Conservation Archive
Posted by Ilana DeBare in
Conservation, Golden Gate Audubon
By Ilana DeBare
Last month we wrote about the Caltrans netting on a Petaluma bridge construction site that was trapping and killing dozens of Cliff Swallows.
Many Golden Gate Audubon members — as well as other conservation groups — wrote to Caltrans asking it to adopt less lethal methods of keeping birds from nesting on the bridge during construction. But Caltrans hasn’t list…
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Posted by GGAS in
Birding, Conservation, Golden Gate Audubon
By Corny Foster
If you are walking the north end of Crissy Field beach in the Presidio, you can easily mistake a Western Snowy Plover for one more ripple of sand. Camouflage helps the plovers evade predators. It is also the reason that few people know the birds are there until they almost step on them!
Luckily, there are some people who are highly aware of the plovers – Golden Gate Audubon and National Park Se…
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Posted by Ilana DeBare in
Conservation, Golden Gate Audubon
By Ilana DeBare
For the past two years, we’ve been fighting plans by the city of San Francisco to create artificial-turf soccer fields with stadium-style lighting in western Golden Gate Park, an area that was intended in city plans to remain more natural and less developed.
We lost a round in this battle last summer before the city’s planning and parks commissions.
But next week, the issue …
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Posted by Ilana DeBare in
Conservation
By Ilana DeBare
There has been so much deeply horrific news this week — the Boston bombings, the spineless Senate, the Texas fertilizer fire. It might seem hard to care about two dead goslings.
But these goslings were in our backyard, so to speak, swimming in the bay a few feet offshore of San Francisco’s Crissy Field on Wednesday.
And they died a completely gratuitous death in the jaws of sever…
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Posted by Ilana DeBare in
Conservation
By Ilana DeBare
Dozens of Cliff Swallows are being killed each week by a Caltrans contractor in Petaluma — even though alternative technologies are available that would keep the swallows safe.
Sonoma County bird lovers are up in arms over the killings, in which swallows are being trapped in netting installed on a Highway 101 bridge by contractor C.C. Myers.
They’re asking other wildlife lo…
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Posted by Jack Dumbacher in
Birding, Conservation
By Jack Dumbacher
What iconic north American bird used to be the most abundant bird species on earth, but is definitely not on your life list? The Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius. But if Bay Area innovators Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan have their way, you may be able to see them again, live in feathered form.
Extinction – the end of a gene pool – is regarded as the final step from which there …
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Posted by GGAS in
Birding, Conservation
By Glenn Stewart
At this moment, thousands of people are nervously watching the falcon nest camera atop the PG&E headquarters building at 77 Beale Street in downtown San Francisco. The female Peregrine Falcon nesting there since 2008 has disappeared and a new female has moved in to the territory.
All Peregrine Falcons look similar but not exactly alike. Variations in plumage on the head and neck mak…
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