Dear Flyway Festival Friend,

Photograph by Kathleen Fenton

Photograph by Brian Collett

Silvery and slate blue clouds backlit by the creamy yellow evening light reflect onto the still and sleek San Pablo Bay. A bright white spotlight sears the waters off Point Pinole. A tower like a massive Space Needle arises out of an inferno of clouds enveloping Mt. Tam. Red tails and turkey vultures soar over the ledge below us. The lights of the bridge over the Carquinez are silently lit for the night. Buoys sound their warning. Insistent whistles blow from countless trains on the far shore. My favorite oil tanker, the luscious orange one lit like an offshore hotel, lulls against its wharf. As we whack away at fennel gone crazy, we talk and dream of spring days when the just emerging native bunch grasses, lotus, coastal sage, soap root and buckwheat will once again dominate this sandstone bluff into which is carved a bunker–silent and empty now except when our conversations fill it to overflowing and reverberate back to us.

Where are we? We’re looking west, south, east and north on our sacred sentinel hill atop Mare Island where one really does experience the lure of the Bay with its invitation to songbirds, shorebirds and waterfowl and raptors, too, to stop off, refuel, restore, and continue in flight or not, on the journey south along the Pacific Flyway this fall day.

I invite you to join us again this year, Friday-Saturday, February 5-7, 2010 for our 14th year of offering the San Francisco Bay Flyway Festival headquartered on Mare Island in Vallejo with outings scheduled on the Island and throughout the San Francisco Bay region. If my story of a favorite spot in the Mare Island Shoreline Heritage Preserve has cast even a shadow of the magic spell it cast on me that recent night, I invite you to return for your own absolutely favorite hike or outing or try something totally new. That’s what the Flyway Festival is really all about. If you are an artist or a photographer contributing to the Art Show, I am confident that your work represents your pure passion for some special place in the Bay. If you love nothing more than joining with others on a birdwatching outing or an historic tour, scouting for mushrooms, or sharing with others your own study of wildlife in the Bay, this is your chance to come together with others and find your own place of joy on the wild side of San Francisco Bay Estuary and its watershed.

New this year! “I did it flyway”! You know the song…the twist on it inspired by an avid Flyway Festival fan who happens to have also roofed my house a few years ago. I have been thinking that we must find ways to inspire and engage a tangible investment by you, our Festival visitor in the Flyway in your daily lives throughout the year. Ever since our Festival took wings here on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, we have invited exhibitors to offer something hands-on for kids at their exhibits. This year, we’ve asked them to focus on ways to interest and engage you, our Festival visitors actively in citizen science, native plant surveys and restoration, bird counting, bird nest monitoring, water-quality monitoring and creek restoration, rainwater collection, bicycle repair, solar cooking, raising your own food. We’ve asked them to share with you the tools you will need to on-the-ground get off-the-ground with these endeavors. We’ve asked our exhibitors to show you whatever will help you to more fully understand and apply the methods they and their organization use to “do it Flyway”. Come prepared to tell and show them what you are doing.

CHANGE IS IN THE AIR AND SO ARE THE BIRDS

On the first weekend of February we will share our 14th Flyway Festival together. After all these years of working alongside our more than 100 volunteers, exhibitors, agency staff, vendors and sponsors, to bring this great celebration of all things wild to the people of the San Francisco Bay, I still feel such joy when I imagine the delight the Festival will soon bring to people of all ages. Yet, there is this sense of urgency. Do you feel it? There have been big changes and more seem imminent in our lives. What lies ahead? I wonder to myself, “Will we pull together to offer the Flyway Festival one more year? Where will money and volunteers come from, the food, the wine”…all these things weigh on my mind and heart and I know concerns like these weigh on yours, too, as you navigate the times in which we are now living.

Yet, when things seem nearly impossible, where do you find strength and courage and abundance in your lives? Do you like I, find it in the wilds on the edge of San Francisco Bay...from exquisite vistas, the band of light reflecting a sunset off the San Pablo Bay, the evening light on the Carquinez Bridges, Mt. Diablo lurking in the haze or crisp-edged at dusk? I recall White Slough softly lavender and shimmering with shorebirds feeding under a full moon and my heart overflows with a peace and a restoring exuberance that can only come from an immense Bay around me. Do you love the Bay and its wild places as much as I do? It seems to me that you really do. I invite you then, to please join me this year in assuring the Flyway Festival will succeed by lending us some help to put on the Flyway Festival. Will you volunteer? Will you bring something you think others will treasure for the silent auction? Will you bring a friend? Will you make a donation?

FLYWAY FOR FREE

Do you know what it means to pull out all the stops? It means to open up a pipe organ to all its potential and play away. That’s what I am asking you to do this year. Our visitors from the north have arrived, so we are planning a fine time for you our guests to come to see and get to know them. As always, I am committed to keeping the Flyway Festival free. More than ever before to keep this promise will mean receiving donations of every denomination. You may make your contribution with a check made out to Arc Ecology. Bring it with you and drop it in the donation barrels or mail it to P O Box 1573 Vallejo, CA 94590 or by credit card (email or call me 707-557-9816 or 707-249-9633 cell to learn how). Then, go out to your favorite Bay place or discover a new one and dream of the delight we will share once again in February.

Warmly,
Myrna Hayes
Festival Coordinator and Co-founder