Scroll down to read stories about a blind sailor, a Marin County snowy egret nesting site, a boy trapped in a paralyzed body and post 9/11 Muslim Americans.

Ballerinas in the Trees

Spring bird-mating ritual unfolds at bucolic Bolinas Lagoon Preserve

By Kari Hulac, STAFF WRITER

POSTED:   04/30/2006 07:54:00 AM PDT

EVERY SPRING they come. One by one, on wide, white wings and spindly legs to find a mate and make their nests in the safety of the tall redwoods just beyond Bolinas Lagoon.

No one knows exactly how long the herons and egrets have been coming to this bird sanctuary a few miles north of Stinson Beach.

And no one knows exactly where they soar away to come mid-summer, their work done — when the fledglings, strong enough to survive, must take flight and fend for themselves.

But the people of Audubon Canyon Ranch, the 37-year-old nonprofit organization that watches over this preserve and two others in Marin and Sonoma counties, have more important concerns.

The staff and some 300 volunteers are just thankful that these feathered beauties have a refuge at all. They're happy that they can open the gates a few months a year to give the public an up-close look at the natural world's oldest story.

The battle

It's easy to take for granted the scenery of Highway 1 as it hugs the coast in west Marin County, with steep forested valleys and canyons that seem to tumble into the sparkling ocean.

But there was a time, not so long ago, when places like Bolinas Lagoon were on the chopping block. When thousands of acres were at risk of being subdivided and sold and paved.

Skip Schwartz, executive director of Audubon Canyon Ranch, has been working there for 30 years. He lives in the white 1870s Victorian home overlooking the highway, with a view of the lagoon and the ocean beyond.

"This whole area was going to be developed," Schwartz said in February, as his staffers were starting to prepare the preserve for its public season, which began March 18.

He absent-mindedly brushes white bird droppings from a picnic table as he recalls the "battle for Bolinas Lagoon" of the '60s and '70s.

Highway 1 was to become a four-lane highway and the lagoon a marina, a la Newport Beach. The heronry, home each spring to close to 100 pairs of great blue herons, great egrets and snowy egrets, would have been destroyed.

"Some people think all this bucolic beauty is a terrible waste," Schwartz said. But one person didn't. Martin Griffin was just a boy from Oakland on a Boy Scout hike in 1934 when he first set eyes on the canyon overlooking the lagoon.

The now-retired physician describes the moment in his 1998 book, "Saving the Marin- Sonoma Coast":

"Ignoring our blisters, we hiked along the Dipsea Trail and came out on a most glorious sight: the sparkling Bolinas Lagoon, dotted with white birds, with fog-bound Point Reyes beyond. Behind the lagoon, 30-mile-long Bolinas Ridge, an arm of Mt. Tamalpais, loomed in the mist. The smell of salt from the crashing surf at Stinson Beach, combined with the aroma of coastal sage after a rain, was unforgettable."

That very day, Griffin, now 85, said in a phone interview from his home in Belvedere, he decided he would return there to live. He didn't see the lagoon again until seven years later, when he visited as a botany major at the University of California, Berkeley. When he did, he realized the site was in danger of being lost and vowed to do something about it.

"I had seen what happened to Oakland and how the Bay front had disappeared and was being used as a garbage dump, and I saw the same thing could happen in Marin County," Griffin said.

After Griffin established his family medical practice in Marin County, he got involved with the local Audubon Society. With the help of well-known Bay Area conservationists Caroline Livermore and Stan Picher, he made good on his promise. He started what would become a lifelong effort to buy land in the area to protect it from development.

The father of four girls made plenty of enemies along the way. "I hardly dared show my face in West Marin," Griffin recalled, but eventually he helped the Audubon Society buy enough properties to put the four-lane freeway idea to rest.

These days, he returns to Bolinas Lagoon every year to see the pristine birds he fell in love with some 70 years ago, taking along some of his grandchildren.

"The most wonderful thing that we did with Audubon Canyon Ranch is not only protecting the birds, but we protected their habitat and their feeding grounds and their nesting grounds," he said. "We saved the whole ecosystem."

Take a tour

Ranch volunteer guide Leslie Flint, a retired teacher who lives in San Mateo, has been coming to the heronry since 1972. She's one of many docents who patiently explain its ecosystem to thousands of weekend visitors and Bay Area schoolchildren who visit on weekdays during the nesting season.

On a recent short hike from the lower bird-viewing and picnic area (which is easily accessible to kids or people with disabilities) up to a bird-watching deck equipped with telescopes high above the main nesting area, Flint shows off the fauna and flora of the ranch. She points out violet bearded iris sprouting off the path, the newt-filled pond and wintering shorebirds pecking for food.

The great blue herons arrive first, slow and skittish, to pick their nests in the dark green swaying redwoods in February. Their statuesque height (4 to 5 feet) and 6-foot wingspan requires an equally sizable nest, which Flint likens to a "big soup bowl." When the babies are born they tug on a parent's beak to order up a stew of regurgitated fish. Then come the snowflakes - the blinding white great egrets and snowy egrets. They are not shy about settling down, displaying their love for one another with a dramatic showing of feathers as they perform their mating dances.

Through the scopes, this display of what are known as nuptial plumes looks like a white peacock-shaped fan, the thin feathers shaking and shimmering in a delicate, lacy circle. The birds stroke their blizzard-colored fluff with their bills, stretching high and low. "It's spectacular to see," Flint said. "They are like ballerinas in the trees."

This year, the birds have been arriving a little more slowly than usual, but by May biologists expect to see about 90 pairs filling the trees.

Once the eggs - as many as five per nest - are laid, the parents divide the caregiving duties equitably. The male and female take turns sitting on their growing brood, which take about a month to hatch. The parents leave to hunt or to search for the perfect branch, which they bring back to bolster the nest and to bond with their mate.

When the chicks hatch, a cacophony of "gack-gack-gack" fills the forest, Flint said, but their preciousness should not belie the truth. Real nature is happening here, and viewer beware. It's a fight to the death all the way.

Raccoons and ravens pose the biggest threat. There have been seasons when all the young were lost in one night - not to mention the dangers within, as the stronger, healthier babies think nothing at shoving a runt out of the nest.

Eventually the chicks go about the business of learning to fly. As they practice their first hard flapping, they're usually surprised when the wind catches their wings, and they rise up out of their nests, only to crash back down into the branches.

As spring turns into summer, it's time for endings. The adult birds leave one by one, just as they arrived, leaving their offspring behind.

In July, the ranch will shut its doors and its staff of about 18 will return to its mission: preservation, education and research at the lagoon and the two other preserves, Bouverie Preserve in Glen Ellen and Cypress Grove Preserve in Marshall.

"We do it all," Schwartz said. "We have to." But those who go there to watch nature happen may find themselves changed, he said. Permanently.

"Everyone comes away with something different," he said. "My hope is they come away from here with a little resonance in their hearts - that they have a little more respect and love for nature."

Griffin worries that some day the lagoon will naturally close up and become a marsh, cutting off some of the fish food sources especially enjoyed by the egrets. But at least he can rest easy knowing he set out to accomplish what he dreamed of so many years ago.

"I feel very proud of saving Audubon Canyon Ranch," he said. "That was the most important thing I ever did in my life for future generations."

Inventive Oregon Teen Trying To Set His Disabled Cousin Free 

By Kari Hulac
Corvallis Gazette-Times
PHILOMATH, Ore. - A near-fatal accident in Southern California 12 years ago left a Philomath teenager's only cousin trapped inside his body, unable to speak or move.

But Jim Richardson, 17, is determined to set his cousin free. He is building a computer hardware and software system that will give the young man the ability to communicate for the first time in 12 years.

"It motivates me tremendously," Richardson said.

His cousin, 22-year-old Matthew Stern of Palos Verdes Estates, was the victim of a brain injury that destroyed his motor functions. He can think, hear and understand what the outside world says to him. But in reply, he only can move his eyes and head.

Richardson's family still lived in Southern California when the accident occurred. He and his younger brother were at his aunt and uncle's when Stern went to borrow some butter from a neighbor.

Stern, then 10, pressed the automatic garage-door button and began to duck beneath the descending door. But a spring caught on the hood of his jacket. The door didn't stop, and its choking grasp left Matthew without oxygen for more than 10 minutes.

His father, Larry, prayed in the ambulance for his son's heart to beat again. It did.

After six months in a coma, Stern awoke with a laugh. He had heard his father telling a joke to a nurse.

But laughing and making noises are all the only way he can communicate.

"He's this real intelligent child inside of this body that can't talk," said his mother, Linda.

When Richardson talks mechanical engineering, his eyes light up. His knowledge bubbles out of him excitedly. He knows computers. He knows how to build them, run them, tinker with them. He knows video capturing and digitizing. He knows electronics. He knows robotics.

His laboratory is a corner desk in the bedroom of his family's spacious home just south of Philomath. A card table is covered with a maze of wires, batteries and tools. A white plaster mold of Richardson's head sits on top.

He used the mold to build from fiberglass a black head harness with two rectangular boxes in front.

One box contains a tiny infrared camera aimed at the wearer's pupil.

Richardson puts on the headset and turns on his computer. A live picture of his eyeball, delayed just a few seconds, floats on the screen.

Eventually his cousin will wear the headset. He will see a picture of the computer screen. Instead of using a hand-controlled mouse, Stern will blink his eyes on different parts of the screen. The camera will sense the movement and transmit the command to the computer's cursor.

For example, the wearer will blink on a file, open his eyes, go to another screen section and blink again, "dragging" a file to another spot.

"It's just like you have a mouse," Richardson said. "But instead, your eye is doing it."

The speed of the blinking system can be set so the headset camera won't pick up normal eye blinks.

Richardson is setting up an alphabet and common word file, so Stern can begin writing and expressing himself. A human-voice system installed in the computer will allow him to "speak" what he writes.

Eventually, Richardson would like to link the computer to household appliances so Stern can turn on a television. Or, it could be linked to an electric wheelchair.

Richardson's mother, Carole, a substitute teacher, has no idea where her son got his engineering talents.

"The first thing he wanted was a tool belt," she said.

Richardson's creativity advanced quickly from an award-winning 4-H pig to a two-person hovercraft he built at age 14.

After seeing the hovercraft, which can carry two people a foot over water at 35 mph, Carole and her husband, Neil, learned not to doubt his ideas.

"We quit saying, `It's impossible,' " she said.

One of Richardson's employers, consultant Mike Plackett, heard of the hovercraft through a photograph in the Gazette-Times. He hired Richardson the past two summers to help build full-sized hovercrafts for the Navy and Army.

"He's an extremely intelligent young man," Plackett said.

Plackett had a 20-year-old hovercraft that needed rewiring. They didn't have any good diagrams to work from.

"He kept saying, `Look, Mike. I can do it,' " Plackett said. "Basically I closed my eyes and said, `Go ahead.' He did a fabulous job."

Plackett said Richardson's eye-controlled cursor is similar to military technology that allows a helicopter pilot to aim his guns by just looking at a target. But that project is classified, so Richardson has created his invention on his own.

Stern's mother, Linda, has only heard about the project so far. Richardson expects to take it to California this summer.

Muslim Americans Cope With Life Post 9/11

http://www.amvoice-two.amuslimvoice.org/html/body_ang_newspapers.html

Remembering 9/11:
Bay Area residents say sense of security seems lost forever

This article was published by  Alameda Times Star, Argus, Daily Review, Oakland Tribune, San Mateo County Times and Tri-Valley Herald.

By Kari Hulac - STAFF WRITER  Monday, September 08, 2003 –

Jeff Kunkel sometimes feels jittery. Carmella Meier says the ugly images are fresh in her mind. Diana Belger always thinks of the families. And Samina Faheem's life will never be the same.

Two years later, Sept. 11, 2001, still holds a powerful grasp on the hearts and minds of many Americans.

While these four Bay Area residents didn't see the death and destruction firsthand, they watched the horror unfold minute by minute on TV. They prayed for the victims and their families. They wondered if it could happen here.

The legacy of Sept. 11 - things like color-coded security alerts and invasive airport searches - have become a normal part of life. But does anyone feel any safer? Will life ever really be "normal" again?

Bay Area Living invited the four - a 91-year-old native New Yorker, a Methodist pastor, a Muslim activist and a senior caregiver - to meet and discuss such questions in the company of psychologist Alan Siegel, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Despite the group's diverse backgrounds, the participants all seemed to agree that Sept. 11 stripped them of their sense of security and changed how they think of their place - and the United States' place - in the world forever.

Ground Zero
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed like the whole world was falling apart, says Faheem, a Palo Alto mother of two and director of American Muslim Voice. Faheem, 48, who had run a child care business for 18 years, couldn't believe that something so awful could befall a super power nation like the United States, a place where she always felt so protected. "How could this happen to us?" Faheem says, describing her first thoughts. "Then I was praying, `Let there be no Muslims on the plane."

Meier, 91, of San Leandro was born in New York, but she left there before the Twin Towers were completed in 1973. She had never seen the landmark buildings in person. An early riser, Meier had her morning cup of tea in hand when she turned on the TV and saw the smoke. "I was just frightened to death, beyond belief," she recalls in a matter-of-fact tone, her New York accent faint but still detectable.

Home health care provider and Hayward resident Diana Belger, 48, was in a celebratory mood that day. One daughter had just been married and another was visiting from out of town. Then someone called and told her to turn on her TV. "We were all watching, and I just couldn't understand what really happened," says Belger, a soft-spoken native of El Salvador who moved to the United States when she was 18. "I just couldn't believe it."

When it was clear the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were terrorist acts, she felt a complete sadness that stayed with her for a long time. Kunkel, 49, recalls the shock and disbelief he felt when he too watched the events of the day unfold on TV. "The anger and fear came up much later," says the bearded pastor and author from Oakland.

Two years later
As the second anniversary of Sept. 11 nears, people will likely feel less intense feelings than they might have a year ago, but there still may be a sense of anticipation, says Siegel, author of the book "Dream Wisdom" and of a study on nightmares suffered by survivors of the Oakland firestorm.

Siegel, who lost a friend from college in the World Trade Center attacks, says it's normal to feel a sense of anxiety around anniversaries of traumas. People might also find themselves remembering other tragedies of their lives.

Kunkel, author of a book filled with children's artwork about their fears, says Sept. 11 for him represents a new vulnerability - for himself and for the nation. And that vulnerability seems here to stay. "There's nothing anybody can do to change that in the end," Kunkel says.

Of the discussion group members, Faheem's life was most dramatically altered.

Before Sept. 11 she worked to help Muslims obtain elected offices and other positions of leadership.

Now, because of an atmosphere of fear she blames on the U.S. government's crackdown on immigrants, she says most Muslims don't dare put themselves in the public eye.

"I wish I could be more positive two years later," she says.

She feels that Congress used the loss of life on Sept. 11 as an excuse to quickly pass laws that unfairly restrict the rights and civil liberties of Muslims and Arabs. "All in the name of security," Faheem says, referring to the Patriot Act. "I don't know about you, but I don't feel more secure." If anything, Faheem says, she worries that the crackdown on immigrants will create more enemies of the United States.

Faheem isn't worried about any threats to her life. As a Muslim, she's already accepted that her death has been predetermined. But she is worried about how a post-Sept. 11 world perceives the practioners of her faith. So she has cut back on her daycare business and refocused her efforts toward educating the world about Muslims.

She hopes Americans will realize that Muslims are their friends and neighbors and colleagues and that everyone can learn to respect one another and celebrate diversity. "I'm dedicating my life for humanity," she says.