A Bird Year Resolution

In 2008, I'm making a New year's Resolution to go birding weekly with a focus on learning more about the birds that live here in the Bay Area. Of course, some of my birding adventures will happen outside of the Bay Area, but I'm committed to knowing my local birds better and seeing how many species I can view during my "Little Year" resolution.

What's a "little year"? Well, birders will participate in competitions to have a "big year" or "big day" or the like. Since I'm only in this to challenge myself and to blog my results, I'm calling it my "little year".

As I started off my new year, the first bird I saw as I was driving back from Lake Tahoe was a raven. Once uncommon in the Bay Area, you see them everywhere now because of the impacts development have made urban environments inviting to ravens, but difficult for other native wildlife.

My first official weekly birding outing will be at the kick off event for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Big Year. It's a great yearlong event to highlight the 33 endangered species that call the GGNRA home and what participants can do to help those endangered species. Participants are challenged to not only find and view the threatened and endangered plants and animals within the boundaries of the GGNRA, but also to complete conservation actions to help those species. The GGNRA Big Year reminds us all that the Endangered Species Act and the National Park System alone are crucial in protecting wildlife from extinction.

I encourage any readers to come to the San Francisco Zoo on January 6, 2008, at 1 PM for the first of many events in 2008. To learn more and to participate, please visit the GGNRA Big Year website: http://www.ggnrabigyear.org/

We will be visiting Ocean Beach in San Francisco to view the Western Snowy Plover, a threatened bird species that struggles to survive on busy urban beaches in San Francisco. This adorable bird deserves a boost in public awareness of how we can all do more to "share the shoreline" with plovers and other shorebirds.