About Us:

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.

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.

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.