Suburban birds
boats and rebounds
I thought I was better and then I wasn’t. After brief spell of wellness, I experienced the notorious COVID rebound. So for nearly another week, life felt like a reverse negative of my 2020-2021 pandemic experience: I was isolated, but experiencing the virus physically while the world outside buzzed with activity.
Another of the things I was sorry to have to bow out of was participating in the Oakland Christmas Bird with the Alameda Island area crew. Christmas Bird Counts, or CBCs, are the longest-running citizen science project in the country. A nationwide bird census, the goal is to count every bird in a day in a given location. While counts were originally held on Christmas Day, now the annual census is held between December 14-January 5.
But Saturday, it was clear that I was not not recovered enough to meet up with the Alameda team on count day. I'd felt well enough to take easy, solo walks all week — the benefits of living on a flat-as-a-pancake island — so I offered to cover some of the more boring suburban parks and my “patch,” Jean Sweeney, that the rest of crew might be busy elsewhere to reach. Between Elsie Roemer, Crab Cove and Alameda Point Wildlife Area, Alameda has a lot of busy, bird hotspots, but I’ve come to appreciate all the less-showy avian activitiy happening in local street treets and parks.
I did the Golden Gate Bird Alliance and California Academy of Sciences Master Bird Program this year, and one of the requirements (including doing at least one CBC), was maintaining a local bird patch list. Patch birding — monitoring birds at a local and familiar site on a regular basis — is far less sexy than chasing rare migrants or attempting a big year or counting at a migration site, but I kind of love it. It’s really about paying attention to all the life that’s going on, a little more quietly, but no less extraordinarily, right under one’s nose.
Because it's very close to my house, I chose Jean Sweeney Open Space as my patch. More people use Jean Sweeney OS, , a 25-acre multi-use community park, for walking dogs, family picnics and taking their kids to its well-outfitted playground. But a host of birds also use it, especially the more scraggly, overgrown areas that border the park. I’ve seen over 75 different bird species there this year— some just flying over, or coming through during migration, and others (hello there California Towhee, Red-shouldered Hawk and Black Phoebe) who clearly call the place home. So it was a good place for me to count on Sunday, alone, feeling gloomy, testing positive, but nonetheless with enough energy and desire to participate in something (being sick=another exercise in taming ones FOMO).
Despite the rain, it turned out to be a decent day at the park, which was empty of people but busy with a variety of sparrows, warblers and Cedar Waxwing. A House Wren made an appearance and a flock Brown Pelican flew over. It felt good to be outside and add to the more than 100 different bird species (official tallies tk) the Alameda Island team would observe.
One of the last things we did before I got COVID was the 47th Annual Alameda-Oakland Lighted Yacht Parade. This was our third time entering the event, which involves decorating Espresso in as many lights as we can muster and has become one of our favorite things to do during the holidays. Summing up our music, travel and bird-filled year (and perhaps our growing eccentricity), Kwame spent a couple of weeks building a “flying” and singing bird to place on the bow. It was wacky and a lot of fun.
The day before the solstice, I finally tested negative. Solstice night, Kwame came home and installed the lit-up bird contraption on the porch. It just barely fits and looks kind of hilarious but there you have it! It might look better on the roof, but that would be a whole other engineering problem….
Stay healthy out there!