Palo Lore
The year the first Palo Handbook was produced by an intrepid group of interns and their supervisors.
What is 1980?
The Palomarin buildings were previously the elementary school of this pacifist religious community
What is Christ's Church of the Golden Rule?
In this year, Palo banding became fully standardized AND gridding began.
What is 1979?
In 2020, banding intern Brandon and others detected the unusually long-distance dispersal of 2(to 3!) Wrentits from Palo to this surprising location
What is Pine Gulch?
This staffer likes to whittle in their time off
Who is Mark Dettling?
In the late 1980s, these two individuals painted the giant study-species mural in what is currently Diana's office.
Who are Steve Howell & Sophie Webb?
The year the organization moved into Palomarin
What is 1966?
We began monitoring Muddy Hollow in 1995 in order to study bird response to this specific event.
What is the Mount Vision Fire?
This made it a challenge to determine the reason behind the lack of HYs caught in the Palo nets in 1986 - a season of Chernobyl fallout and extreme rain.
What is the pausing of gridding in 1986?
This 2020 high count of the number of birds caught at Palo on a single day was on June 30th.
What is 50 birds?
The reason the Wrentit in the mural in Diana's office was depicted with rainbow underwings.
What is the fact that no one ever sees the underwings of a Wrentit in flight?
This Point Blue staffer first visited Palo as an elementary school student with her Sacramento school that still comes every year to Palo
Who is Melissa Pitkin (Director of Education & Outreach Group)?
This was the very first species whose migratory connectivity we began studying with geolocator tags (in 2010).
What is the Golden-crowned Sparrow?
This species, which did not hold any territories on the Palo grids for the first 15 or so years of the gridding program, has been a study species here since 2014
What is the Swainson's Thrush?
The number of Song Sparrow territories at Palomarin in 2020 - which also happens to be triple the number there were in 2016, their low point.
What is 9?
In perhaps Palo's most infamous banding-related human emergency, an intern got this item stuck in their sternum in 1998 and needed to be taken to the hospital in an amubulance.
What is a crochet needle [that banders that season - and never again - wore around their neck to help with extractions]
This caused the Palomarin Field Station to be closed to the public for an extended period (i.e., > 2 weeks) for the first time in its history
What is the government shutdown of 2013?
This species (or subspecies really), which has been studied out of Palomarin since 1997, is at the southern end of its breeding range here in Marin County.
What is the Northern Spotted Owl?
Our only "old world" species to be caught in our nets, this species was caught twice in Palo's history (at Palo in 1997, and at Redwood Creek in 2015)
What is the Dusky Warbler?
What Kodiak and Grand Manan Islands have in common [related to Palo]
What are islands where Palo supervisors (Hilary & Renee) were born?
The reason behind a grass fire between the upper building and net 5.0 in 2006, that could have burned the building and more had Dennis Jongsomjit not been so quick with a fire extinguisher.
What is an attempt by an intern to eradicate a nest of ground wasps by burning it out?
The translation in English of 'Kule Loklo', the village replicate (which can be visited at Point Reyes National Seashore's headquarters) of the Coast Miwok who lived at Palo and Point Reyes for thousands of years
What is 'Bear Valley'?
This new monitoring effort was initiated at Palo and our off-sites in 2012 as a result of heightened interest in climate change impacts
What is plant phenology monitoring?
The oldest known Wrentit in the world was a Palo bird known to be at least this exceptional number of years old.
What is 13?
The number of birds caught in the Palo nets, ever.
What is 188,864?