Bay Area Bird Blog

Several hundred people showed up at the beleaguered San Francisco Zoo today for the kickoff of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) “Big Year.” The Big Year is the brainchild of Brent Plater, formerly the Bay Area director of the Center for Biological Diversity, now with the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic of Golden Gate University School of Law.  Brent says he was reading a legal brief a couple of years ago, related to some kind of development in the Bay Area, and that the brief mentioned that the GGNRA has more federally listed endangered species than any other mainland unit of the National Park Service.  Brent was flabbergasted (so am I).   More than Yellowstone, with its wolves and grizzlies?  Yep.  More than the big parks of the Pacific Northwest, with their spotted owls?  Yep.  The only U.S.  parks with more federally listed threatened or endangered species are on islands: Hawaii, and the Channel Islands of Southern California.  We’ve got 33 listed species here (”listed” means listed as “threatened” or “endangered” under the federal endangered species act).  This is not something to be proud of. 

Brent’s idea was to take the “Big Year” concept from birding — it refers to people trying to see as many different bird species as they can in a single calendar year — and apply it to the 33 listed species in the GGNRA.  You can get a checklist that lists the species, which include birds, butterflies, mammals, plants, fish, and a freshwater shrimp.  The idea isn’t just to get people to see the species, but also to help save them, so you can also look up 33 actions to take.  There’s even a contest: at the end of the year, the person who has seen the most species and taken the most beneficial actions will be the winner, and will get a prize!  (Brent says “the prize will be OK, but it won’t be a Prius or anything.”) 

Quite a few organizations are supporting the Big Year, including Golden Gate Audubon and the Sierra Club, and lots of people have worked on publicity and pamphlets and such (thank you, everyone!), but Brent deserves a ton of credit for coming up with the idea and for working hard to make it happen. At today’s kickoff party there were mercifully few speeches, and then people went out to bag one of the species right then and there: there are about 30 Western Snowy Plovers, a cute little shorebird, that hang out most days on Ocean Beach just north of the zoo, and we went out to take a look.  The Park Service had discreetly sent a couple of rangers out ahead of time, so for once there were no off-leash dogs to be seen, and several groups of plovers were racing about on the wet sand. So, I’ve seen the Western Snowy Plover.

 Now, where am I going to see a Blue Checkerspot butterfly?