The Las Gallinas water treatment ponds in San Rafael comprise the most intensely birded location in the county. For good reason. Access is convenient, the walking is flat and easy, and the birds, above all, are abundant. While the notion of going to the sanitary district’s settling ponds (the last round of treatment before reuse of recycled water) to look at wildlife may seem strange to newcomers to birdwatching, such locations are actually widely recognized by birders everywhere as likely hotspots, with year-round, nutrient-rich water providing a reliable oasis within the generally marginal waterbird habitat known as suburbia.
Here at Las Gallinas, the setting is particularly conducive to a wide variety of birds, even by the high standards of your typical sewage pond.1 The ponds themselves are developed with a variety of shoreline textures (rocky segments, transitional areas with drier upland vegetation, shallowly inundated areas covered with cattails) and with islands to provide refuges for birds. A few larger trees attract species looking for more vertical shelter or look out positions. And the surrounding fields provide excellent habitat and hunting grounds for a number of open country birds, including several different raptors. All this adds up for a lengthy list of nearly 250 species recorded at this site and makes it fairly easy for an experienced observer to record over 50 species in a single winter visit (see Las Gallinas’ very active eBird Hotspot page for a seasonal bar chart, recent sightings, and more).
One more note before diving into the birds. “Las Gallinas” is properly pronounced in Spanish as “Las Gayinas,” with double “l”s pronounced more or less like “y”s. This means “the hens” and was a name applied to the valley and creek since the land grant days. These days, most people seem to pronounce the name in Americanized form, with the “l”s sounding like “l”s in our normal English manner. If you want to pronounce it in a more authentic Spanish style, go for it, but it seems to be a losing battle.
The Main Attraction: Winter Waterbirds
And Other Winter Birds
When we’re talking ponds, we’re naturally talking about waterbirds. While a few wading shorebirds occasionally visit shallow areas, the relatively deep water with no tidal mudflat or sloping shoreline is more conducive to heavy use by waterfowl (ducks, geese, and swans) as well as the heron and egret family. The latter are mostly present all year round; the former are mostly winter visitors. I’ll note some exceptions and springtime specialties below, but let’s start with the busy season at Las Gallinas: the winter, a period which extends in our local ducks’ schedules from roughly October into April.
Ducks are often divided broadly into two categories: diving ducks and dabbling, or surface feeding, ducks. Both are well represented at Las Gallinas. In wet winters when parts of the adjacent fields are flooded, some of the dabblers such as mallards, northern shovelers, gadwalls, American wigeons, green-winged teal, and the particularly lovely cinnamon teal will often spread out from the ponds proper into this new expanse of shallow water. Diving ducks include the small bufflehead and ruddy ducks, a few scaup, and a reliable winter population of common mergansers. The mergansers often seem to favor the second of the three ponds, with the “whale” (a long, partially submerged pipe) a popular resting place for mergansers to pull over with gulls, terns, or cormorants. Duck-like grebes are represented here by pied-billed grebes all year round, and eared and horned grebes in the winter.
The gull family is another water-tied group that increases in variety during the winter months. While summer hosts a steady population of ring-billed gulls and a smattering of California gulls, winter is more likely to see additional species such as the small-billed mew gull, the nimble Bonaparte’s gull, or the graceful Forster’s tern. The terns can gather in sizeable colonies of dozens of birds, quite a sight as they plunge like daggers into the water to catch fish they’ve sighted from 50 feet in the air.
Among songbirds, the shrubby borders of the ponds fill with the everywhere ubiquitous white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, accompanied here by the wetland-favoring Lincoln’s sparrows and a winter infusion to the resident song sparrow population. Say’s phoebes join the resident black phoebes to catch insects from open perches. Meadowlarks burst from the fields in winter, suddenly revealing their hitherto camouflaged presence, while American pipits walk energetically nearer the the trails and water. Yellow-rumped warblers forage constantly among the shrubs, trees, and down to the water’s edge, joined occasionally by an uncommon palm warbler. Keep an eye on eBird or set up personal alerts for the steady stream of less common sightings, which get rapidly picked up on by the active birding community here: this month a loggerhead shrike, next month a tropical kingbird – there’s often something out of the ordinary showing up.
While the surrounding fields provide good habitat for raptors all year round, reliably attracting species like white-tailed kite and northern harrier, winter sees a marked uptick in both abundance and variety of raptors. American kestrels become regular sightings and less common species like peregrine falcon, merlin, ferruginous hawk, burrowing owl, and short-eared owl become definite possibilities (the latter two best looked for at dawn or dusk).
Las Gallinas in Spring
This is not to say that nothing is happening at the ponds in spring and summer. Although the ducks and raptors thin out over the course of March and April, we receive ample compensation for these diminishing numbers with the simultaneous dawning of the nesting season. The resident marsh wrens, song sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, and great-tailed grackles sing with increasing enthusiasm from the cattails. The waterbirds that remain, notably mallards, Canada geese, mute swans, pied-billed grebes, and common gallinules, are all firmly paired up and can be seen with their young in May and June.
Las Gallinas is one of the best places to see cute little baby birds: even experienced birders, general jaded to common mallards and Canada geese, can usually find some enthusiasm for these little fuzzballs following their mothers. Pied-billed grebe babies are perhaps my favorite, in virtue of their extreme stripiness and their endearingly dependent habit of hitching a ride on their parents’ backs (two for mom, two for dad), where they can tuck under the folded wings to warm up or stick their heads out to survey the world, and from whence they can make increasingly lengthy forays out into the cold and watery world.
A few of the birds I just mentioned deserve a little more explanation as to their current status. Canada geese and mallards have a well-established resident population, sprung from semi-domesticated forebears that have spread across the Bay Area and now intermingle to some degree with more wild, migratory members of their species. Mute swans, great-tailed grackles, and the Eurasian collared-doves cooing from the nearby buildings and power lines are all more recent arrivals, quite possibly missing from your field guide of a decade or so ago.
Mute swans in particular are not very popular with some birders, due to their aggressive tendencies towards our smaller native waterbirds, and are increasingly colonizing local ponds after first being introduced to California from Europe for ornamental purposes. Grackles have spread under their own power from the southwest states, while collared-doves have spread across the country after an introduced population in the Bahamas flew to Florida. The impact of these two on existing species is less clear, but some view their steady increase with some trepidation.
Among actual migratory arrivals to Las Gallinas, the most notable are the swallows. While a substantial number of tree swallows and some violet-green swallows remain around the ponds in winter, when most of their kind have made the long journey back to South America, the numbers of both start picking up in late February. Soon they are joined by our remaining three species: barn swallow, cliff swallow, and northern rough-winged swallow. All are a regular sight through the summer, when they will sometimes descend to thrilling proximity, swooping down to drink lightly from the water’s surface, whipping by us clumsy earthbound walkers, too close to follow in binoculars. Cliff swallows are particularly notable in summer as they nest form their nesting colonies under the main entrance bridge and on other piers and old jetties around the ponds, eventually fledging hundreds of noisy young swallows who will perch together on fence lines to make an almighty clamor for feeding.
Year-round specialties and closing words
Winter has maximum diversity of easily visible ducks and other birds, including a steady stream of reported rarities both songbird and swimming. Spring and summer have a first act of birdsong and a second act of prime baby waterbird viewing. Either of these seasons offer enough pleasures in themselves to make a visit well worth while. But I shouldn’t neglect some of the steadier year-round attractions, one notable for elusiveness and one for obviousness.
First, elusiveness. Las Gallinas is one of the better places to observe – which in many cases means “to hear” – rails, shy and secretive marsh birds of somewhat chicken-like form that wander around under cover of vegetation. The ponds are pretty well-stocked with the two non-secretive members of the broader family, the American coot (which winters here in large numbers) and the common gallinule (formerly known as the moorhen, which breeds here in modest numbers). The freshwater ponds themselves also host the two freshwater-favoring rails, the Virginia rail and the petite sora. Both favor the heavily vegetated shoreline of Pond 1, from where they can occasionally be seen creeping out into the open, but are more often heard, the Virginia with a series of loud grunts, the sora with a high whinny or onomatopoeic sor-aah! The surrounding salt marsh, a general mass of pickleweed cut with little channels, is the home of our remaining two rails: the Ridgway’s rail, formerly known as the clapper rail for its distinctive clapping call, and the most elusive of all, the black rail, hardly bigger than a sparrow, which can periodically be heard giving an unmistakable ki-ki-doo call.
Maybe the easiest of the four “elusive” rails to see. You’ll still hear their whinny calls more often than you see them.
Extremely hard to see. But you might hear a ki-ki-doo from the marsh, particularly at dusk or early morning.
Many birders make a point of listening for these secretive birds, and relishing the occasional glimpse of one. But what experienced birders can often forget to do is to fully enjoy the most common of birds. Here, several members of that category belong to the heron and egret family, a group of large, obvious, stationary, and striking birds that have a curious mismatch between their notability to the general public and to the dedicated birder. In that sad price of experience that makes the common seem common and less worthy of attention, some birders get in the habit of walking abstractedly past great or snowy egrets, big birds of stunningly clean white plumage, incredible statuesque patience, and wonderful precision when they choose to strike.
Their larger cousin the great blue heron is also regular seen around the ponds, while the chunky black-crowned night-herons roost in the islands and vegetation of Pond 1 during the day, before flying out for their nocturnal hunting sessions. The less abundant green heron gets a little more attention, along with the uncommon American bittern, and the locally rare least bittern, formerly a decided aberration but now a successful spring breeder for several years running. This last species is rail-like in it’s difficulty of observation: you need to be standing in the right place when it is standing in the right place, or it can very easily be perfectly invisible to human view. Fortunately, it is also rail-like in its habits of vocal communication, being much noisier than the other herons and egrets: listen to its call to prepare for tracking down a least bittern.
There you have it: there is always something to see here. The setting may seem mundane: pipes, machinery, developed trails, a limited sense of solitude. But this is one of the most important lessons to learn from watching wildlife among our suburban landscape: the animals are no less wild for living among us. They take the ponds of our construction as they would take a pond of nature’s construction, and they make the best use of it they can. When we have the opportunity to make such a setting as attractive to the use of the birds as we can, we should seize that chance, both to create and to enjoy. The essence of appreciating local nature resides in this: that neither rarity, nor expense of access, nor difficulty in observation is determinant of a creature’s worth or the value of our encounter.
There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace.
Emerson, “Fate”
Practical Details
Bird Lists and Recent Sightings: Las Gallinas is the most well-birded site in the county, with multiple new lists submitted by local birders every week (pushing 5000 checklists as of spring 2019) to the Las Gallinas eBird Hotspot. Also of note, Marin Audubon Society sponsors a monthly walk that’s great for beginner birders at Las Gallinas, on the first Thursday of each month from 9 am until noon (generally taking a break during the lower activity summer months).
Getting There: Just south of the Novato border off Smith Ranch Rd. in San Rafael, Las Gallinas is well worth the short trip down the road. To reach the ponds, exit Hwy 101 at Smith Ranch Rd./Lucas Valley and drive east toward San Pablo Bay. At the entrance to McInnis Park, cross the railroad tracks and turn immediately left, following the signs for the wildlife ponds. Follow this road .7 miles until it ends in a gravel parking lot.
Getting Around: The Las Gallinas ponds are one of our easiest and most accessible nature preserves, with a level gravel path surrounding the main three ponds in a 2 mile loop, with additional trails between the ponds. A further ~1 mile trail continues through the marsh beyond the ponds, towards the Hamilton Wetlands to the north, although there is currently a gap in the official access. Someday, this will all be part of the continuous Bay Trail.
Header image: A pair of common mergansers at Las Gallinas, by Doug Greenberg on Flickr. Given our relative scarcity of year-round freshwater ponds, this is the best local place to see these and other freshwater-loving birds.
Yet another job well done – thanks, Jack! Also – AH’s photo of the Forster’s Tern is especially lovely.
Nice photos! I love to walk around the sewer ponds! I’ve even seen otter there! And pelicans!