In the Shadow of the Bridge: Birds of the Bay Area

by Dick Evans, Hannah Hindley (Text by), Mary Ellen Hannibal (Foreword by)

Overview

Experience the wild beauty of birds around the Bay.

"Gives voice to a piece of California that nourishes an astonishing array of birds who deserve celebration." —Chris Johns, Former Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic

Having explored San Francisco neighborhoods in three celebrated books, Dick Evans turns here to the avian species that call the Bay Area home. With his photographer's eye, he finds art and drama in the lives of birds, from the smallest sparrows to long-legged Great Blue Herons. He captures the pockets of wilderness in our cities that make the area a birder's paradise: from a marsh full of endangered birds wading in the reeds near the Oakland Airport to the isolated refuge of the Farallon Islands, home to a quarter-million seabirds and a handful of visiting scientists; from Crissy Field, flocked with egrets, to the pasturelands birds share with cattle. His vibrant images are interspersed with text by Hannah Hindley that weaves us more deeply into relationship with our avian neighbors, introducing readers to the natural history of the region, to themes of interdependence and ecology, and to the evolving challenges for birds in a densely settled urban environment. At the heart of these images and stories is love for the living descendants of dinosaurs as they soar and parade, and awe at their ephemerality and endurance. Evans's photos highlight the wonder of a world on the wing and the rich biodiversity of Bay Area birds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597146913
Publisher:	Heyday
Publication date:	11/25/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	11.00(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Dick Evans became interested in photography as a graduate student at Stanford Universityand continued his practice throughout a forty-seven-year career in the global metals industry that took him all over the world. San Francisco always remained home base, though, and he now lives in the city with his wife, Gretchen. Evans is the author or coauthor of the photography books San Francisco and the Bay Area: The Haight-Ashbury Edition, The Mission, and San Francisco's Chinatown.

Hannah Hindley is a wilderness guide and the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and the Barry Lopez Prize in Nonfiction. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and evolutionary biology; she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Arizona. Her environmental essays can be found in Bay Nature, The Sun, Hakai, and more. Hannah writes about small creatures, big landscapes, and the scientists who love them.

Mary Ellen Hannibal is an award-winning environmental author of five books including The Spine of the Continent and Citizen Scientist, and frequent writer for many publications, including the New York Times and Science. She also teaches at the California College of the Arts and the Fromm Institute in San Francisco. She is a creator and writer of "Nature in the City," a spatio-temporal map of San Francisco, which synthesizes more than 40 maps of the terrain and tells stories of change over time. She has received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship and a Stanford UniversityMedia Fellowship, and received the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science and Society Award and Stanford University's Knight-Risser Prize.

Read an Excerpt

FOREWORD BY MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL: "Looking at You"

I tried to behave while tagging along with a Point Blue Conservation Science (Point Blue) birding group in fall 2024. Dick Evans was along with his camera, and avian ecologist Mark Dettling hauled a telescope and kept a list. Evans called us the “Fault Line Feathers Group” in honor of our San Andreas–defined zig zag path in Bolinas.

Frankly, I’m the person on a bird walk that the “real” birders would like to jettison. I’m chatty and I have questions. I’m hungry and waiting for lunch and trying to be quiet about the wrapper on my energy bar. I am pretty good at noticing a bird but hopeless at knowing what it is. I’m not particularly bent on improving my birding—I just am glad to be out looking for birds.

I do love learning from the real bird-watchers, who observe patterns and anomalies, get to know the behavior of different species, and stay highly tuned to seasonal changes and the birds they bring. Following Evans’s photographer’s gaze as it arches upward, querying the sky, then attempting to discern what Dettling is hearing in the trees, I’m guided to perceive more deeply. Birders are also superb citizen scientists. Every observation donated to eBird contributes to the pointillist portrait of birds as they stitch up the tapestry of life.

I look at the birds, I try to “see” them. I want to be involved with the birds and their life, even as I am thrilled at their otherness—simultaneously outside me, indifferent, and yet mysteriously entwined with my own being. We frequently that say scenes of aesthetic overflow such as the natural beauty Bolinas provides are beyond words. But this unity and diversity are prior to words in human development and drive us to express what we see, feel, and attempt to know.

In the Shadow of the Bridge brings new and deep information to this quest. Hannah Hindley’s storytelling about birds and the Bay is warm and accessible to all, while managing to capture a progressive view of ecology and its many entanglements. How does the deeply fissured Bay Area geology provide structure to the view and habitat for such a variety of birds? (Dettling counted more than 80 species that day.) How do Indigenous people here integrate avian doings with their own, helping to create what we call nature? Hindley touches down on human history, Earth-system science, land-use change, and species’ evolution, and how these impact our birdy experience all around the Bay.

Of course, I find myself staring at Dick Evans’s photographs. Wildlife photographers "get the shot,” never a mean feat with a subject that is often cryptic, mobile, and far away. But there are subtle and important differences in how bird photographs are indeed captured. Evans gives us many spectacular portraits of birds in situ, living their lives, mating, eating, adrift on the water or gliding in the sky, all the while following patterns in time that are millions of years old.

But there’s another surprise in these photographs as well. Many of Evans’s portraits have a focus on the bird’s eye. Evans is looking at the bird and taking the picture, but the bird is not precisely looking back at him. I find myself entranced with these persistently perceiving birds. Evans has fixed his eye on their eyes in a direct encounter. A biologist will tell you the bird is looking for potential prey, a mate, or a predator. Fine, we’re all doing some version of that, right? But it doesn’t quite explain the charismatic presence these birds have. Looking at them informs us as well about the moment we live in, its history in the making. The birds are seeking, recognizing, knowing. We’re doing that, too. And as Wallace Stevens put it, the bird is “involved in what I know.” We seek to know this place of land and water—this wonderful book helps us know it better.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Looking at You

Introduction: A Walk Among Birds

Photographer’s Statement

Writer’s Statement: Homecoming

Natural Forces

• Moving Mountains
• Cool Fog; Golden Summers
• The Far Reach of the Bay
• Flight Paths in the Night

Human Influences

• The Devil’s Teeth
• Catch, Release, Record
• A Library of Birds
• The Art of Attention

Evolving Challenges

• Rewilding Ranchlands
• To Sacrifice and to Save
• Canons and Cormorants 
• The Way In

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

About Point Blue Conservation Science

Editorial Reviews

"Anchored by Hannah Hindley's liquid and radiant prose, the portfolio of Dick Evans attains something transcendent. His photography isn't just about birds, it is about grace in evolution, its diversity, and its poetry." —Obi Kaufmann, author of The California Field Atlas and the California Lands Trilogy

"A celebration not only of the wonderful and varied birds of the Bay Area but also of the collaborative efforts to study and protect them. Photographer Dick Evans and essayist Hannah Hindley have beautifully captured the wonder and mystery of birds, the fascinating research to better understand them, and the joy of birding itself." —Wayne Klockner, Executive Director, American Birding Association

"In the Shadow of the Bridge is a spectacular book, capturing the dance of light and color that can only be seen on the feathers of a bird. The Bay Area is a truly astonishing place for birds, and this photographic compendium celebrates its diversity of species, habitats, and behaviors in crystalline detail. From the mundane to the extraordinary, every scene in this book tells a story of wild beauty, patience, and discovery." —John P. Dumbacher, Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy, Institute of Biodiversity Science and Sustainability, California Academy of Sciences

"As graceful and impressive as the Golden Gate Bridge is, the natural world it spans is even more enchanting. This is the bay Dick Evans is drawn to and cannot turn away from. With his camera in hand, he seeks birds who grace air, sea and shore—from elegant Snowy Egrets to cartoonish Hooded Mergansers—as they thrive in a scene like no other. Dick's passion for this place where ocean meets land is shared by Hannah Hindley whose words are as powerful as Dick's photographs. Together they create a book, In the Shadow of the Bridge, that gives voice to a piece of California that nourishes an astonishing array of birds who deserve celebration." —Chris Johns, Former Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic

"In the Shadow of the Bridge beautifully weaves the lives of Bay Area birds into the region's natural and urban landscapes, revealing how their presence shapes our sense of place. With lyrical prose and vivid observation, it celebrates the resilience, grace, and enduring connection between birds and the dynamic environment they inhabit." —Glenn Phillips, Executive Director, Golden Gate Bird Alliance

From the Publisher