Tag Archives | birds

Exploring Culturally Relevant Education and Climate Smart Restoration

Golden Gate Audubon’s Online Speaker Series presents

Exploring Culturally Relevant Education and Climate Smart Restoration

with John Parodi, STRAW Restoration Director; Alba K. Estrada Lopez, Conservation Educator; and Isaiah Thalmayer, Senior Project Manager.

Today, as climate change impacts both wildlife and human communities world wide, climate smart restoration is becoming recognized as an important strategy for healing landscapes and increasing human health. The goal of climate smart restoration, a growing field of ecological restoration, is to prepare landscapes for the impacts of climate change by increasing habitat resilience and engaging local communities. In this presentation we’ll explore guiding principles of climate smart restoration, current science and exemplary projects where people and places are being restored together. In addition to highlighting projects across California, we’ll explore our experiences engaging diverse communities and practicing culturally relevant teaching — a pedagogical framework to make restoration science and conservation topics relevant to the culture and lived experiences of the students and communities we engage. In a time of civil discord, a global health crisis and rapid climate change, climate smart restoration is emerging as a solution for many challenges.

When: This Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 7 pm PST

How To Sign In: Our free Speaker Series webinar is available on a first come, first serve basis with capacity for up to 500 participants. We currently do not have the capacity to register or sign up participants before the event. Please make sure to download the Zoom app before the Speaker Series begins. You will need a passcode to sign into the event. Links and passcode are provided below.

Join from a PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android device:

Please click this URL to join. https://zoom.us/j/99089322418?pwd=RUplMG5ya2J1c1Jxd2R4ZWxUSnpYZz09

Passcode: 258264

Or join by phone:

 

Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
US: +1 669 900 6833 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 929 436 2866 or +1 301 715 8592 or +1 312 626 6799

 

Webinar ID: 990 8932 2418
Passcode: 258264

International numbers available: https://zoom.us/u/add4s6GOsq

About Point Blue Conservation’s STRAW Program: Point Blue Conservation Science’s STRAW program (Students & Teachers Restoring A Watershed) implements community-based restoration projects, engaging more than 3000 students annually in hands-on restoration across California. Since beginning in 1994, STRAW has restored more than 36 miles of streams and educated 50,000 students, all free of charge to teachers thanks to generous support from partners, funders and donors. To learn more about STRAW, please click here

Townsend’s Warbler by Corey Raffel 

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Identification of Bell’s and Sagebrush Sparrows

The Bell’s and Sagebrush Sparrow split has been one of the more headache-inducing identification challenges for southwest birders. In 2013, the AOU’s 54th supplement split Sage Sparrow Artemisiospiza belli into two species; Sagebrush Sparrow A. nevadensis and Bell’s Sparrow A. belli. Bell’s Sparrow consists of subspecies bellicanescenscinerea, and clementeae.

Separating nominate Bell’s belli from Sagebrush is straightforward based on both plumage and range. However, separating the interior Bell’s canescens from Sagebrush, especially where the two species overlap in winter in the California, Nevada and Arizona deserts, can be a much harder problem to solve and has been frustrating birders across the southwest.

In this webinar, Kimball Garrett will provide an overview on the status and distribution on Bell’s and Sagebrush Sparrow, as well as pointer on identification. Kimball will also introduce us to a new project to find and photograph Sagebrush Sparrows in Los Angeles County! Be ready for the Great Sagebrush Sparrow Hunt.

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CONNECTION INFORMATION: A link to the webinar livestream will be posted on our website at 6:55pm, five minutes before the webinar start time. If you have a YouTube account and are logged in to YouTube, you will be able to submit questions or comments that will be relayed to the speaker.

If you are unable to attend, this webinar *will* be recorded and made available on our website for later (or repeat) viewing.

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Interested in future webinars and projects with Los Angeles Birders? Join our LA Birders mailing list and be sure to add the email losangelesbirders@gmail.com to your contacts to make sure you don’t miss any messages!

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WHAT and WHO is Los Angeles Birders? Los Angeles Birders (LAB) is a newly formed, independent non-profit organization with the goal of bringing birding, knowledge, and field experience together to encourage, educate, and empower birders. More information is available on our website — losangelesbirders.org

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Northern Saw-whet Owls

Northern Saw-whet Owl

Monday, November 16, 2020 at 6:30pm

Join our ZOOM Meeting by clicking the link below:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86056017933?pwd=QURMbWJ1bzBheTUrV0NqVjNDeXlOUT09

Meeting ID860 5601 7933

Passcode443463

More About the Program:

What do you know about Saw-whet Owls?

If you’re like most of us, probably not much.

But these little birds are all around us, year round, fighting out their fierce lives in our forests and woodlands. Come learn about these neighbors from Ken Sobon, director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl Research & Education Project in Northern California.

The Presenters:

Ken Sobon is an avid birder, field trip leader, Vice President of Altacal Audubon Society, and is now the Northern California representative to Audubon California board of directors. He has worked the last six seasons volunteering and assisting and is now the Director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl fall migration monitoring project. In addition Ken has been a science teacher to middle school students in Oroville since 1995. He has shared his love of science and birding with his students both in the classroom and in field.

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A Beginners Guide to the Hawks of Shasta County

Red-shouldered Hawk

Bob Yutzy will present a visual guide with commentary covering the main identification features of our local Hawks. Photos will be used to show the various plumages and phases of these magnificent flying machines.

Bob is the North American Birds sub-regional editor and eBird Reviewer for Shasta County, and our local County Checklist Chairperson. He and his wife Carol are compilers of the Fall River Mills CBC, and have been completing hawk count and breeding bird routes in Southeast Arizona and California for over 30 years.

Here is the information for the meeting:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89200835402

Meeting ID: 892 0083 5402
One tap mobile
+16699009128,,89200835402# US (San Jose)
+12532158782,,89200835402# US (Tacoma)

Dial by your location
+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Germantown)
Meeting ID: 892 0083 5402
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kEaSJYIOD

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Northern Flicker – a Red, White, and Blue Bird

Northern Flicker Male

It’s election season, and not too big a stretch to see red, white, and blue in some of our feathered aboriginals. Many colorful birds have headed to Mexico for the winter, but northern flickers, after spending summer in cooler areas upslope, along the river, or northward, have returned to our local woodlands.

Flickers are woodpeckers, and our western version has bright red under its wings, a bold white rump patch, and, for a willing eye in good light, a steely blue-gray face, offset in the male with a red dash of a whisker.

Northern Flicker Male Intergrade

The eastern version of the flicker shuffles some of these colors around, and substantially substitutes yellow for our western red. But yellow or red, both flickers sport a beautiful black necklace, speckled breast and belly, and a list of beneficial behaviors.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They act as partners: mated pairs share the work and, we can hope, pleasures of nest construction, egg incubation, and child-rearing.

Northern Flicker Nestlings

Northern Flicker Nestlings

They get along with their neighbors. Small groups routinely stick together, flocking severally through the woods. Where red- and yellow-shafted flickers meet, they associate impartially.

They communicate with one another, singing a one-pitch staccato trill to call far and wide, or drumming on hollow wood in various cadences, or murmuring to closer birds with a silky weeka-weeka-weeka call.

Of course flickers are not  immune to conflict, particularly in finding mates. But they have evolved a ritualized solution to their disputes. As in some other species, rivals face each other, bills to the sky, and they bob and weave together, perhaps calling out, until one seems to decide the other has rights and flies off with no harm done.

Northern Flicker Males

Northern Flicker Males In Conflict

Flickers interact thriftily with other species. Before eating ants, they may rub them over their bodies, or simply allow the ants to crawl over them. It is hypothesized that the ants’ formic acid helps protect the birds from mites and lice, and preening with them may improve the ants’ palatability by reducing their remaining acid content.

They provide for other species, however naively.  Many kinds of birds nest in woodpecker cavities, but flickers, because of their large size, are crucial to other large cavity nesters. Buffleheads, the most common black and white duck you’ll see on the river in winter, rely almost exclusively on flickers for nesting cavities.

And flickers live close to the earth. They chisel at bark like other woodpeckers, but most of their foraging is actually done on the ground, where they lap up ants and other insects, as well as fruits and seeds.

Northern Flicker Male Anting

Northern Flicker Male Anting

They are so comfortable with the dirt that even in nesting they will sometimes forgo a tree cavity to raise their young in a hole in the ground–say, an old kingfisher or bank swallow tunnel.

So flickers act as good partners, neighbors, and members of their larger communities and environments–making them quite patriotic, I think, even if they have no notions of that idea.  The added power of voting is just our own.

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