Something interesting is coming to Brisbane - Wild Parrots! These colorful creatures are beginning to show up in town. We’re intrigued by them because they are beautiful but also they (or similar parrots) were the subject of one of our documentary filmmaker colleagues, Judy Irving in her film, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I personally haven’t seen them but my wife Sam and I have heard them ‘talking’ around the town. Here are what some people in Brisbane have said about them:

• “this morning, Saturday 8/18, I had 5 large red-headed Parrots feeding in my yard…”
• “There have been other sightings around town, which would make sense as they move about foraging for food…”
• “What were they eating? They were eating Juniper Berries in the Juniper/Cedar Tree.”
• “I just heard the parrots overhead down here in the second block of San Bruno Avenue.”
• “Yes, I saw them on the 500 block of Alvarado Street last Sunday morning and I heard they were here again this morning…”

Here’s a digital photo of the Parrots, taken I believe a few days ago:

Let us know if you see them, or better yet, have video!

I am the Director of San Bruno Mountain Watch, so the mountain is very important to me. But it wasn’t always – though I lived on Bernal Heights and enjoyed walking on that hill top, I hardly knew San Bruno Mountain existed. I hadn’t been involved in any of the struggles to create the park, or the resistance to the HCP. I didn’t know about the butterflies, or the other rare species, or the way the fog comes in.
It became important to me the first time I walked on it with David Schooley, San Bruno Mountain Watches founder, and a great hike leader. My eyes were opened to the small miracles of the mountain, and I began to see possibilities of a more intimate connection with individual plants. I started looking down as I walked instead of outward and forward as I usually did when hiking. I slowed down, sometimes squatted down to examine plants, and began to forget about time and distance as a component of hiking.
Though I had been a hiker, backpacker and nature lover for years, San Bruno Mountain was changing my relationship with nature. That has been important to me.

Today’s San Mateo Times features a front page article about our film “Butterflies & Bulldozers”. San Mateo Times Staff Writer Christine Morente interviewed Ann, Steve, Keith and Sam about the film and the history and continuing Fight For San Bruno Mountain. Check it out.

Are you a little bit interested in the ’story behind the story’ of the film, Butterflies & Bulldozers? We finally added a page to our website that briefly tells the story of how Ann, Steve, Keith and Sam got together to make Butterflies & Bulldozers.

Looking through the various historic photo collections, one thing becomes clear: San Bruno Mountain is much more likely to be the backdrop for a picture, not the subject. It appears, by accident or compositional design, as the cameras focus on the highways, the railroad, the dump, the South City stock yards, the Colma cemetaries or Daly City subdivisions. It was, and remains for many, unrecognized despite its obviousness.

If you have an image (still or moving) in your personal collection, we’d love to see it. You may not even know you have it.

Keeping all this in mind, Saturday, August 11, has been declared Home Movie Day. The San Francisco Media Archive is hosting a special event to celebrate this undervalued part of our cultural history. Read more about it here.

Jake Sigg pulled this wonderful quote for his recent e-mail newsletter:

“Weaving together the large and small fragments of natural habitat on both public and private lands is the only way to fully protect America’s natural heritage. Even an acre of old timber, a remnant wetland, or an isolated spring often harbors hundreds of species, including many of threatened status. By inventing new economic incentives for conserving these special places on private lands, the spirit of wilderness can be taken literally to the grassroots and made more fully part of the national passion. Recognition and reward can engage the attention and win the support of landowners and local communities. These are the practical steps we must take to join our daily lives more fully with the natural world.”
E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

This afternoon I went to watch my sister compete in a triathlon. The race ended at the high school in Windsor, a town in the Sonoma valley. As I walked over to the finish line, I was struck by mural on one of the classroom buildings. It contained a quote from Bill McKibben, a writer whom I greatly admire. The exact words were:

“We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”

Later, I looked up his line on the web. It comes from a blog post in Grist on Earth Day 2005. The title is Imagine That: What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art.

I recommend this thought provoking essay on our collective cultural response to our environmental crisis — and what artists and documentarians can do about.

Hello All

We mention a lot on our web pages, “Subscribe” to the B&B Journal. What exactly does that mean?

Well the B&B Journal is what is commonly referred to as a “Blog,” short for “WebLog.”

One of the features of a lot of sites nowadays is a feature called “RSS” or “Really Simple Syndication.” That is a technology that allows a website to ‘Publish” it’s contents –all or a portion all over the internet to those that are interested. When the site changes, such as a new entry in the “B&B Journal” this info is available to those that have ‘Subscribed.’

OK, enough with the theory, you’re saying, “How do I subscribe?”

Well, in a way, ‘bookmarking’ a website is a form of subscribing. However, you have to make some effort to go to the website and see if anything has changed. In many cases (like for our site for a while) there wasn’t much of a change. So this is kind of inefficient.

Now most Web Browsers have a way to subscribe. You may notice when you go to some sites (our Forums and B&B Journal have RSS feeds) You may see a symbol or something like this: . It means the site does have an RSS feed and you can subscribe.

Look in your web browser’s help to see if it supports ’subscribing’ to RSS. Usually it’s just a matter of clicking a symbol in the web browser to ‘bookmark’ the site and monitor regularly for changes through some special bookmark or window.

If you’re really serious about it you can also go to a website specializing in RSS aggregation and set up feeds you’d like to monitor. Or you can get a program that specializes in subscribing to feeds.

Here is a really fun video that describes RSS and how to use it. It’s really probably all you need.

If you want enter the links to our feeds here’s the info:

For the B & B Journal, put this URL into your favorite RSS reader:

feed://butterfliesandbulldozers.com/blog_wp/?feed=atom

I’m using someting called Vienna, freeware for the Mac, you can get it here (not sure about PC/Windows, but there are tons I’m sure):

The B & B Forums also has a RSS interface, the URL to that is:

feed://www.butterfliesandbulldozers.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2

Good Luck and Please feel free to ask me questions anytime, the B&B Forums or the B&B Blog are great interactive places to ask questions and get responses.

Also, if you’ve visited the site you may have noticed some changes to the homepage and some of the other pages. We have a new homepage, with nicer pictures, with a feed from the B&B Journal with nicer formatting (it was challenging to get it to have the right info but not to be to intrusive on the design). We’ve also updated the mountain page with lots of great framegrabs from the actual HD video footage we’re shooting for the film “Butterflies & Bulldozers.” You can click on the little thumbnail images and get a great big 10″ wide image to see the detail.

I’d love to get your comments on the changes to the site.

Enjoy,

-Keith

Robin Leiter became Brisbane City Manager in 1985, just when the city council was being sued by the developer of San Bruno Mountain’s Northeast Ridge. With Robin’s help, Brisbane won the lawsuit, and the housing project was reduced from 1,250 to 579 units.

At the Brisbane Planning Commission meeting last Thursday night, Robin was back as the city’s Special Legal Counsel as it tries to negotiate a new housing plan with the new developer, Brookfield Homes. Here’s the deal on the table:

Brookfield will build 80 fewer units than it is entitled to under the 1989 Vesting Tentative Map. The 71 new units will all be concentrated on a swale below the eucalyptus trees near the intersection of Guadalupe Canyon and Carter Street. The grassy slope (”butterfly hill”) to the east will be conserved as open space. The plan also calls for Brookfield to contribute $4 million to the San Bruno Mountain Habitat Conservation Plan for butterfly monitoring and habitat restoration.

Is this a good deal for the City and for the mountain’s endangered species? Robin and the city staff think it is; not surprising, since they negotiated it. Others, including San Bruno Mountain Watch, don’t agree. They want to see a more complete study of the environmental impacts. Given all of the changes in the past 25 years, they believe an addendum to the 1982 EIR is not sufficient.

This skirmish in the ongoing half-century fight for the mountain is yet another example of the constant tension between private rights and the public interest, between compromise and commitment, between economic and ethics.

You can read more about the debate as well as documents from both sides on our discussion forum. We would love to hear your comments!

Here is a story about being in the front row of what the great conservationist Aldo Leopold termed “the theater of evolution.”
The BBC reports on a scientific study in which scientists have observed rapid genetic evolution in a tropical butterfly species. The Blue Moon butterfly, found on islands in the South Pacific, has adapted to the threat of parasitic bacteria in just a few years. Read more about it here.