Foreword: Looking at You

Introduction: A Walk Among Birds

Photographer’s Statement

Writer’s Statement: Homecoming

Natural Forces

• Moving Mountains
• Cool Fog; Golden Summers
• The Far Reach of the Bay
• Flight Paths in the Night

Human Influences

• The Devil’s Teeth
• Catch, Release, Record
• A Library of Birds
• The Art of Attention

Evolving Challenges

• Rewilding Ranchlands
• To Sacrifice and to Save
• Canons and Cormorants 
• The Way In

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

About Point Blue Conservation Science

FOREWORD BY MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL: "Looking at You"

I tried to behave while tagging along with a Point Blue Conservation Science (Point Blue) birding group in fall 2024. Dick Evans was along with his camera, and avian ecologist Mark Dettling hauled a telescope and kept a list. Evans called us the “Fault Line Feathers Group” in honor of our San Andreas–defined zig zag path in Bolinas.

Frankly, I’m the person on a bird walk that the “real” birders would like to jettison. I’m chatty and I have questions. I’m hungry and waiting for lunch and trying to be quiet about the wrapper on my energy bar. I am pretty good at noticing a bird but hopeless at knowing what it is. I’m not particularly bent on improving my birding—I just am glad to be out looking for birds.

I do love learning from the real bird-watchers, who observe patterns and anomalies, get to know the behavior of different species, and stay highly tuned to seasonal changes and the birds they bring. Following Evans’s photographer’s gaze as it arches upward, querying the sky, then attempting to discern what Dettling is hearing in the trees, I’m guided to perceive more deeply. Birders are also superb citizen scientists. Every observation donated to eBird contributes to the pointillist portrait of birds as they stitch up the tapestry of life.

I look at the birds, I try to “see” them. I want to be involved with the birds and their life, even as I am thrilled at their otherness—simultaneously outside me, indifferent, and yet mysteriously entwined with my own being. We frequently that say scenes of aesthetic overflow such as the natural beauty Bolinas provides are beyond words. But this unity and diversity are prior to words in human development and drive us to express what we see, feel, and attempt to know.

In the Shadow of the Bridge brings new and deep information to this quest. Hannah Hindley’s storytelling about birds and the Bay is warm and accessible to all, while managing to capture a progressive view of ecology and its many entanglements. How does the deeply fissured Bay Area geology provide structure to the view and habitat for such a variety of birds? (Dettling counted more than 80 species that day.) How do Indigenous people here integrate avian doings with their own, helping to create what we call nature? Hindley touches down on human history, Earth-system science, land-use change, and species’ evolution, and how these impact our birdy experience all around the Bay.

Of course, I find myself staring at Dick Evans’s photographs. Wildlife photographers "get the shot,” never a mean feat with a subject that is often cryptic, mobile, and far away. But there are subtle and important differences in how bird photographs are indeed captured. Evans gives us many spectacular portraits of birds in situ, living their lives, mating, eating, adrift on the water or gliding in the sky, all the while following patterns in time that are millions of years old.

But there’s another surprise in these photographs as well. Many of Evans’s portraits have a focus on the bird’s eye. Evans is looking at the bird and taking the picture, but the bird is not precisely looking back at him. I find myself entranced with these persistently perceiving birds. Evans has fixed his eye on their eyes in a direct encounter. A biologist will tell you the bird is looking for potential prey, a mate, or a predator. Fine, we’re all doing some version of that, right? But it doesn’t quite explain the charismatic presence these birds have. Looking at them informs us as well about the moment we live in, its history in the making. The birds are seeking, recognizing, knowing. We’re doing that, too. And as Wallace Stevens put it, the bird is “involved in what I know.” We seek to know this place of land and water—this wonderful book helps us know it better.