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About Us
Who we are and who we are becoming.
The Flyway
Festival was founded in November 1996 by Myrna Hayes and Marc Holmes,
while staffers of Save San Francisco Bay Association, as part of a
project called the Partnership for San Pablo Baylands. Inspired by
urging of Robin Leong, of the Napa-Solano Audubon Society, they crafted
an event that would introduce the Bay Area public to the world of birding,
the fastest growing outdoor recreation in America. Its roots are in
a cause–to
set one weekend aside each year to celebrate the migration of shorebirds,
waterfowl and other wildlife through San Pablo Bay, the largest bay
in the San Francisco Bay
Estuary, and to offer access to areas of San Francisco Bay’s
north shore, not normally open to the public.
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The Flyway Festival was also
created to inform the residents of this region about the opportunity
to protect the approximately 50,000 acres between Vallejo and Marin
County from urban development and to actively engage the public
in stewardship of this unique area, which represents much of
the last five percent of the Bay’s
tidal marshes and the habitat for dozens of endangered and threatened
species. We hoped the Flyway Festival would inspire the residents
of this region to get to know and cherish the fragile, yet magnificent
wild lands that surround them. We, who live in the north bay, perhaps
more than any other part of the Bay Area, enjoy vistas unmarred by
intense urbanization and live adjacent to vast open space that is
the signature San Francisco Bay. This unbroken connection to the
land and water of the Bay, with hills rising so close to the water’s
edge, and vast unsettled tracts of bayshore, sets us apart from
the other sub-regions of the Bay.
What we found in people’s response to our first Festival is
what we at the Flyway Festival still find today–that residents
of the Bay Area, and particularly those who live in the north
bay, are eager to discover this mysterious place and jealously
protect it from urban intrusion.
What started out as an educational opportunity
and chance to celebrate migratory wildlife, quickly grew to
include an advocacy component. Our first five festivals were
held at Building 505; the festivals held there, gauged the public’s
interest in a permanent environmental education facility for
the north shore of San Francisco Bay. To this day, your attendance
at the Flyway Festival reminds decision-makers that the natural
world in all its intrigue, matters to you.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge hosted the Flyway Festival
from January of 1998 to January 2001. Fish and Wildlife Service
staff, then Refuge Manager Betsy Radtke and Louise Vicencio,
Refuge Biologist at the time, and Fran McTamaney, the San Francisco
Bay Refuge Complex Education Manager, were stalwart supporters
of the growing festival. Ruth Pratt, Fish and Wildlife Service
wildlife biologist from the endangered species division, who
shared the first little office space on Mare Island with the Refuge,
was a great inspiration. Countless other San Francisco Bay National
Wildlife Refuge Complex staff and Fish and Wildlife Service employees
have helped ensure that the Festival has continued to flourish
over the years and continue to play key roles in ensuring that
you have informed and full access to the protected natural lands
we have entrusted them with managing for wildlife on our behalf.
While
the San Pablo Bay Refuge is no longer the Festival host, they
continue to serve as our major partner along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service Coastal Program. As the Festival has grown and the community
has taken more ownership of the Festival, the Refuge staff have
turned their focus toward year round environmental education in local school
classrooms and in the field, on Mare Island, and pressed on with
significant wetland restoration projects at Lower Tubbs Island,
Tolay Creek and Cullinan Ranch, along with continued efforts to acquire
both 3300 acres of Skaggs Island and the property
on which Building 505 is situated from the U.S. Navy. The multi
million dollar renovation of Building 505 to the San Pablo Bay Discovery
Center, is another ambitious task, along with plans to expand
the Refuge by more than 2400 acres on Mare Island through a planned lease
from the California State Lands Commission.
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In January 2002 the decision
was made to expand the Flyway Festival to the only 3-day birding
festival in San Francisco Bay and drop “Northern” from
the original name. Arc Ecology, a San Francisco based non-profit,
specializing in technical and advocacy based assistance for communities
transitioning military bases to civilian uses that are environmentally
safe, economically productive and quality places to live and
work, took us on as a project. We are so delighted, as this Festival
continues to prove that our communities can survive base closures
and take advantage of the multiple assets of these rare, protected
parts of the country, for public enjoyment of natural resources,
recreational opportunities and historic treasures that abound
on many former military bases.
Our future
The future of the Flyway Festival is to serve
as an anchor for Mare Island’s complex of natural, cultural,
recreational and historic attractions. Mare Island represents
the last island in San Francisco Bay not accessible to the
public. Except for the yearly Flyway Festival, Mare Island is
currently off limits to the public because of risk of exposure
to environmental contaminants in certain areas. It will not
always be so. Mare Island is slated to be brought online as a
regional hub of mixed educational and recreational use woven
into the other mixed use development plans for the former naval
station.
It is only
through a significant and visible infusion of investment into
the urban core and the less urban of California’s communities,
that we will preserve the lands and ways of life that make California
a world economic leader, superb place to live and renowned tourist
destination. If we, who have chosen the urban dweller lifestyle
cannot be compelled to remain, to thrive and flourish in the cities
and experience a vibrancy not possible in the rural and agrarian
parts of California, we will be forced to continually etch away and
erode the wild places and the wide-open places of California.
Mare Island
represents just such an amenity for a growing urban center. The
current land uses at the edge of San Pablo Bay and the Carquinez
Strait represent significant shifts from historical regional
reliance on heavy industry. Situated at the dramatic confluence of
the Carquinez Strait and the Napa River, Mare Island is the inviting
gateway to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, the scenic Carquinez Strait,
the Delta and the Golden Country to our north and east and to San
Francisco and Marin County to our west. Vallejo and our neighbors
Benicia and Crockett, are poised to become Gateway Communities, if
we eagerly envision a bold new future rooted in the past, the land
and the water.
The Flyway Festival is a window into
this future. The wide range of activities that take place 3 days
each year on Mare Island, could take place year round. Instead
of historic tours, hikes to the hilltop, wetland walks, environmental
education and beautiful art and birding equipment being available
just once a year, we could enjoy these and even more exciting
amenities every day. Not only would we embrace our past, champion our natural
resources and relive our grandest accomplishments daily, we could
share these treasures with visitors. Mare Island has been closed
to the public for 150 years. Isn’t
it time for us to explore and get our feet wet in this magic place?
We have a lot of catching up to do, don’t we?
What is a gateway
community?
A gateway community is a town or region that
acts as the doorstep to a local, regional or national scenic,
historical or natural attraction(s). How are Vallejo and its neighbors
gateways? We are poised at the mouths of the Napa River (Mare Island
Strait) and the Carquinez Strait. To our northwest, lie more than
50,000 acres of lands along Highway 37 between Vallejo and Marin
County, known as the San Pablo Baylands, former tidal wetlands
of the Bay, now representing a mix of non-urban uses–agricultural
production, a National Wildlife Refuge and State Wildlife Areas.
To the north of the San Pablo Baylands is the Carneros wine-grape
growing region. The growers and wineries of the Carneros are
on the cutting-edge of environmentally friendly farming and cooperative
partnerships with agencies and organizations charged with protection
of wildlife habitat.
To the northwest and northeast of the Carneros, are of course,
the world-renowned wine-grape growing regions of the Sonoma and
Napa Valleys. To our west are the recreational bounty and beauty
of the coastlines and protected lands of Marin and Sonoma Counties.
To
our east are the birding, fishing, hunting, boating and recreational
meccas of the Suisun Marsh and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Deltas. If the 7 million residents of the Bay Area wish to travel
by auto, bus, train or boat to the State Capitol at Sacramento,
the northern Central Valley of California, or the attractions of
the Sierra Nevada–Lake
Tahoe, skiing, Reno–they primarily pass through Vallejo,
Crockett and Benicia.
To our south, are Angel Island State Park, and
of course San Francisco, the most visited city in America,
the 4th most visited in the world and the richness of the East
Bay with it's dizzying array of cultural, recreational and educational
venues.
Throw in the concentration of national historical attractions
such as the National Historic Landmark Districts of the Benicia
Arsenal and Mare Island(the highest ranking National Park
Service bestows on a historical location), the National Historic
Memorial at Port Chicago, the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home
Front National Historical Park now in the planning stages in Richmond,
the John Muir Historic Site in Martinez, the mothball fleet
in the Suisun Bay, and the regional historical locations such as
the town of Port Costa-the wheat shipping capital of the world
in the late 1800's, the towns of Vallejo and Benicia-the first
and second state capitols, the Carquinez Strait-Gateway to the
Gold Rush and where the first suspension bridge built in America
in 38 years has risen from the depths of the waterway through which
40% of California's water flows… shall I go on, or do you
begin to get the picture?
We don’t need to abandon our historical industrial roots as
a region, to set a new course for our communities for the 21st century.
Eighty-five percent of California’s revenue from tourism
is generated by Californians. We Californians visit California!
California coastal tourism generates more revenue for the
State than all other combined uses including ports. Seventy
percent of families traveling with children make a specific
effort to visit a historical site on vacation. Birdwatching
is the fastest growing outdoor recreation in the nation.
We have everything we need to reinvent ourselves as
the most desirable place to live, learn and play in the Bay, if
only we have a dream for our future, founded on an equal passion
for our past.
San Francisco Bay Flyway Festival
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