For local birders, Joseph Grinnell's detailed and descriptive "A Second List of the Birds of the Berkeley Campus," published in 1914 in The Condor, makes fascinating reading. He lists 92 species, each with brief general comments about their occurrences and distributions. The list is preceded by a good description of the Campus - including Strawberry Canyon and the surrounding hills - in the early part of the 20th century. "The hills from the distance look bare and untimbered save for interrupted tracts of newly-planted pine and eucalyptus. But these really well-grassed hill-slopes constitute a favored haunt of a distinct category of birds, of which the Meadowlark is a characteristic example," he writes.
Joseph Grinnell was the founding director of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, serving from 1908 until his death in 1939. He was also a superb field biologist. His last entries in his field journal which numbered 3000 pages were made five days before his death. Presently, a group of scientists from the Museum are using his careful data for the Grinnell Resurvey Project, revisiting a third of the 700 California sites which he studied between 1904 and the late 1930s.
But for an intimate view of Canyon in the early days, I turn often to the writings of Amelia Sanford Allen who, with her UC professor husband, built their redwood home on the wooded slopes near the mouth of the Canyon in 1912. Grinnell acknowledges the value of her notes and records in his "Second List." Her personal observations were also published under her own name a year later (1915) in The Condor. The article is titled: "Birds of a Berkeley Hillside."
The Allen house is off Panoramic Way on Mosswood Road - a felicitous location for a devoted bird watcher. The house was on a north-facing slope in a young forest of live oaks, but just around the corner was an open, sunny west-facing hillside with an old almond orchard. Birds attracted to both habitats frequented her garden with its bird bath, proffered food, and nesting sites.
Panoramic Hill (then called University Hill) and the roads into the Canyon attracted naturalists and early Sierra Club members such as her neighbors, the Parsons and the Hutchinsons, both of whom have Sierra lodges named after them. Another neighbor on Mosswood Road was Willis Jepson, the UC botany professor who developed the first taxonomy of California's native plants. The revised edition - The Jepson Manual - is the bible for both professionals and amateurs who have the patience to follow the botanical keys.
Allen's "Birds of a Berkeley Hillside" is written in a narrative style and illustrated with her photographs, giving the reader a through-the-year account of the birds of her particular Canyon hillside.
In both accounts there are some real surprises. The dark-eyed junco (then called the Sierra Junco) and the chestnut-backed chickadee (the Santa Cruz Chickadee on his list) described as infrequent winter visitors are now among our commonest breeding birds. The brown (Sierra) Creeper and the Red-breasted Nuthatch were also listed as unusual seasonal birds. Grinnell had predicted that certain boreal birds might become residents when the planted groves of conifers matured.
Both Allen and Grinnell list all three owls - Barn, Screech, and the Great-horned as common residents, "making the darkness visible by their cries,' Allen writes. "The Anna Hummingbird knows everything that happens in the whole area the year around," she continues. "In the summer time two pairs of House Wrens do enthusiastic housekeeping behind the shingles of hillside cottages. Vigors (Bewick's) Wrens, Bush-tits, and Wren-tits are permanent residents," she adds.
Then as now the Lutescent (orange-crowned) Warblers were common breeders with "four to six pairs nesting within a hundred yards of the house each year," she writes. Rufous-crowned Sparrows frequented the open slopes. Quail were both abundant and "very tame." She mentions with special pleasure the frequent visits from the California Thrasher whose enthusiasm for California holly-berries (toyon) was such that "he flew against the window twice one morning in his effort to reach a bunch in a vase within."
The only species for which she held no affection was the English Sparrow that arrived in the fall by the thousands from the town below to feed in the orchard.
Twenty-eight years later we hear again from Amelia Allen with a second article in the July 1943 issue of The Condor titled "Additional Notes on the Birds of A Berkeley Hillside" In the intervening years dramatic changes had taken place with the construction of Memorial Stadium at the mouth of the Canyon where the hillsides were "blasted down to the rocky substrata," she writes. Meadowlarks with their lovely song disappeared. Strawberry Creek which once flowed out of the Canyon in a series of waterfalls now ran under the stadium through a conduit. Since the establishment further up the Canyon of a poultry farm by the University, "the dawn song is dominated by the crowing of hundreds of roosters," she writes. The surrounding grassy slopes were planted with a variety of non-native trees.
Says Phoebes, Cliff Swallows, English Sparrows ("good riddance"), Western Meadowlarks, Rufous-crowned and Harris Sparrows have not been seen since 1915 on the western slope, according to Allen. The arrival of Argentine ants, eastern fox squirrels and opossums and the proliferation of dogs and cats adversely affected the native bird population, she believes. In 1942, the last remnant of the once-abundant California Quail had disappeared from her neighborhood. The Mourning Dove, once listed only as a casual transient began nesting in the University Botanical Garden at the head of the Canyon.
While there were changes over the twenty-eight years especially on the open slopes, her north-facing slope just inside the Canyon remained much the same except that a few new houses had been built and "all the trees are larger and cast more shade than formerly," she writes. While there were some bird species lost, she adds forty new species - four on the western slope and thirty six inside the Canyon. "Naturally there has been more continuous observation from our own house É than anywhere else, which account for the majority in favor of the Canyon," she writes.
Unfortunately this devoted bird watcher died two years later in 1945. During those final two years when she was mostly bedridden, she wrote a series of papers about her birding adventures titled "Chasing Wrens." which her husband, memorializing her in the slim volume wrote that these papers "might properly be called chapters from the autobiography of an ornithologist."
The first chapter describes in her warm-hearted prose their early trips in 1901 and 1903 when, as a fledgling bird watcher, she and her husband walked to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. Unlike John Muir who strode across fields of unbroken wildflowers in the Central Valley, the Allens traveled partly by boat and train and then walked, with a mule carrying their supplies, from the foothill town of Sonora into the High Sierra.
These mornings when I walk in Strawberry Canyon, bound either for the Botanical Garden or for the trail lower in the Canyon along the stream, I always look up the hill to where, above the trees, I can see the steep gabled roof and tall brick chimney of the house where Amelia Allen made her home.
The same cool summer fogs still creep up the Canyon. Swainson's thrushes (her Russet-backed Thrush) and the warbling vireos still sing their lovely familiar songs. Thinking of Amelia, I'm reminded how this feeling of comradeship with birders past and present brings to the avocation one more pleasure.
Phila Rogers