10/18/24 SFGate article on GGRO

[Jan Ambrosini]

A new SFGate article is out today. Here is the link, https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/golden-gate-raptor-observatory-bay-area-19841453.php. 

Below is the plain text version (minus ads and photos).

Great quotes from Deborah Crooks, Eddie Bartley, Horacio Mena.

Jan

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Oct 18, 2024

On a sandy peak about 900 feet above the Golden Gate Bridge, a dozen or so volunteers bundled up in puffer vests and floppy sun hats tried to peer through the unrelenting fog. Suddenly, the silhouette of a creature with a 4-foot wingspan appeared on the horizon.

“Red-tailed hawk!” someone yelled, sending the group into a frenzy. Everyone raced to grab their binoculars and scopes, and the bird was counted: the very first since the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory resumed its award-winning Hawkwatch program on Monday following news that the Fort Mason-headquartered organization had suddenly ceased operations after 40 years. Many of the volunteers said they felt left in the dark by the September announcement, and wildlife experts nationwide feared the impacts of the five-week gap in research collected on tens of thousands of birds of prey as they passed through the Bay Area during the height of raptor migration season.

“Last month, with two key staff members unexpectedly on leave early in the field season, we made the decision to temporarily pause field operations,” a spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which oversees GGRO, told SFGATE in an emailed statement. “We have designed the reactivation of programming in a way that supports employee safety and well-being as our top priority.”

Chris Lehnertz, president and CEO of the parks conservancy, declined to comment on the continued absence of GGRO’s senior leadership: director Allen Fish, who had been at the helm of Hawkwatch since 1985, and banding program manager Teresa Ely, explaining it was the duty of the parks conservancy to “protect everyone’s privacy when they have time away from work.” She noted the time frame of their return had also been unclear. Still, as once-frequent social media updates from the organization ceased, many of the volunteers were left wondering why the information about the disrupted season took so long to reach them — and why they never received an explanation as to what happened.

“Surprises are never easy to manage, whether it’s an organization or a family in your own personal life,” Lehnertz told SFGATE from the base of the Hawk Hill, where the organization has been monitoring birds of prey for decades. “And so we’ll sit down after this is, you know … that we’ve reached the end of the season and look back and see what we could do differently. Communication is always the biggest challenge — who you talk to, when, about what things — and so we will obviously have lessons that we’ve learned.”

On the day of the official relaunch of Hawkwatch, the lone raptor, a couple of ravens and a band-tailed pigeon made for a much lower tally than usual as the fog loomed over the World War II-era military site in the Marin Headlands.

Yet, volunteers were not deterred. In spite of the abrupt halt to the program, many of them said they never stopped making the trek up to look for raptors on the hill.

“We all had our teams in place and were ready to go, so I think everybody who could just kept counting,” Deborah Crooks, a musician from Alameda and volunteer for the past 13 years, told SFGATE. “The birds didn’t know there was a pause.”

Typically, Crooks explained, the raptors are counted via a quadrant system. Volunteers divide the top of the hill into four sections — north, south, east and west — with one or two hawk watchers rotating from corner to corner every 30 minutes, calling out sightings to one another while yet another volunteer records the data on a tablet. It’s a meticulous system designed to identify more than 19 species of birds of prey, contributing to a more than 40-year dataset that scientists use to evaluate trends and fluctuations in bird populations over time. During the period that Hawkwatch had been stalled, unofficial volunteers counted more than 4,000 raptors, Crooks said. Whether the counts tallied during the suspension of the program will be formally recorded by the parks conservancy, however, remains to be seen.

“We’ll welcome that data like any data we’re collecting,” Lehnertz said. “We’ll work with scientists to qualify that data and see if some, or all, or less than that can be used, and appreciate the commitment of our volunteers.”

In a statement, the parks conservancy noted that while lapses in data collection are “never ideal,” GGRO has had to accommodate for similar disruptions in the past due to events like wildfires and government shutdowns as well as the pandemic, and is prepared to do so again.

Meanwhile, Crooks said she and other volunteers plan to continue their work for as long as they can.  

“We’re all excited, and hoping that it keeps going,” she said. “We’re going to see the season out and then see where we get to. But we don’t know the future of the program right now.”

A history of hawk watching

The Golden Gate Raptor Observatory has stood the test of time — it’s not only the oldest, but the largest organization in the history of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Its history dates back to the 1970s, when the late Laurence “Laurie” Binford, then curator of ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences, noticed that raptors were descending on the Bay Area in much larger numbers than usual in the fall and discovered the important migration route north of San Francisco, explained Eddie Bartley, a longtime day leader for the organization. Today, Hawk Hill is considered “the largest observation spot in all of western North America,” Bartley said. “There’s nothing else quite like it.”

From there, a team of researchers from the National Park Service, falconers and staff from the San Francisco Zoo worked together to train volunteers to band raptors at the site — a noninvasive technique in which a lightweight ring labeled with a unique set of numbers is placed on an individual bird’s foot to help researchers keep track of where it flies.

The parks conservancy joined the partnership when it was established in 1981, director Fish was subsequently hired to lead the program, and thousands of volunteers joined its mission, making several noteworthy discoveries along the way about raptor diets, their health, and why and when they fly through the Bay Area. They realized birds of prey that were previously never thought to pass through the Marin Headlands, like the broad-winged hawk, were flying in by the hundreds every year, Bartley said. They watched over threatened and endangered species like Swainson’s hawks, bald eagles and peregrine falcons, which were delisted in 2009.

“Watching the hawks is important, but with the banding data, you get much more information,” Bartley said. The bulk of the data in GGRO's publication history comes from the banding side of the operation.

The organization took a hit during the pandemic but shifted its efforts to training volunteers online — the extensive process takes years, and GGRO has been a place where countless young scientists have launched their careers, Bartley said. Over the past couple of years, volunteer numbers had begun to bounce back, and the 2024 season, the 40-year anniversary of the program, was expected to be a celebratory one.

Instead, Bartley said, “people were shocked and bewildered.”

Hawk banding program uncertain

Hawkwatch has been reinstated for now, but the question on many volunteers’ minds is for how long. Other aspects of GGRO may be sunsetted in the near future, too — Lehnertz said the parks conservancy does not plan to resume its celebrated banding program this season in part because of the “scientific rigor associated with it” and the organization’s need to comply with requirements from the state. The parks conservancy still has its banding permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, but in the aftermath of Ely’s absence “needs to ensure the right permitholder is in place,” Lehnertz said, adding that GGRO plans to work with the National Park Service to “understand what the program can be in the future.”

“Our intention is to continue the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory,” Lehnertz said. “We’re committed to its ongoing work and community engagement. Hawkwatch is where that community engagement happens, but we don’t know what that will look like.”

The volunteers ended their session at about 1 p.m. — it was too foggy to keep going. But as they gathered for a picnic of Trader Joe’s snacks, amiably chatting and packing up their gear, there seemed to be a sense of relief that they were up on the hill again, if only temporarily. Horacio Mena, a volunteer from Berkeley for the past 35 years who used to work for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, said hawk watchers expect to learn by March or April of next year what the vision of the program will be moving forward — it’s when they usually get first updates on the upcoming fall migration season.

For now, “this is the only way to get a snapshot of what is going on,” he said. “We have done this work consistently in one place for 40 years because it couldn’t happen any other way. You see the changes in these birds, the impacts of climate change. It’s important.”