- Oh yeah!

Winter is the prime time for spotting mushrooms.

We call these "little brown mushrooms."

- The last few years have been very, very discouraging.

Very, very few monarchs.

I know that they are survivors.

They will find a way.

(gentle guitar music) (makes bird call) - Winter can be a time where there's the biggest numbers of birds, just abundance.

(makes bird call) - [Announcer] "Bay Area Bountiful" is about agriculture.

It's about feeding us.

It's about land and water.

It's about the health of our planet.

It's about stories that matter.

(gentle music) "Bay Area Bountiful," cultivate, celebrate, connect.

- [Hostess] "Bay Area Bountiful" is made possible in part by Rocky the Free Range Chicken and Rosie the Original Organic Chicken, The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, "Made Local" magazine and Sonoma County "Go Local" and through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

(geese calling, gentle guitar music) Some say California has no seasons, but locals know better.

When our seasonal rains arrive, the hills turn green and many creatures respond, whether flying through the air, or emerging at last from the ground, winter here is an exciting time full of life.

For those willing to brave the cold, there are many winter wonders to discover.

Among the most avid observers of winter nature are birders.

Alex Cho and his family belong to a number of local birdwatching groups.

- Is that a Goldeneye?

- [Hostess] This morning, they're exploring Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont.

- Yeah, that looks like a Goldeneye.

The time of year really matters.

There is still a lot to see here in winter, a lot of ducks and waterfowl are coming through.

(mallard quacks) Oh, is that a Eurasian Wigeon?

- Where?

- [Alex] Mm hmm.

(camera clicks) - Right there.

- [Alex] Yeah.

Oh, there he is.

First I started birding and then my mom started birding very shortly after and then my dad would take us to go look at birds and eventually he became a birder too.

Oh, it's very contagious.

(chuckles) - [Mom] Yeah, it's a Yellowthroat.

- [Alex] Yep.

(camera clicks) That's a Yellowthroat.

(Alex and Mom talk quietly) - [Mom] Oh, he's beautiful.

- I'm actively involved in the Heron and Egret Project, the Bluebird Recovery Program and I'm also a member of Mount Diablo Audubon Society, Ohlone Audubon Society, and L.A. Birders, as well.

I use a program called eBird and eBird is a worldwide program that allows people to document their sightings.

You'll go out in the field and it'll track your steps to track where you are and you can document all the birds you've seen and that data gets sent to scientists for research into migration patterns, locations, maybe any movements, what's still there, what's not there any more.

- [Hostess] In addition to constant use of eBird to report sightings, Alex connects with both amateur and professional birders online through webinars.

He recently had the change to introduce a role model of his, Alvaro Jaramillo.

- Alvaro has been birding since he was 11 years old, when he found a pair of binoculars and a field guide.

Please welcome Alvaro Jaramillo.

- [Alvaro] Thank you, Alex.

- [Alex] Alvaro is a great birder.

He has taught me so much over his webinars.

- This is a good flock in Half Moon Bay, one of the good days when there's tons to look at.

- [Hostess] Though a long time biologist with San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, Alvaro also considers himself a professional birder.

He guides birdwatchers around the state and internationally through his tour company, Alvaro's Adventures.

There's plenty to see on the trail to Cowell Ranch Beach in Half Moon Bay.

- If you're starting out as a nature watcher or a birder, winter's a time to start 'cause there's so much to see.

It's really sort of the boom (chuckles) I would say.

This is one of the most diverse places in the U.S. for birds, California.

A few sparrows, probably White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows that are mixed in there with the blackbirds.

(makes bird call) White-crowned Sparrows, we have a resident group and also migrants.

These are probably migrants from British Columbia down to about Oregon.

And there, there was also a Song Sparrow that was popping up lower down and he has a little dark spot right on the middle of the breast and kind of a rusty look to his back.

(soft footsteps) That is a Golden-crowned.

They breed up in Alaska, the Yukon, so they're all migrants.

You won't see Golden-crowned Sparrows here in summer.

It's nice to sort of have these visitors and think that they're breeding in places way up north and yet they choose to come down here to our backyards.

We tend to think of birds singing in the spring and in the summer, during their breeding season and actually they start singing in winter and as the days start getting longer after December, you start getting more songs, so they're really attuned to the changes in the daylight and also the weather.

(gentle music) On the ocean here, are a lot of Western Grebes, which are interior breeding species, breed throughout the West.

(camera clicks) But in winter, they come down here.

And there are hundreds right now, in here.

(ocean surf) Brown pelicans flying by.

When the food is best to the south, is in that winter/spring period.

They match the food abundance and they move north and south with it.

They know what they're doing.

(chuckles) (gentle music) Our raptors, our hawks and eagles and falcons, do migrate south in the fall and actually build up in numbers in the winter.

We have more raptors around here in the Bay Area in winter than we do in summer.

White-tailed Kites do this hovering.

More properly, they call it kiting behavior.

The sit like this flying over a spot because they're focused right below them.

There's something going on.

It's usually a rodent getting a little closer, a little closer, until they can get their prey.

While the Harrier, Northern Harrier, is much more actively flying around close to the ground with a white at the base of the tail, the rump, and it also not only looks for food, it hears it like an owl and then pounces on the food.

And we also saw the sit-and-wait predator, a Red-shouldered Hawk sitting on a shrub.

And they wait and then they pounce.

All the raptors, winter can be the time when there's the biggest numbers of birds, you know, with the geese and the ducks, just abundance in the Bay side in particular.

(gentle music) Meeting Alex Cho's been really great for multiple reasons.

One is that it is particularly important to me to encourage young people in birding.

- [Alex] There's still a wide variety to see here in winter.

Avocets have started to turn into their white and gray winter plumage instead of their brown and white breeding plumage.

They're so fun to see.

They usually get fairly close to shore so you can get some good views.

(gentle music) So that's a Snowy Egret, looks, actually, quite similar to the Great Egret.

And the Great Egret are definitely bigger than the Snowy Egret.

That was a Yellow-rumped Warbler.

These warblers stay around here in the winter time.

And they're aptly named for their yellow throat, yellow patches on the wings, and their yellow rump, of course.

(chuckles) The value is really about tracking birds and going out to see if patterns have changed, if birds have started going a bit more north possibly due to climate change.

That's a big issue.

There it is.

Other than the tracking and conservation, it's really just all about going out and birding during different times of the year, seeing what you can see.

I love all aspects of birding, but it's just being out in the field and watching them.

That's my favorite part.

I've come to love the winter season.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - [Hostess] Although winter skies are full of birds, an abundance of life can also be found closer to the ground.

(rustling in grass) - Rock.

- [Hostess] Dr. Melina Kozanitas is a Post-Doctoral Researcher who studies fire, plant pathogens, and mycology.

She often lends her time and expertise on fungi to students and mushroom enthusiasts alike.

(light chime music) - Ah, the top.

Turn it upside down.

Yeah.

I feel it's important to educate people about fungi because fungi have really gotten a bad rap in Western culture.

We're taught to be really fearful of mushrooms as kids.

Another reason it's important for me to share information about fungi is to help people realize how much diversity is out there.

And this goes for plants and animals, too.

We are more likely to want to protect something if we know that it exists and we have some kind of personal connection to it.

- [Hostess] On a foggy morning, Melina led a group of Sonoma State University students and naturalists on a guided mushroom blitz, where they collected and identified a variety of fungi at Osborn Preserve in Penngrove, a piece of land managed by the Center for Environmental Inquiry out of Sonoma State.

(group chatters) - For the past four years, we have come to this preserve and to another preserve that the center manages to do a snapshot in time blitz of the fungi that are growing on the preserve and the purpose of this is that if we track which species we find each year in different weather patterns, we can see how they change over time.

- [Hostess] During this year's blitz, the group discovered greater fungal diversity than expected, thanks to the early season rains Sonoma County received.

- The main reason winter is the prime time for spotting mushrooms is because that's when the part of the organism that's visible to us, the mushroom, makes its appearance.

The mushrooms we see in winter are the fruiting body of a larger organism that's existing underground.

And the reason that we see these fruiting bodies in the winter in California is because we have ample rainfall to allow these mushrooms to produce their fruit.

Mushrooms themselves are made up of filaments or threadlike strands of hyphae that weave together to form the mushroom body.

The same thing is happening underground.

These hyphae will weave together to form what we call a mycelium.

And that mycelium makes up the main body of the organism and it can extend for miles.

So when you're picking a mushroom, all you're doing is picking the fruit.

As long as you take care to not disturb any of the mycelium underground, you're not harming the organism.

In fact, mushrooms want to be picked.

They want their spores to be dispersed.

(gentle music) I noticed that the ground was pushed up a little bit, here.

And when I move the dirt away, we call that a shrump, so it's a mushroom hump, I guess.

So this is the one that takes people out every year.

So this is Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap.

- [Hostess] The Death Cap is California's most notable poisonous mushroom.

Although safe to touch and smell, the Death Cap causes severe poisonings each year, some deadly, when people misidentify and then eat them.

- Does it smell?

- Yeah, it smells like rotting potatoes.

They stink.

- Oh my God.

- Yeah, so they smell really bad.

- Oh, what?

- [Students] Death Cap.

- [Melina] But that old, so now smell the fresh one.

- Oh, that one was an old one?

- [Melina] Yeah, it still has that smell.

It's just not as pungent.

- It's like a degree of rotten.

- [Melina] Yeah, but even when it's fresh, it still has kind of a little stink to it.

- [Student] Do you need a bag?

Can you just put it on here?

- [Melina] No, go ahead.

It's.

(students chuckle) It won't kill ya.

All right, let's carry on.

People are continually asking me if it's safe to handle mushrooms and it is completely safe.

Even a Death Cap is safe to handle.

It's really only harmful if it's ingested.

One way we identify mushrooms is by taste and so we'll often take a little nibble of the cap to see if it has a bitter or spicy or acrid reaction and then spit it out.

- [Hostess] While it's safe to taste a mushroom without ingesting it, trying it under the guidance of an expert will ensure you're doing so in safe way.

- Nibble it for a couple seconds.

- [Student] Is it like the way, how it makes your mouth feel?

- [Melina] Yeah, keep it at the tip of your tongue, the back of your teeth.

Nibble it up really good.

Macerate it up really good.

Keep going.

Keep going.

And then spit it out.

- [Student] You don't want it in your stomach, right?

- [Melina] Yeah, you have to ingest the poisonous mushroom and these aren't poisonous, anyway, so...

This is Lacterious.

(students chatter) - Spicy?

- So I thought it was once they touched your stomach acid that you could get sick, but it's deeper down in your digestive system, like in the liver and stuff.

That's what Melina was saying.

- That's like a good point too, about being able to taste it, too, is because of that whole "hands-off" issue, I've even been told when I started getting into mycology, people were saying, "Are you going to wear gloves?

"Be really careful."

Like don't pick anything.

Don't toUch anything.

- Don't even smell things?

- Right, and that's the way that you learn.

We're human beings.

We're meant to learn in a hands-on way in a hands-on environment.

And so when you don't have that, that's going to produce that fear in people, as a society, as a culture.

So being in an environment where you're encouraged to do it in a safe way and you're told the steps, like what you shouldn't do, what you should do, what you can do, kind of opens up and invites you into that world that you wouldn't necessarily have that invitation to otherwise and you wouldn't have that insight.

- I think part of mushrooms is being able to share and Melina's really big on sharing knowledge and so we're like, let's go learn from her and then tell more people and so we're going to share what we learned here.

- Especially something that's so like mushrooms that is so cliquey and like it's so nice to be able to teach this entire group about mushrooms and then like, there's so many things that we learned today.

- Yeah, it's not common knowledge, unfortunately.

It should be, 'cause we all live out here, but it's on us to share it.

- [Hostess] If you are curious about hunting for mushrooms, there are several steps you should take before venturing out for the first time.

- [Melina] Check the regulations in an area before you go, just so you don't end up with a fine.

Always double check to make sure that what you have is what you think you have.

It's a good idea when you're getting started to check every mushroom if you're in a patch because you could have one sneak in there that could make you sick.

Familiarize yourself with any lookalikes and it's always a good idea to confirm with an expert.

There's a lot of great online resources.

iNaturalist is a great place to post photos of mushrooms that you find and have experts come in and identify them for you.

MykoWeb is a great place for California fungi and again, cross-reference with the guide books and have fun.

- [Student] Okay, everybody say Death Cap.

- [Group] Death Cap.

- [Hostess] Winter is also a lively time on the California coast, where migrating monarch butterflies make their annual return.

(light music) The event brings volunteer researchers like Mia Monroe to overwintering sites from Baja to Mendocino in search of this iconic butterfly.

(light music) - I have seen monarchs clustering in the Cypress for years.

Sometimes, there's tens of thousands.

Even just a little flicker of a wing could be a helpful giveaway sight.

My name is Mia Monroe, so I kind of am drawn to "M" things.

Monarchs, migration, metamorphosis.

There's just something about this touch of the other world and this chance to appreciate something that's just kind of co-existing in my world.

(light music) They're generally born in late summer, August through September, in Oregon, Washington, Northern California and then they use the cues of sun, the wind, and topography to return to these places.

Back in the day, you would just see orange all over those trees.

(car passes) The good news is that you are part of the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, celebrating 25 years of community science.

The bad news is, the site we're going to, which has normally hosted thousands of monarchs, again, third year in a row, has very few to no monarchs.

In Northern California, we have not seen a single cluster anywhere.

So our plan for today, is we're going to walk a short distance to our first site.

Okay, let's go.

I first visited in maybe the early 1980's and that led to 25 years ago, setting up the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count and so I was part of a group of people that got this count going and we realized that this was a great opportunity for what we now call community science.

That's trained volunteers that follow protocol, a way of doing things.

So protocol tells you when.

It tells you how to count, how to record data, what other information to get.

So that means it's standard across the state and across time.

- [Volunteer] Mia, I just spotted one.

- [Mia] Oh good.

Where'd you see it?

- It's quite the colorful one.

There it is.

- [Volunteer] Oh yeah.

(group softly cheers) - [Mia] When the Western Monarch Count started 25 years ago, we were already noticing decline.

(light music) - [Hostess] The 2018 Monarch Count dropped below 30,000, revealing the species had entered an extinction vortex, a state where extinction is inevitable unless extraordinary measures are taken.

- From millions to less than 2,000 in the whole state.

- [Hostess] In December, 2020, U.S.

Fish and Wildlife announced that monarchs are worthy of endangered status, but no actions were taken because of limited resources and other higher priority species.

- [Mia] The last few years have been very, very discouraging, very, very few monarchs, so it's kind of our own existential crisis, what's happening to the world by watching the species that we're studying in such precipitous decline.

Oh, and there's one up on that edge there.

Now you can see the challenges of counting.

Did we just double count those five or was it really four?

(chuckles) You know.

- [Hostess] Researchers point to many factors that have contributed to the monarch's decline, including pesticide use, drought, wildfire, and habitat loss.

- As you can hear, PG&E is working nearby because we have power lines going through here.

Like everywhere in California, hazard tree removal is the name of the game.

And so this is one of the crises.

I have faced this so many times where there are PG&E lines next to overwintering sites.

I was here just a few years ago when there were 10,000 to 14,000 monarchs.

So I am so scared because this site may lose its value for monarchs in the future.

This is what's going on up and down the state from Mendocino to Baja and the coast.

This is what's happening and why we're losing sites all the time.

This is one of the things that we have to help the coastal communities do better.

- [Hostess] Despite all of the recent bad news, the 2021 Monarch Count actually brought a surprising change.

- The initial results are in and the Western Monarch Butterfly is making a comeback.

- Butterfly lovers are all a-flutter over the return of the magnificent migrating Monarch Butterflies.

- [Reporter] This year, things are already looking up.

They're back in much greater numbers at hundreds of overwintering sites.

- [Naturalist] There are now promising signs of an uptick in numbers.

- This year, when monarchs started coming back in the core area, there was literally a moment at Pismo and Natural Bridges when it was two thousand, ten thousand, 18 thousand, 25 thousand.

Are we going to get to 30 thousand and out of the extinction vortex?

(light music) It is an uptick in the central core part of the range, Santa Cruz to Ventura, which is south of here.

The monarchs are seeing an uptick, very, very hopeful and exciting to see.

The bad news is that the uptick in monarchs is not happening in Northern California.

That's San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, the numbers are as low as they have been.

(soft music) I don't really know why the uptick is there rather than here.

It could be a micro-temperature thing.

It could be where the breeding range was this year.

That's what the upcoming months are all about is having people crunch the meteorological data, crunch the arrival.

There's people who will come up with some really good ideas.

We just don't have 'em yet, 'cause we're just busy digesting the trend.

How many have seen a boy butterfly like the one on my name tag?

This is where they're going to spend the winter.

We call it overwintering.

One thing that this public contact I do is it goes deep into the well of monarch experience, what it was like as kid, what it was like once upon a time.

We know that there's a few tucked in here and they're really hard to see.

- [Student] I just saw one.

- [Mia] Did you?

Wow, good spotting.

I know monarchs are resilient.

I know they bounce back.

I know that they are survivors.

They will find a way.

Even though I just see a few right now, the fact that there are monarchs to the south, I see how excited those children are.

I just can't help but feel like monarchs are going to be one of the things that carry us through doing the really hard work that's ahead for climate change.

They're going to be one of those symbols that we're doing something.

- [Hostess] With all the wintertime changes taking place across the Bay Area, one group of creatures are always present.

Bundled up, conservation-minded citizens, eager to appreciate and protect the home habitats they love.

- Warbler neck, yes, it exists.

- Warblers are very uncooperative.

- Lots of birds up in the tree all day and you get warbler neck.

- When you're looking at warblers, you're bending your neck straight up.

- In the good birding spots, you could have a chiropractor right at the end of the trail.

- And so that ends in a lot of neck and muscle cramping, commonly referred to as warbler neck.

- No pain, no gain.

It means you had a great day out.

(upbeat music)