A few months before my youngest child graduated high school, a couple of hawks built a nest in a big magnolia tree near our house. For several weeks, the birds swooped through the yard. Sometimes they carried sticks in their beaks. Often, they spattered the driveway and sidewalk with big poops the color and texture of Wite-Out. I began to recognize their high, shrill yips and to pick out their watchful silhouettes in distant sycamores.
By the time they began to sit on eggs, we’d put down a deposit on my daughter’s cap and gown. While she drove herself to parties and planned her last summer before college, my husband and I traded the binoculars back and forth, straining to catch a glimpse of this new family.
Inevitably, curious folks paused their dog walking or jogging. What were we looking at? We shared the binocs, pointed up at the tree. “Cooper’s hawks,” we said, pleased to introduce the neighbor on the ground to the neighbor in the sky.
Conservation biologist Thomas Lowe Fleischner defines natural history as a “practice of intentional focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy.” By this definition, my husband and I might have been justified in feeling a bit like scientists, but it was meeting a local volunteer from a community science project, LA Raptor Study, that helped us truly understand the value of our observations.
Launched in 2017, by Daniel S. Cooper, Ph.D., in partnership with Friends of Griffith Park, LA Raptor Study trains volunteers — often called “community scientists” or “citizen scientists” — to document raptor activity. Over time, the group has expanded beyond the boundaries of the park to include six-sub regions including the southeastern San Fernando Valley, East Los Angeles and portions of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena.
“It would be several full-time jobs to collect all this data,” said Cooper, a research associate in the ornithology department of NHMLA. Group effort enables Cooper and others to learn how the birds adapt to their urban environment. “Even basic questions,” he said, “like if you chop down a tree with a nest, does the hawk rebuild or no?”
He told me that the most common raptors — the red-tail hawk, Cooper’s hawk, red-shouldered hawk, and great horned owl — partition the city by habitat. Like movie stars, the red tails enjoy nesting in the Hollywood Hills, but LA Raptor Study volunteers also have found them in South Central and Koreatown.
According to Cooper, this is a territory expansion worth investigating, and one that, without extra boots on the ground, might have gone unnoticed. Volunteers also have located breeding pairs of American Kestrels in Boyle Heights. “They’ve vanished from the Santa Monicas and West LA,” Cooper said.
He wonders if a broken sprinkler has allowed grasshoppers and Jerusalem crickets to flourish. These preferred kestrel snacks may not exist in the lush, heavily fertilized lawns of the westside.
Opportunities abound
Community science projects exist across the country and throughout the world on a spectrum that includes major journeys, local ramblings and desktop investigations. Websites, such as SciStarter.org, catalogue in-person and online opportunities.
Depending upon your interest and availability, you might use your phone to track cloud formations or report on flowers and bees or spend an afternoon collecting water samples at a nearby beach or river. With our help, scientists can deepen their study of the tiny changes in temperature, humidity or pollutant levels that may contribute to larger ecological transformation.
The 2019 rescue of a fledgling owl introduced Nurit Katz to LA Raptor Study and, ultimately, set her on the path toward a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology. She looks at how different factors in our urban environment affect nesting locations, and cites rodenticide and tree trimming as some of the biggest (and most easily avoidable) threats to the health of area raptors.
“I had some level of imposter syndrome around science,” said Katz, who is chief sustainability officer at UCLA and current co-director of the LA Raptor Study, “but I made some real discoveries and contributions as a volunteer and that made me think maybe I can do this.”
Some of the most successful community science projects, such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird, make logging data as easy as taking a photo with your phone. With more than 1 million users to date, the platform boasts nearly 2 million observations from all around the world creating a vast, publicly accessible, trove that broadens our knowledge of migration, species distribution, and biodiversity.
“You don’t have to do it perfectly,” said Brice Semmens, professor of Biological Oceanography, Marine Biology Scripps Institute at UC San Diego. “You just have to start trying.”
Semmens leads diving expeditions for the REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project, ongoing since 1993. REEF’s public-access database makes it possible to see long-term change in populations of marine fish, and select invertebrate and algae species world-wide. Over the years, swimming community scientists have documented what Semmens calls “pretty fish, but pretty fish that aren’t supposed to be there,” such as the invasive lion fish.
“There are often surprises,” Semmens said. “Often not welcome surprises, but nonetheless important for understanding these sorts of cryptic changes in the ecosystem.”
All part of the ecosystem
Participating in community science reminds me that I, too, am a species in an ecosystem, and that the health of the skies, waters and forests relates as directly to me as to creatures who swim, fly or crawl.
I can think of almost no better example of our interconnectedness than phytoplankton. Allison Cusick, PhD, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, has partnered with cruise ships in Antarctica to collect samples of the microscopic floating plants she calls an “invisible forest.” Built around the November-through-March tour season, Cusick’s study is an on-board educational activity that has provided a bounty of information for her studies of melting sea ice.
“The engagement potential is big,” she says. “I’ve got a captive audience.”
What starts as a bucket-list trip to Antarctica may turn out to be an eye-opening introduction to plants responsible for 50 percent of the world’s oxygen and the health of some of our most photogenic birds and mammals.
“If you know the pattern of your first food source,” Cusick says, “you can see the next pattern in the things that eat them.” Krill eat phytoplankton. Whales and penguins eat krill. We all breathe air. For all these things, we can thank a lifeform smaller than an eyelash.
Data collected regularly over the span of the tourist season gives Cusick a better sense of how the decline of sea ice affects phytoplankton. Chunkier plants seem to like colder water. “Some species are more nutritious than others,” she says. “It’s like a salad bar where you’ve lost all your kale. If all you’ve got is iceberg lettuce, you’ve got nutrient deprivation.”
The living systems of our world are so intertwined that this deprivation will eventually affect those bottles of krill-based Omega 3s on the shelf at your local drugstore. “Contributing to these projects is more than just gathering data,” Cusick said. “It’s inspiring new livelihoods, new hobbies, next-generation scientists and changemakers.”
It takes enormous amounts of raw data to illuminate more complex narratives, especially about species that are rare, vulnerable, threatened or endangered.
“A lot of funding for studies is short-term,” explained Zoe Raelyn Collins, MPA coordinator for Heal the Bay. “It’s good to go into it with a bank of information.”
To track the health of West Coast ocean waters, volunteers conduct monthly samplings in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near Malibu and Rancho Palos Verdes. They also track recreational activity. Since California has only had a network of MPAs for 10 years, this data is especially critical.
“We can assess whether current levels of enforcement are working and can advocate for stronger coastal management across the state,” said Collins, who added that volunteers are trained as land stewards and educators. “When you give people a way to get involved and show them there is a tangible way to make a difference in the world, they just light up.”
After three years as a volunteer with LA Raptor Study, Jenn Rose can easily identify a red-tail hawk, and also a kestrel, a merlin, a peregrine falcon, and so many others. On her daily commute from North Hollywood to Anaheim, she points out every single raptor.
A 3-week-old peregrine falcon is one of three perched near the Point Vicente Lighthouse in Rancho Palos Verdes on Thursday, May 27, 2021. (Photo by Howard Freshman, Contributing Photographer)More ‘Outdoor Restore’
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Three years ago, those Cooper’s hawks in my tree hatched three eggs. We watched from a respectful distance as those fuzzy babies stretched their nubby wings, and held our breath as they made their first tentative explorations outside the nest. Their adult feathers took time to grow and, for a while, they looked moth-eaten and seemed completely at the mercy of all that is fierce and dangerous in this world. But then, one day, they took a short flight. And then another. Eventually, they soared.
Like our daughter, they’ve continued to return, on their own terms, for a visit now and then.
Resources
Budburst
eBird
Fjord Phyto
Globe Observer
Happy Whale
Heal the Bay
iNaturalist
LA Raptor Study
MPA Watch
Natural History Museum LA
Nurdle Patrol
SciStarter
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