You are cordially invited to come shore-birding on the North Mendocino Coast this spring and summer. Get the shorebird lowdown from Mendocino Coast Audubon’s Becky Bowen at our March chapter program via zoom on March 16. Becky will tell the story of the chapter’s Save Our Shorebirds conservation project and tell you where and when to find shorebirds in MacKerricher State Park.

Save Our Shorebirds grew out of a friendship between State Parks Environmental Scientist Angela Liebenberg and Becky in 2006. The two came up with the idea during long in-field surveys in MacKerricher State Park where Angela coordinated Western Snowy Plover volunteer monitors. The Western Snowy Plover is listed as threatened on the federal Endangered Species List. Local birding legend Dorothy Tobkin talked them into making the program about all shorebirds, because so many species that we see in MacKerricher State Park are listed as birds in decline by the National Audubon Society and American Bird Conservancy. Save Our Shorebirds (SOS) is an Audubon conservation program in cooperation with California State Parks.

Angela now is a Senior Environmental Scientist at California Fish and Wildlife. Becky, a retired production manager at ABC-TV in Hollywood, lives in Caspar and is the volunteer SOS data compiler and surveyor coordinator. “Coordinating the Audubon SOS program is not that different than working on an Academy Awards telecast,” she says. “You plan it, budget it, put it on, follow the numbers, and pay the bills. Always have a backup generator, and take good care of the crew, and, oh yes, the stars.”

The stars of SOS are the shorebirds of MacKerricher State Park and the volunteer surveyors who have gathered data about the birds since June of 2007. Please tune in to see photographs, listen to the SOS story, and hear what the birds have been telling us for 15 years.

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