Colonial Waterbird Nesting Sites
Click the colony locations below to learn the colony name. Clicking a location shows the colony name and breeding species. Click through the pop-ups to see the years when there was nesting activity for each species.
2023 Season Highlights
During the 2023 breeding season (February-August), 53 SFBBO community scientists contributed 320 volunteer hours monitoring a total of 43 active breeding colonies. We monitored 30 sites with active heron, egret, and cormorant colonies and 3 sites with active gull, tern and shorebird colonies.
Figure 1. Map of colonial waterbird sites surveyed by SFBBO biologists and volunteers in 2023 in San Francisco Bay, CA. Sites in blue contained breeding herons, egrets, and/or cormorants; sites in yellow contained breeding gulls, terns, and/or shorebirds.
In 2023 our staff and volunteers monitored:
62 American Avocet nests 29 Black Skimmer nest 14 Black-necked Stilt nests 135 Caspian Tern nests 405 Forster's Tern nests 190 Black-crowned Night Heron nests 400 Double-crested Cormorant nests 85 Great Blue Heron nests 39 Great Egret nests 1 Green Heron nests 108 Snowy Egret nests |
Photo by Tom Grey
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California Gulls are the most abundant nesting waterbird in the South San Francisco Bay and SFBBO has been monitoring the breeding population size since 1980. In 2020, SFBBO, California Gull monitoring was suspended due to COVID-19. SFBBO staff will resume surveys of all 10 breeding colonies in South San Francisco Bay in spring 2021.
Please reference our Annual Report for complete data and descriptions. For reports from this year and previous years, please visit https://www.sfbbo.org/colonial-waterbird-monitoring.html