VAQ U E R O S R E S E R VO I R, B R E N T WO O D

Lewis shared Big Junior’s story during a recent Audubon Society-sponsored field trip to the golf course, one of many “into the wondrous” adventures hosted by conservation groups around the Bay Area.

An Alameda golf course might seem an unexpected place to find these majestic birds. (So is a Millbrae elementary school, which is where Big Junior was born in 2019.) But in late 2022, Big Junior, who has a wingspan of about eight feet, was seen soaring above the course with her partner. The two bonded some more while building their nest in a tree above the sixth tee. When the eagles took an “incubating posture,” Lewis and his group concluded the couple was caring for at least one egg that would hatch in early April.

Then came the windstorm.

Lewis doesn’t expect there will be

To get a sense of the amazing avian spectacle that took place in a remote valley near eastern Contra Costa’s Los Vaqueros Reservoir in early June, imagine the sights and sounds of a bee hive — but on a much bigger scale and with thousands of tricolored blackbirds replacing tiny buzzing insects.

On a cool breezy morning, the birds swarmed around a massive Himalayan blackberry bush at the edge of a pond, the males displaying their signature colors — white and shades of red — on their wing “epaulets.” The colony is a welcome sight for scientists and bird lovers. Plummeting populations had landed the birds on California’s endangered species list. The 18,500 acres of protected watershed southwest of Brentwood have been a prime spot for the highly social birds to nest, feed and embark on a possible second round of mating this season.

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Right: A colony of red-winged blackbirds socializes and feeds at Los Vaqueros Reservoir near Brentwood.

ARIC CRABB/STAFF

tendent Cary Richardson hopes they enjoyed their stay enough to return next spring.

Birds on view: Red-winged blackbirds in the wetlands along Kellogg Creek near the park’s north entrance. Plus ash-throated flycatchers, brown-headed cowbirds, starlings and a common yellow-throat. In June, bird experts were monitoring at least six golden eagle nests.

Details: Park ($6) at the Walnut staging area and follow a two-mile loop around the Montero, Salamander and Kit Fox trails; https://www.ccwater.com.

PA LO A LTO F LO O D C O N T R O L BA S I N , S A N TA CLARA COUNTY

This 618-acre basin of diked salt marsh — part of the beautiful Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve — is a great spot for birders interested in seeing a variety of fine feathered friends.

“On a good day, on a lunch hour, you can find 50 species here,” says Matthew Dodder, executive director for the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.

Some 250 species have been spotted along the Adobe Creek Trail Loop, which includes Shoreline Park and Charleston Slough in Mountain View. You’ll likely see the California gulls and American white pelicans that make their homes on the islands in the basin.

But there is always a chance of a much rarer sighting.

“That’s fabulously rare!” Dodder says as a black tern zooms by during a tour of the area. “That’s a celebrity here — there’s only one.”

Birds on view: Mallards, American coot, American avocet, marbled godwit, dowitchers, black skimmer, barn swallow, cliff swallow Details: Begin at the San Antonio Road trail Right: A western kingbird alights at Los Vaqueros Reservoir.

ARIC CRABB/STAFF

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Left: Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society executive director Matthew Dodder talks about birding during a field trip at Charleston Slough in Mountain View.

DAI SUGANO/STAFF

late May, Golden Gate Audubon Society volunteer Mitch Youngman said his group spotted a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, followed by a second hawk and what appeared to be a nest high up in a tree. A half-mile route around North Lake offers rustic views, benches and paths leading through the bramble to the shore — and recently, the sight of a female mallard perched on a half-submerged log, grooming her two ducklings.

Birds on view: Herons, kingfishers, egrets and woodpeckers, plus common yellowthroats, Allen’s hummingbirds and pie-billed grebes.

Details: Find the lakes at Chain of Lakes Drive East and John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. Street parking is available, and there’s a parking lot at South Lake, https://sfrecpark.org.

K E L L E Y PA R K , SA N J O S E

entrance in Mountain View. Street parking available. Find Santa Clara Valley Audubon tips at scvas.org

CHAIN OF LAKES, G O L D E N G AT E PA R K , SA N F R A N C I S C O

Left: Binoculars are a must during a bird watching trip at Alameda’s Corica Park golf course. The Golden Gate Audubon Society offers weekly bird watching treks at the course where visitors have the chance to spot bald eagles, herons, ducks and song birds.

ARIC CRABB/STAFF

Above: A Forster’s tern visits Charleston Slough in Mountain View on May 31.

DAI SUGANO/STAFF

One of America’s great urban parks lies along the Pacific Flyway, offering a stop for birds to rest and feed as they make their epic journeys from South America to the Canadian Arctic.

The park’s less-visited western end offers premiere bird-viewing at the Chain of Lakes in the park’s “Enchanted Forest.” Within seconds after you step into the woods near South Lake, the rumble of traffic from nearby Lincoln Way almost disappears, replaced by a rising chorus of bird calls that are likely to send novice birders racing to the Merlin Bird ID app.

Although the caw-caw-caw of a raven flying overhead was pretty unmistakable.

While leading a field trip in

This urban park delivers 172 acres of opportunities to check out an assortment of winged wonders.

“It’s a nice selection of birds, and it’s easily accessible,” says Matthew Dodder, executive director for the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.

Until 1951, the land was a farm and orchard owned by the Kelley family. Today, it’s a recreation expanse that includes Happy Hollow Zoo, History Park and the Japanese Friendship Garden, as well as year-round birding opportunities and seasonal sightings of such migrant species as the black-headed grosbeak, which is found here in the spring and summer.

Birds on view: Hooded merganser, the rare black-chinned hummingbird, Hutton’s vireo, Bullock’s oriole, black-headed grosbeak Details: Walk south along the Coyote Creek Trail to explore the redwood and oak groves and other bird-rich habitat. Parking is $6.

Find Santa Clara Valley Audubon tips at scvas.org.

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The strange history of early Bay Area ‘zoos’ tells a sad story of exploitation S TO RY B Y J O H N M E TCA L F E I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y D AV I D E B A R C O

The earliest zoo in San Francisco — “zoo” in a very loose sense — was the Mountaineer Museum run by John Capen Adams, aka Grizzly Adams. Located in a basement in what’s now the Financial District, the 1850s museum boasted the “largest collection of wild animals ever brought together in California,” according to a contemporary news report, including grizzly bears, eagles, elk, a lion, a tiger and an “enormous HOG, 800 pounds, from Monterey.”

Adams was a failed gold miner-turned-animal trainer whose antics with wild bears sound like something from television (which it was, in the 1970s).

After shooting a mother bear in the wild, he captured her cubs and trained them to walk on leashes and carry his packs. Visitors paying 25 cents to the Mountaineer Museum could watch Grizzly wrestle and ride around on top of his bears. In karmic turnaround, bears caused his downfall — he got mauled so much, it left his brain tissue exposed, and he died in 1860 of suspected meningitis.

“Grizzly Adams was trying to make a buck any way he could with his interests, and this was one way to draw people in,” says Christopher Pollock, historian in residence for the San Francisco Recreation

Wallace the Lion, seen here circa 1905, lived at San Francisco’s Zoo at the Fulton Street Chutes until 1907, when the zoo animals were sold to a zoo in Vancouver, B.C. OPENSFHISTORY/WNP27.2503

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and Park Department. “These were live animals — inside a basement — and it just seemed like the most inappropriate place in the world to do this stuff.”

We now know, more than a century and a half later, that the best way to run a zoo is not to ride the animals like show ponies.

There are different priorities, such as conservation.

Santa Rosa’s Safari West is hailing this year’s birth of a southern white rhino as a step to help restore the global population. The California Academy of Sciences’ new African penguin chicks are part of a species-survival plan.

And at the Oakland Zoo, they’re stabilizing a historic Blackfeet Nation bison herd by bringing Montana bison in to breed with Yellowstone ones, then sending the mamas and babies back to the Blackfeet.

It’s not practical to look at the Bay Area’s 19th-century zoos for best practices, but it certainly is fascinating. The zoological gardens of the day were half-amusement parks, half-vanity projects for the rich and powerful. They provided endless entertainment for families who might have never otherwise seen an Asian elephant — in Golden Gate Park, no less.

And for the animals, well, their lives were not great, but at least the experience taught our society what not to do.

Woodward’s Gardens was a sprawling complex in the Mission district run by wealthy hotel proprietor Robert B. Woodward.

Opened in the 1860s, it had a sea lion pond, a grizzly bear grotto, an aviary and reportedly the country’s largest aquarium.

“There are three particular places in California that have acquired worldwide fame, and these are the Yosemite Valley, the Monarch the Bear in the Bear Pit at Golden Gate Park circa 1910.

OPENSFHISTORY/WNP70.1163

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Visitors to the Mountaineer Museum could watch Grizzly Adams wrestle and ride around on top of his bears.

He got mauled so much, it left his brain tissue exposed, and he died in 1860 of suspected meningitis. old Cliff House and Woodward’s Gardens,” wrote a contemporary reporter. “Possibly the latter is more generally known than either of the other two.”

Visitors entered through Woodward’s home and conservatory, where they could ogle his fine art and precious minerals, including a gold nugget from the Sierra mountains weighing almost 100 pounds. From there, they’d pass through a tunnel into a zoo that offered camel rides, sailboats on a lake and circus shows featuring the likes of Chang Woo Gow the Chinese Giant, supposedly the tallest man in the world.

Despite a ban on alcohol, the gardens drew thousands on weekends, at least until their slide into disrepair after Woodward’s death. One observer described the decaying zoo as riddled with “pulmonary monkeys and rheumatic lions.” Its last remnants burned down in the Great Earthquake of 1906.

More animal-carnie fun could be found at San Francisco’s chutes. These were water rides popular on Coney Island at the turn of the century that then spread out West — you’d get in a boat and ride at incredible speed down a 350-foot slide and slam

into a lake. The Fulton Street Chutes, one of three chute parks in the city, had a mirror maze, airplane swing and Wallace the Lion, rumored to be untamable (and who proved it by bloodying its keeper’s scalp).

There was also a 14-foot alligator, a black-bear “brigade,” leopards, kangaroos and orangutans conditioned to act like a human family — “father” smoked a pipe while “baby” played with a doll. “The hyena proved a major disappointment; the melancholy beast never laughed,” notes James R. Smith in the book, “San Francisco’s Lost Landmarks.” And the “Chutes Museum displayed a sad lot. It included all of the zoo animals that died in captivity — stuffed!”

(Side note: Wallace wasn’t the last famous lion in old San Francisco. In the 1960s, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, kept a pet lion named Togare in his home. The big kitty drew noise complaints from neighbors and somehow later came to stay with, and sleep in the bed of, Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” fame. And Hedren went on to become an outspoken animal activist.)

Soon enough, though, city residents didn’t have to shell out

This daguerreotype of Grizzly Adams by famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady appeared in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1861.

GRIZZLYADAMS.COM

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money to visit a zoo. There was a free one taking shape in Golden Gate Park.

“In the 1880s, it was realized by people in the growing city of San Francisco that in order to up our game with our metropolitan park, we needed to have an animal exhibit,” says Pollock. “That’s what was happening with other cities around the United States.

They were using animals to draw people in, like a Disneyland kind of thing.”

Wild animals arrived in waves, typically donated by bankers, industrialists and other powerful folks who wanted to be remembered for their generosity. The donations started with deer and grew to include zebras, kangaroos, Persian sheep and a peacock meadow, as well as kookaburras and bison, the latter of which still reside in the park today.

“The bison go back to this growing sentiment across the United States that we are just taking out everything. There’s going to be nothing left, so let’s save some of the species by putting them into a captive location,” explains Pollock.

The Golden Gate menagerie would eventually form the foundation of the nascent San Francisco Zoo. Two animals that didn’t enter the zoo, because they were only in the park for one winter in 1891, were the elephants Baldy and Queen Jumbo. A traveling circus loaned them to perform for families at a kids’ playground, which led to some interesting interactions.

“Children reached out to try to pinch the thick rolls of hide, and audacious youngsters pulled their tails with impunity,” relates one contemporary account. Another

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news story notes the elephants lived next to a baseball field, and Baldy tried to eat balls that children swatted his way: “The ball went into that tireless mouth, and, after a lot of chewing, was swallowed. The boys who had lost the ball wailed and threatened to thrash Baldy, but were diverted from their cruel purpose

by Superintendent Murphy, who advanced the 10 cents necessary to buy another ball.”

The elephants’ lives were indeed hard. They were stationed out in the chilly, gloomy ocean weather where their keepers staved off “la grippe” by giving them quinine and quarts of Kentucky rye whisky. On top of

having to give kids saddle-back rides all day, they were pulled into construction duty.

“Queen Jumbo was responsible for moving a lot of heavy equipment out of Golden Gate Park pretty much on her own,” says Judi Leff, a San Francisco historian and humorist.

“There was this one super-heavy piece of equipment they used that had sunk into the ground. They got a team of Clydesdales to try to pull this thing out, and they were getting nowhere,” Leff says. “Finally, someone says, ‘Wait, don’t we have an elephant somewhere?’

They go over and the trainer says, ‘Sure!’ They put a pad between

San Francisco’s zoological amusement parks included the Haight Chutes, seen here around 1901 with the maze attraction and zoo in the background, and its successor, the Fulton Street Chutes.

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Queen Jumbo’s head and the equipment, and she just moves it — no problem.”

For sheer ambitiousness, not many zoos could beat out the private collection put together by William Randolph Hearst.

One might not expect this ruthless titan of publishing to be an animal lover. But he had a soft spot for even the smallest of creatures. He forbade the killing of rodents at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, so his staff used live traps.

“They’d catch them and let them go,” says Victoria Kastner, former Hearst Castle historian.

“One of the butlers got so tired of releasing the same mouse that he tied a little red string around its

Carnival elephants Baldy, left, and Queen Jumbo, seen here performing at the Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park, spent the winter of 1891-92 entertaining spectators at the park. They performed two shows a day and gave rides to children under the supervision of their trainer, “Professor” H. W. Pett.

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foot, so he could bring it to W.R. and say, ‘This isn’t working.’ W.R. just named him and kept him as a pet.”

The San Simeon property was meant to mirror an English country home, a place to entertain guests and keep livestock and other animals. The bizarre way Hearst interpreted that was revealed in a letter that Julia Morgan, his famous architect, sent him in 1925.

“She wrote that the lions arrived safely,” Kastner says. “They were cubs, and they’re not tamed in the slightest, and it’s just amazing to see the level of antagonism or hostility these tiny creatures can foster.”

Zebras graze on dried grass on the Hearst Ranch property in San Simeon in February.

LAURA DICKINSON/STAFF

African antelope, Bactrian camels, ostriches, musk ox and giraffes soon appeared as well, making strange bedfellows with chimps, polar bears, cougars, coatimundis, an elephant and a tapir named Squeaky. Hearst designed two separate zoo areas.

One was 2,000 acres of pennedin land stocked with herbivores his guests could admire on the long drive to his door, the other a menagerie of cages close to the castle, where they could watch carnivores being fed. And he was always coming up with new ideas.

“How about a maze in connection with the zoo,” he wrote to Morgan in 1926. “I think getting lost in the maze and coming unexpectedly upon lions, tigers, pumas, panthers, wild cats, monkeys, macaws and cockatoos, etc. etc., would be a thrill even for the most blasé.” (It never got built.)

Hearst roped in the talents of knowledgeable zookeepers, but even then there were... incidents.

“These animals don’t all play well together, right? There were these emus just kicking up trouble with their fellow species,” says Kastner. “Another problem was — and he was very grieved about this — they had these giraffes who wanted the salt in the gravel and ate a bunch of gravel. I think one or even two of the giraffes died.”

The zoo’s downfall began when Hearst started running out of money. Some of the animals were sold off or gifted away, and others were released to roam in perpetuity around the vast property. You can still see some of their descendants today — zebras, sambar deer and aoudads, roaming the California hills like lost foreign tourists.

“So it’s still a zoo,” Kastner says.

“Just not in the traditional sense.”

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It’s all happening at

LAURA A. ODA/STAFF ARCHIVES

T H E

Five ways to enjoy Oakland’s wild animal attraction B Y J OA N M O R R I S

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ounded in 1922 by naturalist Henry Snow, the Oakland Zoo sits on 100 hilly acres filled with nearly 1,000 animals and at least that many scenic views.

The legendary zoological park has a proud history of providing sanctuary for animals that have been abused or misused and helping care for wildlife injured or sickened, often by humankind’s misadventures.

Two of its tigers were liberated from an abandoned roadside attraction where they were once part of the cub-petting industry, a lucrative if unethical endeavor. As adults — no longer safe for tourists looking for a cute photo op — they were left on their own, trapped inside cages. Others, including the zoo’s Fennec foxes, Aldabra tortoises and Amazon macaws, were part of the illegal wild animal pet trade, living as someone’s pet until the creatures became too unwieldy for their owners.

The zoo offers ways to participate and appreciate its serious side, but there are more ways to appreciate its spectacular sights.

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A herd of American bison roam the hillside at the Oakland Zoo. ANDA CHU/STAFF ARCHIVES

ANDA CHU/STAFF

Z O O Here are five must-see, must-do things to try on your next outing.

or diving into the pool will take your breath away.

S OA R A B OA R D T H E GONDOLAS

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These perpetually moving aerial transports opened in 2018, providing a leisurely and effortless climb from the lower part of the zoo up to the California Trail.

The free trip only takes about four minutes but offers views of six Bay Area counties and a bird’s-eye perspective on the zoo’s camels, elephants and bison.

The 24 Swiss-made cars, which hold up to eight passengers, travel on a continuous loop. The cabins are enclosed, but open windows let the Bay breeze blow in. Tip: Explore the lower part of the zoo first, visiting the sun bears, tigers, chimps and squirrel monkeys in the Tropical Rainforest, and save the gondola until later in the morning, when the lines are much shorter.

VIEW THE BISON

The Dr. Joel Parrot Bison Overlook provides some excellent views of San Francisco and the Bay, too, and it gives viewers a look at the zoo’s bison, which have one of the most heart-warming, feel-good back stories at the zoo.

American bison once roamed the plains in the thousands, but overhunting and diseases from domesticated cattle sent pop-

The zoo’s Landing Cafe offers an assortment of burgers, sandwiches, salads and drinks, but really, the main draw is the view. Platforms jut out over the landscape, exposing the vistas of the zoo, the Bay and surrounding areas in an almost 360-degree panorama.

That those views come with a side of bacon cheeseburger or Southwest black bean burger and fries is a bonus.

RIDE THE EXPRESS

ulations spiraling downward.

In 2014, the Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty was signed, the first cross-border indigenous treaty, creating a partnership of 13 nations from eight reservations to restore wild bison.

Now, Oakland Zoo is working with the Iinnii Initiative in Montana to restore a wild herd of bison to their native territory.

In 2018, 14 female bison were brought to the zoo to breed with two bulls from Yellowstone National Park. Their offspring are returned, when old enough, to Montana to be cared for by the Blackfeet Nation. The program provides genetic diversity to the herd, helping to ensure its health

The Oakland Zoo’s gondola takes visitors swooping up the hill to the Landing Cafe and expanded California Trail attractions.

LAURA A. ODA/ STAFF ARCHIVES

and survivability.

M A R V E L AT T H E G R I Z Z LY BEARS

Few people have seen grizzly bears up close and awesomely personal. Oakland Zoo has four, all born in 2017 and rescued by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. All four are grizzly bears, although brothers Rubicon and Kenai are identified as coastal brown bears, a distinction among grizzlies that takes into account their size and territory. The other set of brothers are Tulare and Truckee.

Watching these powerful youngsters playing in sprinklers

If you want a good look at emus, wallabies and wallaroos, a great way — and the only way — to see them is with a ride ($5) on this miniature 65-passenger train.

The charming little engine chugs right into the Wild Australia exhibit, and at times, it’s hard to determine who is watching whom.

The animals, unbothered by the noise and gawking riders, often sit and stare back at the tourists.

The train station is in the Adventure Landing amusement park.

Tip: Have your camera ready.

Details: The zoo is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily at 9777 Golf Links Road in Oakland. Reserved tickets ($20-$24) required. Parking is $15 ($12 if paid in advance). www.oaklandzoo.org

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B Y B E N DAV I D S O N

Walk T on the wild side Strolling in California’s coastal redwood forest yields delightful animal encounters

his past spring, I was hiking solo on a little-known trail high above Mill Valley’s Cascade Canyon. This dense, shady coastal redwood forest is just over the ridge from the famous old-growth redwood trees of the Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County.

Despite being a neighborhood of sorts, the canyon is also a wildlife haven. Dozens of species of resident and migratory birds, animals, insects, amphibians, mollusks and even crustaceans make this magical forest their home. And you never know what you’re going to see on a stroll in the redwoods.

Rounding a bend into a deep, shady ravine, I heard a slight hooting sound. I paused to locate the sound and continued walking just a bit further up the trail.

To my astonishment, I had lucked into an encounter with some of the rarest creatures in the redwoods: Northern spotted owls, a threatened species that lives mostly in the old growth coastal redwoods and the forests of the Northwest.

Amazingly, right above the trail in the hollow of a time-worn redwood tree were two fuzzy baby owls — owlets — looking like cute little “Star Wars” ewoks as they bobbled their heads and warbled in curiosity.

Two parent birds were in the nearby redwood canopy, keeping a watchful eye on their brood.

Spotted owls are the holy grail of veteran Bay Area birders. To see fledgling spotted owls was truly a moment to remember.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve spotted these rare owls and other exotic birds in this particular redwood forest.

Opposite: Fuzzy baby owls nestle in the hollow of an ancient redwood in Mill Valley’s Cascade Canyon.

BEN DAVIDSON PHOTOGRAPHY

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Above: A robin takes a breather along the trails of Muir Woods.

Right: Wildlife abounds in the hillsides and redwood forest in Mill Valley’s Cascade Canyon.

BEN DAVIDSON PHOTOGRAPHY

Walking the trails that follow Mill Valley’s Old Mill Creek, I’ve seen great blue heron and snowy egrets — birds usually found in San Francisco Bay’s estuaries — fishing for tiny steelhead trout. And I regularly see redtailed hawks and turkey vultures circling the canopy high overhead, bold Steller’s jays winging among the trees and Anna’s hummingbirds flitting about in highspeed searches for nectar. Acorn woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers with their distinctive red crest and distinctive call peck away at rotting trees with a rat-a-tat-tat, searching for bugs to eat.

Among my favorite avians are the most common: tiny Pacific wrens that hop along logs with their stubby tails held upright, chirping high-pitch notes.

They’re cute and perky, like little welcome ambassadors to the redwood forest.

California’s 2 million-acre coastal redwood forest,

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Right above the trail in the hollow of a time-worn redwood tree were two fuzzy baby owls looking like cute little “Star Wars” ewoks.

Ladybugs converged along the Stream Trail at Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in Oakland last fall. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES

Above: A pair of spawning Chinook salmon swim in Lagunitas Creek at the Leo Cronin Fish Viewing Area in Lagunitas. SHERRY LAVARS/STAFF

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Lush ferns drape the edges of Mill Valley’s Redwood Creek in Muir Woods National Monument. ALAN DEP/STAFF ARCHIVES

which is unique to the state’s north coast and the extreme southern Oregon coast, is also home to an abundance of small mammals, such as bobcats, Western gray squirrels, raccoons, skunk, bats and medium-sized members of the weasel family, including Pacific fishers and pine martens. You may spot larger animals, too, such as black-tailed deer and Roosevelt elk.

Once, while visiting Muir Woods, I spotted elusive gray foxes and their young emerging from a den below the deck of the park’s visitor center. Another checkmark for my redwoods wildlife bucket list, right next to black bear and mountain lions.

Once common amphibians such as Pacific giant salamanders, red-bellied newts and tailed frogs have become less common, at least on my walks, perhaps victims of increased global temperatures.

But garter snakes and slimy, slow moving banana slugs (the mascot of UC Santa Cruz — Go Slugs!) are still seen here and there, with the latter most commonly seen on moist and rainy days.

And there are fish! In Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park, a unique variety of rainbow trout has adapted to dammed-up waterways and can still be seen spawning in streams shaded by the park’s redwood trees. (The park is a favorite gathering ground for other creatures too, including the

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tens of thousands of ladybugs — a loveliness of ladybugs — that cluster on logs and branches to hibernate each fall.) On Mount Tamalpais’ north side, Coho salmon make their way up Lagunitas Creek to spawn each year and can be seen from the Leo Cronin Fish Viewing Area off Sir Francis Drake Boulevard between the village of Lagunitas and Taylor State Park.

It’s yet another remarkable wildlife scene in our unique and vibrant coastal redwood forest.

If you’re heading out to go birding or wildlife-watching in California’s coastal redwood forests, you’ll want to wear comfortable hiking shoes, of course, and tote trekking poles, a good pair of binoculars and birding, wildflower and wildlife guidebooks or smartphone apps. A hat, sunscreen, a sack lunch and plenty of water are a must for any Bay Area hike. And a digital camera with telephoto and close-up lenses will provide the highest resolution images.

Smartphone applications such as Merlin and Sibley have detailed identification information and illustrations along with bird calls that can help you identify a wide variety of birds. The latter, which costs $20, includes all the content in David Allen Sibley’s 644-page “Sibley Guide to Birds,” as well as audio recordings. But like its print counterpart, the app is aimed at die-hard birding devotees.

Beginning birders will likely want

Above: A banana slug is spotted in the redwood forest in Mill Valley’s Cascade Canyon.

Left: Redwood Creek splashes its way through the verdant hills of Muir Woods.

BEN DAVIDSON PHOTOGRAPHY

to start with Merlin, a free app designed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

You can download a copy of the Save the Redwoods League’s free, 81-page birdwatcher’s guide to the coastal redwood and giant sequoia forests and other helpful travel guides at www.savetheredwoods. org under the Experiences tab.

Having seen spotted owls in the redwoods and checked those off my list, my new priority is to spot other rare birds, such as California condors, peregrine falcons, bald eagles and especially marbled murrelets, seabirds that curiously split their time between the open ocean and nesting sites high in the canopy of old growth redwoods.

So many birds, so little time.

For neophyte birders, I suggest following the sage words of the Save the Redwoods birding guide: “Walk slowly and stop often.

Listen. Look. Speak softly. Birds, after all, are wildlife, and wildlife is reflexively reclusive and retiring. To observe birds, you must become part of the wild.”

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A bee prepares to land on a sunflower during the early morning hours in Walnut Creek. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

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BY A.K. WHITNEY

A green hummingbird hovers among the branches of a sage bush, dipping its long beak into the purple blossoms as the sun gleams on its metallic-pink neck feathers. A tiny brown lizard darts from behind a rock. Mourning doves coo from a bottlebrush shrub but are soon drowned out by squirrels chattering angrily at each other.

As the sky darkens, a family of raccoons digs in the turf at the base of a tree, looking for worms and grubs. And as the moon rises, a coyote howls in the distance.

Make your outdoor space a biodiversity haven

An oak titmouse feeds on seeds along a trail in Lafayette. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

This isn’t happening in some idyllic country retreat, but in a tiny back yard a block from a major freeway. And if you think it’s unusual for such a small space to have such varied wildlife, think again.

California is the most biodiverse state in the country and one of the most biodiverse on the planet. The Bay Area offers so many species of flora and fauna — birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and invertebrates — UNESCO designated the region the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve in 1988.

Even Los Angeles County, with all its concrete, is home to more than 500 species of birds, 19 species of snakes and dozens of species of frogs, lizards and turtles. And that’s not even counting the mammals, says Lila Higgins, a senior manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and co-author of 2019’s “Wild L.A.: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los Angeles.”

“We’ve got very ‘urban’ habitats, parks, back yards, empty lots, streetscapes,” Higgins says. “(But) like an ‘urban forest,’ all of those things create zones for creatures to live in.”

In other words, you don’t have to head for the wilderness to spot wildlife. They’re in your back yard. Higgins and colleagues started the annual City Nature Challenge in 2016 as an L.A.-Bay Area effort to encourage citizen naturalists to photograph the wildlife they spot in their yards, parks and hiking trails. Since

This Tracy garden is filled with creatures large and small, including this praying mantis perched on a bloodleaf plant. DOUG DURAN/STAFF

Although it appears this squirrel is suspended in midair, it’s actually clinging to a window screen and, despite the risk, raiding a bird feeder. LOIS MCCLEARY/GETTY IMAGES

then, the effort has gone global.

The 2023 challenge, held May 1-7, involved 485 cities in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas and recorded nearly 1.9 million sightings of more than 57,000 species by more than 66,000 citizen naturalists.

If you missed this year’s challenge, you can still do some nature spotting and recording of your own, says Mark Girardeau, who posts his sightings of bobcats, pumas, coyotes, foxes and even orcas at orangecountyoutdoors.com.

You won’t want to make your back yard coyote-friendly, of course. But how do you make whatever green space you have as wildlife-friendly as possible for other creatures?

Plant as many native, drought-resistant species as possible. Add a water feature. A small pond, bird bath or fountain is a great way to attract birds. Avoid pesticides. Leave mulch on soil and don’t clear away brush piles.

They provide cover for insects and smaller animals, such as lizards.

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B Y L I N DA Z AVO R A L P H OTO S B Y A R I C C R A B B, R AY C H AV E Z , J O S E CA R LO S FA JA R D O, K A R L M O N D O N A N D JA N E T YS K A

Seizing the moment is the secret to that stunning wildlife shot

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he Bay Area is teeming with wildlife, not just in the rugged wilderness of Mount Diablo and Big Basin, but in the parks and open spaces that dot our urban and suburban landscapes. You’re guaranteed to see wild creatures at places like Año Nuevo, where gargantuan elephant seals famously loll about on the sand, and the Sunol Regional Wilderness, where raptors of every feather fly overhead.

Unexpected treasures, however, await if you have a good eye and the patience to wait, as our Bay Area News Group photographers show in this stunning array of images.

“Often it also takes a bit of luck and good timing,” staff photographer Jane Tyska said about spending a day at the Foothills Nature Preserve in the Palo Alto hills in hopes of capturing a photo of one of the preserve’s elusive mountain lions. Her wait was rewarded with a coyote sighting instead, and she also “lucked into” seeing another coyote — near San Francisco’s Coit Tower, where the animal’s presence was unexpected.

Karl Mondon agreed on the time one has to devote when photographing the artistry in nature. He grew up near Golden Gate Park’s Lloyd Lake, so he swings by when he can to check out the birding scene. “Sometimes you go for days without a glimpse,” he said. “Other times, they just won’t stop smiling for the camera.”

Jose Carlos Fajardo has had luck staking out spots like Indian Creek in the Shell Ridge Open Space during the rainy season — toads abound — and even the manmade lake at the suburban Heather Farm Park in Walnut Creek.

Wherever there’s water, there’s wildlife.

The image by Ray Chavez of flocks of pelicans feasting at Lake Merritt in Oakland, an unusual sight, occurred on a day when he stopped by to get photos of runners, bikers and hikers. “Took too many photos until I saw this white pelican surrounded by the brown pelicans, plus the nice sunlight dropping in it. Made a beautiful picture.

“After I took those photos, the pelicans left.”

A moment in time.

Top: A Great Egret searches for food while walking through the pond at Heather Farm Park in Walnut Creek.

Left: A toad rests in a pond in Indian Creek at Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

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Chicks are fed lunch in a nest under the eaves of the Portals of the Past structure at Lloyd Lake in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. KARL MONDON/STAFF

A Red-tailed Hawk is bathed with evening light as it flies during the sunset hour at Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF

Above: An Anna’s hummingbird collects nectar from a plant at Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek. JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF Left: Flocks of pelicans and other birds descend on thousands of fish at Lake Merritt in Oakland. RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

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Above: A deer makes its way through the grasses at Los Vaqueros Reservoir. ARIC CRABB/STAFF Left: Elephant seals gather on the sands of Año Nuevo. PATRICK TEHAN/STAFF ARCHIVES

A bobcat searches for prey along the Tennessee Valley Trail in Mill Valley.

RAY CHAVEZ/STAFF

A gopher makes a tasty snack for this coyote at Palo Alto’s Foothills Nature Preserve.

JANE TYSKA/STAFF

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​​ Above: You never know which creatures will wander into view on a jeep tour of Santa Rosa’s Safari West. Below: Baby rhino Otto, a 100-pound bundle of joy, marks a milestone for the threatened species and mother Eesha.

Zebras and cheetahs and rhinos — oh my! — Santa Rosa’s Safari West has them all

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BY K A R E N D’ S O U Z A

eter Lang first heard the call of the wild as a little boy, scampering around Hollywood backlots in the ’60s as his filmmaker father, Otto, worked on TV shows such as “Flipper,” “Daktari” and “Sea Hunt.”

Beguiled by the lions and chimps he befriended on the “Daktari” set, the young Lang felt a deep connection to nature.

It sparked a passion for animal conservation that led him to raise African eland, large antelopes with oxlike bodies, and eventually inspired him to found Safari West, a 400-acre nature preserve tucked amid the rolling hills of Santa Rosa, in 1993.

For Lang and his wife, Nancy, a zoologist, this is more than just a wildlife refuge. It’s their life’s work. During the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, Lang refused to abandon the preserve. As the flames approached, he made everyone else evacuate, grabbed a garden hose and a shovel and fought the fire. He stood guard all night, making sure that all 1,000 animals — from the giraffes and the cheetahs to rhinos and hyenas — were safe. The Langs lost their home to the inferno that night but not a single animal.

That fierce sense of devotion is what makes this more than just a zoo

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where most of the animals roam free. A trip to this wildlife sanctuary feels like an escape from mundane reality. Certainly, it’s the closest many of us will ever get to the magic of the Serengeti. Here are four must-dos for the next time you visit.

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A dazzling herd of zebras bolts across the road, perhaps spooked by your off-road jeep.

You never know which creatures will wander into view, as you bounce up and down the winding roads on a three-hour quest to encounter more than 90 species.

But it’s common to spot leaping antelopes, fuzzy baby zebras and perhaps a rowdy cape buffalo, the most dangerous animal in the preserve, grunting in a standoff.

You can’t touch the animals, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to touch you. Be prepared for sneaky ostriches who want to steal your sunglasses and giraffes who fancy a nuzzle. And there’s a dainty little demoiselle crane in the aviary, Kovu, who may try to sneak out with you.

Fall asleep to the sounds of kookaburra when you sleep over in one of the 30 luxury camping tents at Safari West.

GO GLAMPING

I N D U LG E T H AT BA BY FEVER

Make the magic last by staying overnight. Tuck into a traditional South African braai, a hearty barbeque of spice-rubbed chicken or brisket, for dinner, then sip wine by the fire as children and grandchildren cartwheel on the grass near the aviary. Once darkness falls, you can explore a bit by flashlight before bedding down in one of 30 luxury camping tents imported from Botswana and decked out with zebra-print bedding, African art and gorgeous woodwork (some made by Lang).

Fall asleep to the chuckles of the kookaburra and wake up to flamingos squawking for breakfast.

(Bring earplugs, because the jungle can get noisy.) Once morning arrives, go watch the fluffy little fennec foxes begging for food and belly rubs.

The birth of any baby is cause for celebration, but the arrival of a Southern white rhino is close to a miracle. Bouncing baby Otto, a 100-pound bundle of joy named after Lang’s father, represents a

Details: Safari West offers reservationonly safari tours ($45-$148), as well as specialty tours and overnights, at 3115 Porter Creek Road in Santa Rosa; www. safariwest.com.

GO BEHIND THE SCENES

Specialty tours include a variety of behind-the-scenes encounters with wildlife, from cheetahs to the gregarious giraffes eager for their favorite snack. You won’t be feeding anything to the cheetahs — obviously — but the giraffes are a delightfully different story.

Just hold onto those acacia leaves tightly; giraffes pull hard.

And a photo safari combines the thrill of the expedition with the art of the camera. Learn how to compose eye-popping pictures, from lighting tricks and interesting angles to framing details. A guide helps your party snap the perfect shot of flamingos striking a one-legged pose or ring-tailed lemurs whirling by their tails. The photo safari goes out twice a day, once in the early morning and again in the late afternoon, when the light shimmers. Tip: Look for tableaux that are rich in intricate detail,

major environmental milestone.

Safari West zoologists have been trying to breed rhinos for almost a decade to help save the endangered species, and this is their first victory. Decades of poaching have rendered the Northern white rhino almost extinct, which makes the arrival of Otto, a cousin of that species, all the sweeter. Best of all, he’s a real scamp, barreling around on chubby limbs until he falls over or trying to coax his mother, Eesha, into a game of tag.

(Check out some of his antics on YouTube @safariwest373.)

The wild denizens of Safari West include a dashing cheetah, left, a very alert lemur, right, and stoic Cape Buffalos.

such as impala horns overlapping and zebra stripes seeming to zigzag as a herd thunders by. The symmetry of nature is high art.

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Wildlife experts deploy strategies to ensure the survival of the mountain lion

PROTECTING THE PREDATORS

BY M I C H A E L A H A A S A N D J OA N M O R R I S

Winston Vickers might have one of the most suspenseful screen feeds in the state: His team has installed dozens of strategically placed cameras in the Orange County backcountry to track where mountain lions roam. As we speak, Vickers is waiting for a mountain lion to approach the deer carcass that one of his team’s biologists laid out in the Santa Ana Mountains. They are hoping to lure a cougar with a free meal, so Vickers can collar it with a GPS tracker.

The director of the California Mountain Lion Project at UC Davis’ Wildlife Health Center, Vickers, 68, is one of the most experienced cougar experts in the U.S. He raves about his close encounters with the majestic predators.

“When you handle them, oh my gosh, look at their claws and those teeth! They weigh about the same as me,” the tall and trim, grayhaired researcher says with playful envy in his voice, “but holy smokes, unlike me, they’re all muscle!”

A mother mountain lion, known as F92, keeps watch as her kittens, F126 and F127, dine on a deer in the Santa Ana Mountains in 2014. All three cats are the offspring of M86, the only known cougar to cross Interstate 15 and mate on the west side of the freeway — bringing much needed fresh genes into a dangerously inbred population.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UC DAVIS WILDLIFE HEALTH CENTER

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“ When you handle them, oh my gosh, look at their claws and those teeth!

They weigh about the same as me, but holy smokes, unlike me, they’re all muscle!”

Winston Vickers, UC Davis Wildlife Health Center veterinarian and mountain lions expert

Winston Vickers, a veterinarian at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center and leading researcher and expert of mountain lions in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, walks through a culvert beneath the I-15 freeway in Temecula in 2018. Vickers and others are studying ways to better connect the Santa Ana mountains with a wildlife corridor over or under the I-15 to the Eastern Peninsular Range.

MARK RIGHTMIRE/STAFF ARCHIVES

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The UC Davis project, which has worked with mountain lions in Southern California for more than two decades, uses cameras and tracking collars to look at questions of habitat, health and human interaction, as the border between wilderness and development grows increasingly porous.

Northern California has a similar organization, the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which was founded by wildlife biologist Chris Wilmers in 2008. The partnership between UC Santa Cruz and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife focuses on Bay Area mountain lions, using collars and cameras to track them, and projects such as the wildlife underpass completed in January that provides safe passage beneath Highway 17 at the Laurel Curve.

The underpass, a collaboration with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz, benefits a variety of wildlife, not just mountain lions, Wilmers says.

Within hours of its cameras going live, there was already evidence of squirrels, deer, wood rats and gray foxes using the underpass.

Researchers are just now starting to get focused data on how well it works.

Vickers’ and Wilmers’ research focus has a common impetus: In both the Santa Monica and Santa Cruz mountains, California mountain lions’ survival is threatened by inbreeding, human interference and car crashes.

In Southern California, “cars and roads, in a nutshell, are the main cause of their deaths,” says Vickers, In the Bay Area, Wilmers says, traffic accidents are second only to humans seeking revenge against mountain lions that kill livestock and pets.

Rodenticides can be harmful to mountain lions, although it rarely is their primary cause of death, he adds. Mountain lions are an apex predator, and they feed on larger animals. But rodenticides can lead to a weakened immune system in mountain lions, making them more susceptible to illness and possible death.

Above: A remote camera, placed at hair snare sites, captured this mountain lion’s image.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UC DAVIS WILDLIFE HEALTH CENTER

Winston Vickers weighs a mountain lion he and his team captured near Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in San Juan Capistrano in order to replace the puma’s tracking collar in 2012.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL GOULDING/STAFF ARCHIVES

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Winston Vickers stands beneath the I-15 freeway in Temecula in 2018 as he talks about the wildlife corridor that follows along Temecula Creek.

MARK RIGHTMIRE/STAFF ARCHIVES

Right: A wildlife overcrossing has been proposed for this stretch of Highway 101 in San Juan Bautista, where Rocks Ranch, a 2,667-acre rangeland expanse to the left of the freeway, was recently acquired by the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County.

NHAT V. MEYER/STAFF

“Every (dead) mountain lion we find has some amount of rodenticide in its system,” Wilmers says.

“It is very widespread.”

Urban development and the vast networks of highways and interstates create another sort of threat for the animals, one that most people don’t even think about. The barriers prevent free movement by the mountain lions.

The result is populations that suffer from inbreeding. Vickers has seen it firsthand: mountain lions reaching a freeway, sitting for hours as cars and trucks speed past and then turning around, because they don’t dare cross.

The lack of genetic diversity in an inbred population, if not addressed, could doom the estimated 5,000 mountain lions that reside in the state. Already, scientists are seeing newborns with deformities such as kinked tails. Vickers was instrumental in a recent study which discovered that 93 percent of the male mountain lions have abnormal sperm.

“There’s a race to the bottom,” he says.

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estimates that mountain lions will be locally extinct by 2050, if the state does not take drastic measures to help them survive.

Vickers grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozarks, the son of a country vet. “We treated every creature, small and large, from cats to cows,” he says.

He describes himself as an outdoorsy kid, “always fishing and hunting and canoeing.” He vowed not to follow in his father’s footsteps but after a few semesters of studying engineering, the call of the wild was too strong, and he switched to veterinary medicine after all.

“What my dad really gave me was appreciation for animals and caring about their welfare,” he says.

Vickers became a vegetarian when he started to work as a veterinarian, “because I couldn’t really see the value of working so hard to save the life of one cow only to then kill it for a steak.”

He worked as a regular vet in Arkansas and California for nearly two decades, while also accepting every chance to treat wildlife. His

Remote cameras are placed at hair snare sites to capture the movements of mountain lions. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UC DAVIS WILDLIFE HEALTH CENTER

fascination with big cats led him all the way to Nepal to study snow leopards. A second degree in epidemiology at UC Davis inspired him to join the Mountain Lion Project there in 2002. At the time, the vets there had started out researching endangered bighorn sheep in Anza Borrego State Park and considered mountain lions a threat to them.

“We were soon shocked to find that the mountain lions had an unusually high mortality rate,” Vickers remembers. So the researchers started tracking mountain lions, accumulating 20 years of detailed knowledge about the reclusive animals. The data on the big cats’ important habitats and corridors has become key for conservation efforts.

Vickers is among those calling for wildlife crossings over major freeways so local mountain lions can mix and mate with peers from neighboring habitats. In the Santa Monica Mountains, Caltrans recently broke ground on the world’s biggest wildlife overpass, dubbed the Liberty Crossing over

busy 101. The new bridge, which is expected to open in 2025, will cost $88 million, a sum that sounds outrageous until one considers the alternative: In the last three years, wildlife crashes in California have cost more than $1 billion.

The crossings help wildlife of all sorts. In Utah, wildlife crossings have reduced fatal deer collisions by 98.5 percent, and Colorado has seen a drop of nearly 90 percent. Apex predators such as pumas also act as “ecological brokers,” a recent study found, and play “an outsize role” for the health and biodiversity of their territories.

Another overpass is being planned for Highway 101 near the border of Santa Clara and San Benito counties. The nonprofit Land Trust of San Cruz County purchased a 2,600-acre slice of land near San Juan Bautista in December, spending $17 million.

Now the trust is working with Caltrans to build a 120- to 160foot wide wildlife crossing, which will provide mountain lions, deer, bobcats, badgers, foxes and other

animals safe passage over the highway.

Vickers hopes he can convince the state and conservationists to add several smaller crossings in Orange County as well and improve the small existing freeway underpass near Temecula Creek. He soon will start meeting with experts and engineers from Caltrans, the Nature Conservancy, National Park Service and other organizations to determine the best designs and locations for crossings “to help as many species as possible. Mountain lions have become the poster child, but the barriers affect many other animals, including birds that don’t like to fly over freeways.”

Providing safer routes for animals to navigate their territories is important, but it’s not the only thing that can be done to ensure the survival of mountain lions.

“No. 1 is stop the sprawl of development,” Wilmers says. “Build in existing cities. Secondarily, a lot of mountain lions die when they kill someone’s goats. People often have their goats in pens at night, which helps them keep track of the goats but doesn’t provide any protection against predators. If they can, they should have their goats in a fully enclosed structure with a roof.”

Acknowledging that “it’s hard to get people to change their behavior and spend money to build a barn or a secure cage for their animals at night,” Vickers focuses on young people. “Educating the young when they’re at the formative stage on how to protect animals, hopefully, that’s a longterm solution.”

When asked what fascinates him the most about the charismatic cougars, he raves about their resilience.

“Despite dramatic persecution, they have been the most successful of the big carnivores to persist,” he says, with awe in his raspy voice. “You just have to admire their ability to continue to exist against all odds.”

Left: A rendering shows the proposed wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills. The bridge over the freeway would allow mountain lions and other animals to go from one side of the freeway to the other and would promote genetic diversity in local species.

RENDERING COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION

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COYOTE ENCOUNTERS 66 WILD

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Y

BY A . K . W H I T N E Y

ou’re walking your dog early in the morning, as usual.

But as you amble up the sidewalk, you spot a furry brown shape up ahead. You tighten the leash, worried about an aggressive stray dog. Then you get a closer look.

It’s a coyote.

If you spend any time on social media, whether it’s your neighborhood’s Facebook page or NextDoor.com, it seems like coyote sightings have increased exponentially in the last few years.

Not only that — the canids, many claim, are multiplying by the day, and some areas are being overrun, threatening public safety.

But is that really the case?

“No,” said Seth Riley, chief wildlife ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, who says he’s been hearing “that exact same thing” for the last 23 years.

Riley’s National Park Service colleague, wildlife ecologist Jeffrey Brown, said the uptick in sightings is likely related to the fact that so many people have doorbell cameras nowadays, which pick up wildlife visitors day or night.

“It just seems they’re noticing the wildlife more because they’re able to see them,” Brown said.

The California Department of Fish and Game estimates there are somewhere between 250,000 and 750,000 coyotes in the state, a wide range, to be sure, but it’s possible to get more precise in certain areas.

San Francisco’s coyote population was nearly wiped out in the last century — trapped, removed or poisoned. Some 30 years after that poison — Compound 1080 — was banned in 1972, a coyote was spotted in the Presidio. Today, the city has about 100 coyotes, which are divided into 17 to 18 family groupings, according to Janet Kessler, an amateur naturalist known

Keep the peace by keeping your distance

as San Francisco’s “Coyote Lady,” who has studied the animals for the last two decades and posts her findings at coyoteyipps.com.

Coyotes can be spotted strolling the streets and trails in suburbia, too. They normally avoid humans, but there have been a few widely publicized exceptions to that rule in recent years. In the East Bay, an aggressive coyote attacked five people, including two children, in Lafayette and Moraga between July 2020 and February 2021, before being captured, DNA tested to make sure it was the right animal and euthanized. Meanwhile, in Golden Gate Park, a coyote had to be euthanized after it began lunging at small children in broad daylight in 2021.

In both cases, authorities said, the coyotes seemed to have lost their fear of humans — because people had been feeding them. In 2021, San Francisco Animal Care and Control officials even released photos of a woman feeding coyotes meat from a plate in Bernal Heights Park. That same year in the Oakland Hills, neighbors united to stop a resident from putting out dog food and water for coyotes.

Not feeding coyotes is incredibly important, Kessler, Riley and Brown agree — and it may seem an obvious thing. But you may be feeding them involuntarily by leaving your pet’s food and water bowls in the backyard or by not picking up fallen fruit or seed that falls from bird feeders. The latter attracts rodents, which are a favorite coyote snack.

We may want our backyards to be a haven for birds and other wildlife, but welcoming coyotes to your back door is never a good idea, especially if you have pets or small children — or neighbors with either. Even with these precautions, it can be hard to keep coyotes out of your yard.

Hazing coyotes –yelling at them, throwing things, chasing

them off — works, at least for a while. “Coyotes are super smart,” Riley warned. You may need a longer term solution.

“A six-foot fence with rollers is supposed to keep them out,” Kessler said. “But this requires that no gaps exist at gateways and that the fence is buried at least a foot underground to keep coyotes from digging under the fence. The best practice of all is to always supervise your pet when you are out of doors.”

Which brings us back to that walk you were taking with your dog. You spot a coyote, and instead of running away, it saunters closer. What do you do?

Avoid contact of any kind. Keep your dog on a leash, so it won’t go after the coyote. If it’s a smaller dog, Kessler said, pick it up. Then, walk away, keeping an eye on the coyote and staying calm and assertive. Running away from a coyote will only make it chase you. If the coyote follows you, stay calm but keep moving. Coyotes are protective of their territories and may just be “escorting” you away.

A coyote that lunges at you or bites is still a rare occurrence, but canid aggression can vary according to season. When coyotes are breeding, they are protective of their dens. Being cautious on nature trails between March and September, Brown said, is a good idea. In fact, the Presidio of San Francisco typically closes some trails to dog walkers during pupping season to minimize the chance of conflict.

Above all, try not to let one bad interaction sour you on these animals, because we’re more alike than you think.

“Our coyotes lead much richer lives than most folks are aware of,” Kessler writes on her site.

“Their lives are full of emotion — really the same emotions we experience — and full of family life — the amazingly similar family life we enjoy.”

A coyote crosses Heart’s Desire road in Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County. FRANKIE FROST/STAFF ARCHIVES

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An animal lover’s guide to hanging at Happy Hollow Park & Zoo B Y L I N DA Z AVO R A L

E

ven at 16 acres, San Jose’s Happy Hollow Park & Zoo could be considered a hidden gem, tucked as it is behind a gateway along Story Road. First conceived in the mid-1950s, the attraction opened in March 1961, with the zoo added in 1967. Many expansions and upgrades have taken place in the years since.

Today, Happy Hollow is partly devoted to gentle rides and amusements for children and partly devoted to the survival of global species, from the adorable (meerkats) to the slightly intimidating (jaguar). About 130 animals representing more than 50 species call this place home.

We took our zoo cues from the youngest animal lovers on a recent visit.

Here’s our guide: S Q UAW K W I T H T H E M ACAW S

Many of Happy Hollow’s inhabitants reside quietly in their habitats.

Not the macaws. Their piercing cries make them wildly popular with kids, who can’t help joining the chorus. Add the vibrant feathers, and the birds become an irresistible draw. Two-year-old Zaiden of Morgan Hill was transfixed first by the blue-and-gold macaws, named Barney and Sarg, until the scarlet macaw, Rooster, let out a cry. Then the blue and gold again, then the scarlet, like cheerleaders on opposing teams.

By the way, Rooster came by that curious name because he was confiscated from a person trying to import parrots into the country illegally. He “ Will Smith,” a red panda, relaxes in his enclosure at Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose. PATRICK TEHAN/STAFF

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was being transported in a box labeled “chickens.”

so they are acclimated to cold weather. “During the summer in San Jose, they need air conditioning,” O’Hara says. “The window on the night house allows zoo guests to still be able to view the panda, while allowing the panda a comfortable, climate-controlled atmosphere.”

G O ‘AW W W W ’ OV E R T H E CA P Y BA R A S

How is it we are horrified by the sight of a mouse or rat, yet find ourselves enamored with the largest rodent of them all, the capybara? Must be the fact that these Happy Hollow gals are related to the guinea pig, making them cute in a not-so-classically-cute way. If you have small children along, you may have to point out the capybaras — two females named Wendy and Boo — because they’re the size and color of boulders and like to hang out behind said boulders in their habitat. Note the webbed feet, making them what animal experts call “semi-aquatic.” Zoo manager Amber Rindy says they can stay underwater for up to five minutes.

G O O N A SA FA R I

he’s still active. “He paces, and he comes up really close to people.”

The San Jose children and their parents, Kimberly and Chris Coran, are Happy Hollow veterans.

Mom, in fact, grew up visiting the park.

G AW K AT T H E T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S

PAY A V I S I T TO T H E ELDERS — AND THE NEWBORNS

Can it be that young boys are born knowing how to recognize a vulture? At Happy Hollow, they flock to this habitat. If they’re savvy enough to know about the, ahem, diet of your basic turkey vulture, then it occurs to them to raise concerns about the safety of nearby creatures, like the sweet parma wallaby in the next enclosure. Not to worry, says Caitlin O’Hara, the zoo’s conservation and communications manager.

Live wallabies are perfectly safe; plus, these vultures came here as wing injury patients. They’re all better now, but their high-flying days are behind them.

The African spurred tortoise, Kengele, who will turn 57 this summer, is the oldest resident of Happy Hollow. But he’s not the inhabitant who’s been here the longest — that distinction belongs to Barney the macaw, who has resided here since 1982. As for the newbies, two baby red-ruffed lemurs were born in May and should be scampering around their habitat by now, to the delight of visitors.

V E N T U R E TO A N T E AT E R T E R R I TO RY

The Coran kids — Emma, 8 going on 9, and Oliver, 6 — highly recommend a trip to the far corner of the park to see one of the anteaters, Xander. “He’s a little show-off,” the knowledgeable Emma says, with her brother nodding in agreement. Even when it gets hot and most of the animals are “over it” for the day, she says,

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Top: Crowds gather at Senior Safari at to watch peccaries roam through an enclosure at Happy Hollow Park and Zoo in San Jose.

Center: One of the oldest residents at Happy Hollow Park & Zoo is this tortoise.

Above: Fennec foxes nap in their enclosure.

ARIC CRABB, DAI SUGANO, NHAT V. MEYER/STAFF

GET A GLIMPSE OF A RED PA N DA

You need to be determined to see Will Smith or Xena — they alternate between the main yard and the behind-the-scenes yard — but their cute faces are worth it. These animals come from the Himalayas in Nepal and China,

This zoo isn’t just for the young. Happy Hollow welcomes the young at heart several times a year at its Senior Safaris. For attendees 50 and over, the event offers early entry into the park on a Thursday morning, chats with zookeepers and special meetand-greets with the zoo denizens.

Admission and parking are free for attendees, who are welcome to spend the whole day relaxing at the park. The zoo usually offers six safari dates between May and October.

F I N I S H W I T H A C U L I N A RY A DV E N T U R E

Just east of Happy Hollow sits San Jose’s restaurant-rich Little Saigon district, and it would be a shame not to indulge while here in the neighborhood. For starters, you’re going to want an icy Vietnamese coffee after leaving the park on a hot afternoon. Then go casual with a banh mi or bowl of pho or head to the Vietnam Town center for a sit-down dinner of dishes like shaken beef, tamarind prawns and lemongrass chicken with cocktails and wine.

Details: Happy Hollow is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends through November. Admission is $18 for ages 2-59 and $15 for seniors.

Your $10 parking fee can be used for a discount on a family membership. Note: Make sure to bring strollers for your little ones. This is a massive park, and you’ll walk on a bridge over Coyote Creek and two roads just to get from the parking lot to the ticket booth. 748 Story Road, San Jose; https://happyhollow.org.

A great horned owl sits perched on a tree branch at Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek in 2022.

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/STAFF ARCHIVES

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3

YEARS

Celebrating 40 years of helping neighbors in need

Together we can make a wonderful difference this year!

This year’s Wish Book and Share The Spirit stories, which highlight our neighbors in need, will begin publishing November 19. Generous contributions from valued readers like you support individuals facing difficult circumstances, making our community a better place.

To learn more about these programs or to donate visit:

Scan for Wish Book

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wishbook.mercurynews.com sharethespiriteastbay.org

Scan for Share The Spirit