In March 2020, I was driving with my son-in-law Praveen Madan from San Francisco to the Cosumnes River Preserve near Sacramento in the Central Valley. We were taking the scenic shortcut through Antioch and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta when the car radio played the news: the jinxed cruise ship with several verified cases of COVID-19 had been cleared to enter San Francisco Bay that morning, not to dock in San Francisco or Oakland but rather to dock and be quarantined at a military base in Solano County-which by chance we were entering that minute and planned to be hiking later in the day. We briefly considered turning around but concluded that if COVID could travel 30 miles in the cold, wet Delta in a few hours, we were probably doomed anyway.

At the time, I was also busy coauthoring my second documentary photography book with Heyday-this one on San Francisco’s Chinatown, following a book three years earlier on San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mission and Chinatown books were built on the foundation of hundreds of hours of walking the neighborhood streets and talking with (and photographing) the residents. How-ever, the pandemic mostly shut down my urban walking and talking. Instead, my wife, Gretchen, and I redirected our hiking activity to the parks, preserves, and trails anywhere within a two-hour drive of our home in San Francisco. That translates roughly to the Russian River to the north, Monterey Peninsula to the south, and the Cosumnes River Preserve to the east, all in the shadow of the Golden Gate’s influence. We explored the Pacific coastline, the giant San Francisco Estuary, and the encompassed wetlands, forests, and chaparral-carpeted hills.

I took my camera on most of these outings and quickly realized that this region held a trove of local and migratory birdlife. In total I have captured approximately fifteen thousand images of 165 species. Because of the region’s unique abundance and variety of birds, it has also nourished a long-standing, dedicated, and knowledgeable cadre of birding clubs, scientists, and bird conservancy organizations. Some such as the California Academy of Sciences date back to the mid-1800s, and others, including my book partner, Point Blue Conservation Science, started in the mid-1900s.

I have never been a believer in predeterminism, but neither does it seem plausible that our lives unfurl totally randomly. I grew up on a hilly cattle ranch in western Oregon, where I spent hundreds of hours with birds in nature. I also realized at an early age that I wanted to see a good deal of the world, and studied engineering as a way to make that happen. Marrying someone (56 years ago) who also wanted to see the world undoubtedly helped. We’ve been lucky enough to live in Washington, California, Ohio, and West Virginia as well as Ghana, Switzerland, Paris, and Montreal-and each new location has afforded opportunities to appreciate birds. Making my home now in San Francisco has fostered enduring relationships with the people, birds, and organizations of the Bay Area, including with Heyday and my coauthor Hannah Hindley, bringing this book of Bay Area birds to life.

When I was fifteen in 1962, my mother, a lifelong lover of literature and teacher of languages, gave me a copy of the then-controversial best seller by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. The title came from the fear that the pesticide DDT would wipe out swaths of avian species and silence our springs. It nearly did. This book is my small contribution to support those who are working hard to protect our future birds of spring.