Hawks To Hummingbirds Titillate Birders Visiting Ingleside Park

The flock of birders circled around the crest of Ingleside’s Brooks Park and shut their eyes. As the Friday morning light broke through the fog, more than a dozen avian enthusiasts stood in silence, tuning their ears to the species chirping and cawing around them.

A red-tailed hawk pulled at its prey in a nearby pine tree. Pygmy nuthatches trilled in the community garden.

Amber Zertuche, an Ingleside resident, birder and volunteer guide with the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, led the group through the shrubs to scan tree branches with binoculars and telephoto lenses. In San Francisco, a birder never knows what they’ll see.

Zertuche, 43, has been birding for six years, but Friday was only her second time leading a walk for the alliance. The 108-year-old organization, which began as a group of birdwatchers from U.C. Berkeley, now attracts members across Northern California who contribute to conservation efforts. And Brooks Park, divided into a garden and natural area, attracts a variety of birds to the city’s south-westernmost hill.

“Birding brings me into the present, into the quiet,” Zertuche said. “Even here in San Francisco, you can still find the stillness of nature when you’re birding.”

The fall migration season was in full swing, attracting a variety of flycatchers and the occasional orange-crowned warbler to the park.

“I can usually see 20 species a day here,” Zertuche said.

The birders stepped over fallen raven feathers to approach where they’d seen two dark-eyed juncos weave in and out of the shrubbery. Someone called out the sighting of a Townsend’s warbler, and an Anna’s hummingbird hovered through the perimeter of the clearing. One couple got excited over nearby movement in the trees, but it was only a squirrel.

Bewick's wrens had been hanging out in Brooks Park for some time now, and it came as no surprise when someone pointed out the mob of house finches crowding a tree beside the garden. But it was as the group trudged between raised beds, all covered in netting to prevent white-crowned sparrows from ravaging emergent seedlings, that everyone froze to raise their binoculars. Sasha Gonzales, 28, called out that he’d seen a rarity.

“That must have been either a female or immature chestnut-sided warbler,” Gonzales said.

Zertuche’s jaw dropped. She encouraged people to try capturing a photo for evidence, but no one else could confirm the sighting. Brooks Park is far out of the species’ range, making it a “vagrant” in birder parlance. Zertuche said the Pokémon-like aspect of birding gives a rush of excitement when adding a species to your personal sighting list.

Gonzales, an Excelsior resident, had set a goal of recording sightings of at least 250 bird species that year.

“The world seems so much bigger when you pay attention to the little things,” Gonzales said. “When I watch the western sandpipers out on Ocean Beach, I think these guys just flew here from the Arctic. And maybe some of their friends back in Alaska didn’t survive, but these did. That’s life and death. The drama in that is crazy.”

Around 20 different species were sighted in the park that morning, including the California scrub jay, northern mockingbird, California towhee and a Nuttall's woodpecker. Bill Hudson, who had come from the East Bay, remarked that when you’re birding, you never know what you’ll find.

Hudson is in his late 70s, and has been an avid birder for over 40 years. He served on the Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s board of directors for six years.

“We’ve got more natural variety in this region than we do in the whole of the United States,” Hudson said as Bay Area trail guides hung in pouches off his hip, along with additional lenses and binoculars. “You’ve got wet places, cold places, hot places, all these microclimates due to the shape of the coastline. The geology and the way the rocks are all jumbled along the fault lines are unique. There are endemic plants that survive off the serpentine.”

The Golden Gate Bird Alliance is responsible for significant contributions to local conservation efforts and offers several free birding classes every year. In 2019, they were awarded the Outstanding Environmental Project Award for their ongoing restoration work at Pier 94. Zertuche said she is looking forward to leading more bird walks, including the next Brooks Park walk in October.

After nearly two hours on the hunt, the flock of enthusiasts dispersed from the sanctuary to return to their urban environs, filled with reminders of the natural dramas unfolding in their own backyard.