This was the year many of us re-discovered the joys of backyard birding.
Sure, it’s great fun to go wonderful places and see new and exciting birds; I’m certainly looking forward to doing that again. But this year has been an eye-opener for learning about the locals… birds and people.
I had a fairly catastrophic experience with the flu in early 2019 — quite literally a near-death situation. The ER doc who first treated me came to visit while I was still in the ICU; he said he’d never seen anyone as sick as me survive. So when San Francisco announced the shutdowns last year, my boss turned to me and said “you’re going home”. Two hours later, I had packed up all I needed to get through the three-week shutdown. Um, yeah.
In the Bay Area, we were told not to go more than five miles from home (goodbye to all my favorite spring birding sites), and state parks and many of the city/county parks were closed. Even in the parks that were open, many people weren’t yet wearing masks so I didn’t feel comfortable as a high-risk person. That left me to explore my yard and the immediate neighborhood.
I have a few advantages, admittedly. We live about two miles from the Pacific and the migrations move past our home. Though we’re in a dense residential neighborhood by the standards of most of the country, we’re actually a bit more open by SF standards (single family homes instead of multi-unit housing), and we have a sort-of-open space across the street.
Another advantage is having serious birders as over-the-fence neighbors, and having a world-renowned ornithologist as a friend/neighbor just a few blocks away. There were many sets of texts between the three households over the year, passing off sightings from yard to yard and block to block.
The novelty of working at home wore off pretty quickly, and just as quickly I adapted to working a longer day with longer breaks throughout. When the spreadsheets started driving me nuts, I could step to the back window and see who was at the baths, or at my neighbors’ feeders.
Lunch hours were no longer spent at my desk; I’d step into the yard for an hour and attack the seriously overgrown grasses, ivy and other annoyances. My native plants got some TLC, and were joined by others. Long-hidden blooms tempted the bees and the birds, and newly-exposed soils were kicked over by towhees and sparrows looking for a meal.
My young neighbor and I followed a banded juvenile redtail who had been hanging out. We got her band number, then watched her go through molt as she transitioned into adulthood. We got to see the spectacle of Sooty Shearwater flocks from our back windows — Yard Bird, legit!! Ornitho-friend texted us “Look Up!” in time to see a bald eagle fly over. We traded warbler sightings — who knew so many Yellow Warblers used our yards? — and thrilled at the multi-day sightings of Western Tanagers and a House Wren (the first wren of any kind I’d seen in the neighborhood, much less my yard). I’d been living here for 17 years, but 2020 was my first sighting of all of those birds from home. Even Song Sparrows were new yard birds for me.
The five year old boy next door started joining in some of our back fence conversations. Turns out he really likes birds too, especially hawks. He doesn’t put a name to every sparrow, but he likes the small birds and is a really good spotter for birds large and small. We often have conversations about the birds and I look forward to maybe getting out there with him when things get a bit more normal again. He knows about other creatures too — he raised butterflies but before he released them in his back yard, he wanted to make sure that it would be safe — that the birds wouldn’t eat them as soon as he let them go.
Another neighbor noticed us trailing the redtail earlier in the year; we shared our scopes and she asked questions a few times. In November, I came home to a note slid under my door — “you know about hawks, right? I think there’s an injured hawk down the street”, with her phone number. I called, she showed me the bird (perched on a wire at that point) and I called someone I know who does raptor rescue. The next morning he picked up the enormous redtail, got her to rehabbers who discovered she had a broken coracoid, but was otherwise doing well — her chances were excellent.
Weeks later she had healed and was ready for release. (The rehabbers said she was eating them out of house and home.) The neighbor who’d found her and my back fence neighbors all came to see her released in the little neighborhood park where she’d been found. It was a lovely moment seeing “our” bird take to the skies again. Even better, she started hanging out on our block soon after (she had some distinctive feathers that confirmed her identity). I have seen her as recently as last week — almost four months after her release.
So, yeah. 2020 sucked. No doubt about it.
But I got to know my neighbors better than I had in the previous 16 years. We bonded over birds, over knowing that our neighborhood provides safe haven for a great variety of feathered friends. That’s not nothing.
How did birds help you through this last year?