If you’ve driven eastbound on the Dumbarton Bridge from Menlo Park to Newark in San Francisco Bay, you might have seen a lonely white pickup truck with funky metal scaffolding built onto the back, parked along the right shoulder.

And you probably also saw Stacy Moskal standing atop this makeshift mobile watchtower, standing very still, and with her back to the road.

“I’m not sure if people know what I’m doing,” Moskal laughs. “I think they just see this random girl standing on a truck platform, and everyone almost always honks their horns.”

So what is she doing up there, catching a breeze?

“I’m just doing some serious bird counting, actually”

Moskal, a biologist at the USGS Western Ecological Research Center and also a master’s student at San Jose State University, has been studying the waterbirds off Dumbarton Bridge since October 2010.

Specifically, she’s studying a very unique patch of water called “Pond SF2” -- a 156-acre former industrial salt production pond that has been restored to a managed tidal pond as part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

It’s a rock’s skip away from Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park.

Designed into SF2 are 30 oddly shaped islands -- an aerial view of them on Google Maps reminds Moskal of Pac-Man in his maze. The different island shapes were especially designed as part of the salt pond restoration project, to test which island shape offered the most desirable habitats for the wintering and migrating bird populations that rely on South San Francisco Bay for food and rest.

• Look up directions on how to visit Pond SF2
• Attend a guided tour of Pond SF2 hosted by the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge this April and May 

It’s been Moskal’s project to study the wintering/migrating shorebird response to these islands: which islands are birds hanging out at; whether the birds are foraging or roosting; are they poking around in the low tide shallows or perched on the dry parts of the island.

To do so, Moskal has gone out to observe and count birds at SF2 one day a week since October, twice a day at high tide and low tide. To date, she’s counted more than 97,000 shorebirds.

The diversity is spectacular, including black-bellied plovers and dowitchers that fly in from the arctic, marbled godwits from southern Canada, and multitudes of western sandpipers.

The jury is still out on how actively the birds are using the islands, or whether they’re just feeding in the flats during low tide. But Moskal will continue her work through May and finish out the winter and spring migration seasons.

So who built that crazy truck tower anyway?

“Oh that was not as fun as it looks on TV,” recalls Moskal, whose office is in on Mare Island. “[Intern] Jeff Liechty and I went to the hardware store, bought what we thought we needed…  some 2x4s, plywood, carpet for a  non-stick surface, and large U-bolts... stapled the carpet onto plywood… bolted the plywood to the 2x4s....”

“That’s how I tricked my truck -- for science.”

-- Ben Young Landis



Photo copyright Pelican Media/Judy Irving