Date: 1/1/26 9:01 am From: Ed Yong via groups.io <edyong209...> Subject: [EBB-Sightings] A Year of Alameda Birding: 2025
Happy new year, everyone.
2025 was a deeply troubled year, but birding, as always, provided a salve. Some of you know that I moved to the Bay Area in 2023, feel deeply into birding that year, and spent 2024 trying to see as many birds as I could in my home county of Alameda. I initially figured that in 2025, I’d be more limited in my ability to bird locally because I had a book to write and a lot of travel to do. But as it happened, I successfully finished the book (out spring ‘27) and somehow managed to find a lot of birds—289 in total.
Chasing birds is just one of many ways of birding, and a silly and sometimes maddening game—but also an extremely fun and rewarding one. And for a baby birder, it’s an absolutely phenomenal learning experience. It forces you to pore over the minutiae of identification, to practice ear-birding, to understand and predict bird behavior, to explore a wide variety of hotspots and habitats, to pay close attention to seasonal and tidal cycles, to plug yourself into the local community both human and non-human, to learn to differentiate solid reports from dubious ones, and, above all else, to spend lots of hours in the field. And after spending 2024 doing all of the above, 2025 felt richer, easier, and more joyful. I felt like I had a substantially better understanding of both the land and the birds, and that I was started to recognize the birds instead of just identifying them.
2025 was also an amazing year for Alameda. We had multiple sightings of some great migrants, including common terns, pectoral and solitary sandpipers, chestnut-sided and palm warblers, Pacific golden-plovers, lesser black-backed gulls, clay-colored and Brewer’s sparrows, Ross’s geese, and apparently three separate black-chinned hummingbirds at Creekside. From mid-October, fall migration delivered a two-month streak of absolute bangers, including a sharp-tailed sandpiper seen at close range in perfect light, a Leach’s storm-petrel viewed from shore, a red-naped sapsucker and a bar-tailed godwit (yay!) who both hung around for ages, a black-throated green warbler in Estuary Park of all places, a yellow-billed loon who turned Crab Cove into Crabless Cove, a rock sandpiper who led to calls to surveyors’ offices, and a green-tailed towhee who adopted a pink laundry basket. And let’s not forget the big trend of 2025, which was birds showing up in the worst possible habitats. Consider the American dipper who spent an evening at the tiniest creek at Lake Temescal, the northern waterthrush of Middle Harbor who hung out next to a decaying seal carcass, the Townsend’s solitaire at MLK who didn’t get the memo about junipers and mountains, and the Cocos booby who decided to land in the middle of the lawn in Crab Cove. The birds were all over the place. So, apparently, was I.
Here are the headlines, with all numbers referring to species totals:
* *Total Alameda bird count:* 289, beating my total from last year by 9.
* *New county birds:* 20
* *Lifers:* 7 (Cocos booby, Townsend’s solitaire, long-eared owl, Baird’s sandpiper, Leach’s storm-petrel, tundra swan, rock sandpiper, and last year’s nemesis, the black rail)
* *Birds documented with either photos or recordings:* 286, which was everything except parasitic jaeger (too far and fast), scaly-breasted munia (flyover, tho technically I have a rubbish recording with one call), and pigeon guillemot (no battery in camera, gnnnh)
* *Rarities* (defined as birds that eBird flags as rare throughout the year ): 58
* *Rarities first found by me:* 8 (blue grosbeak, pigeon guillemot, parasitic jaeger, pectoral sandpiper, black scoter, Brewer’s sparrow, Costa’s hummingbird, bar-tailed godwit)
* *Misses* (i.e. reviewer-confirmed species seen by others in Alameda): Only 14, which is wild to me, and almost all were flyovers, feeder visitors, one-hit wonders, or birds whose records were initially withheld.
I don’t think you can really compare people’s numbers since everyone has their own rules for their lists. For the sake of transparency, here are mine:
* *The list reflects your position.* Some folks only count birds that are physically in the county ; I’m in the camp that counts the birds they see from the county. This is consistent with eBird’s guidelines but more importantly, it better reflects what I think birding is about. Censusing birds within an abstract, human, geopolitical boundary is, frankly, not it. For me, birding is an act of extending your senses as far as possible to appreciate the living world around you. As such, an egocentric frame of reference just makes more sense. You plant yourself in place and watch the birds as they go where they like. (People who feel differently can dock harlequin duck from my total, and potentially other seawatched birds.)
* *No playback.* If birders near me ask to use it, I won’t object, but I won’t use it myself. Birds are a gift, and playback feels like greedily snatching that gift instead of positioning yourself to receive it.
* *Heard-only counts.* Birding is a multisensory affair, and there are many species I’d rather hear than see. But I try to get a recording of all heard-only birds to check the IDs. Merlin is helpful, but confirms nothing. HO birds this year included common poorwill, black rail, winter wren, yellow-breasted chat, and owls: northern pygmy, northern saw-whet, and western screech.
* *Try to get proper documentation.* No to written description, sketches, or anything else that is first processed by your senses, fallible and bias-prone as they are. Yes to photos and recordings.
* *All reports confirmed by eBird reviewers.* Self-explanatory. Thanks to the reviewers, and especially to Teale Fristoe for tirelessly keeping the county data’s shiny.
* *Usual eBird rules:* No dead birds, escapees, or exotics. I don’t count the recurring Swinhoe’s white-eyes of Creekside Park even though they count in my heart. And I don’t count hybrids even though, as Megan Jankowski says, they should count three times.
Huge thanks to everyone who I spent time in the field with; friends in my groupchats; the many people who found cool rarities (with a special shout-out to Sharon Jue who found so many ); everyone who shared reports of East Bay birds and especially people who did so quickly; and every single person who has worked to conserve the places that we and the birds rely on.
On that final note, and in the spirit of giving back to nature as much as we take from it, I have donated $5 per species to the Golden Gate Bird Alliance.
Happy new year, everyone. Let hope, as always, be the thing with feathers.
