Park News Dec 11 2025
Restroom on Trial
The new Throne restroom installed here on Sep 5 will come to the end of its probation period on Jan 5. If the Throne contract is not renewed, the park goes back to the plastic outhouses (portapotties) that have disgraced the city and repelled park visitors since the park opened more than 30 years ago. You can cast a vote on this Google Form, click here.
On Thursday morning Dec 11, Parks Commission Secretary Roger Miller chaired an outdoor focus group at Civic Center Park, corner of MLK and Center St., where a second Throne unit is installed. Some 20 people attended, including City staff and Throne company representatives. One of the Throne founders, Jess Heinzelman, lives in Berkeley and walks her dog in Chavez Park almost daily.
Throne is a startup, Heinzelman said, just over five years old. They hadn’t intended to do a high-tech unit. They just wanted to provide a better public restroom than anything on the market, and were led bit by bit to the Throne design. These units are self-contained, don’t require sewer or other utility hookups, run on solar power, and are connected via wifi to an office that monitors usage 24/7.
The online hookup allows the staff to match maintenance service to hourly needs. For example, the staff knows from its online data that usage of the Civic Center unit peaks during Farmer’s Market mornings, and schedules frequent maintenance at that time. The online monitoring feature also allows staff to detect if a user attempts to camp out in a unit, which violates the 10-minute usage limit. At first violation the company warns a user about overtime use. If it’s repeated, the user can be banned. But, said a company representative, this has happened only once, at a unit outside Berkeley.
A Berkeley Parks staff member expressed surprise that the Throne units had so far shown no vandal damage and no graffiti. Possibly the fact that each user can comment online on the condition of the unit as they enter discourages vandalism. In Berkeley, a company speaker said, they’ve gotten a series of comments from users who have done minor cleanups, such as picking up unused toilet paper off the floor or wiping a soap stain off the sink.
The need for a cellphone to enter the unit, either via a QR code, or a text message, or via the Throne app, was not a major barrier to users, most focus group members agreed. For people without phones, the City will issue access cards at two locations. Seven of these cards have been issued, according to Miller, and four are in frequent use.
The Chavez Park unit, Miller said, gets even more usage than the Civic Center site.
The City plans to follow up this outdoor focus group with a Zoom group on a date TBA. Meanwhile, you can cast a vote right now on this Google form. It asks two questions: (1) Have you used the Throne in the park, and (2) Should the City keep the Throne in the park? There is also space to add comments.
Two Owls: Proof
For more than a week, some park visitors have reported seeing another Burrowing Owl in addition to the “Shy Owl” that seems to have settled in for the season on the south slope of the Spiral. This owl was reported peeking over the riprap just north of the Spiral. This is a different spot than the burrow further north where an owl was sighted on Dec. 5 and documented in a photo by Susan Black, here.
As luck would have it, every time I went looking for this just-north-on-riprap owl, it was invisible. Some other owl watchers had the same disappointment. Some of the early photos were taken with older cellphones with weak zoom that left room for doubt. There was also the possibility that this just-north owl was really the Shy Owl taking a walk in its neighborhood.
Now thanks to Melissa “Hawkeye” Schneider, who has an earlier elusive owl spotting to her credit this season, we have proof that this newer owl is not the Shy Owl on a ramble but is a different bird. Melissa also got a short video of the additional owl moments later, plus a pretty good still image.
Now the inevitable questions come up. Is this new just-north owl the same bird as the Dec 6 owl on the far north side? Are these the same as the Dec 5 owl in the burrow on the near north side? The unavoidable answer is, we don’t really know. To tell individual owls apart it really helps to have a sharp and clear full frontal photo in good light. That way we can see the pattern of dots and dashes on their breast plumage. That pattern is unique to each individual like a fingerprint. We should have software that reads these patterns like a QR code, but the Silicon Valley brains are falling down on the job here. And our owls are being too shy this season to show themselves full Monty. To those of us who try to keep an owl census, this is frustrating. But to those of us who just love to see Burrowing Owls, it’s wonderful. Guess what? I’m both kinds of people.
Shy Owl Fan Club Grows
There’s nothing like a reliable owl to attract a fan club. The “Shy Owl” on the south slope of the Spiral is becoming star of a court of devotees.
Lew Jacobson, a member of the Board of Directors of PIDO, the model dog owners’ group at Pt. Isabel, was over here on Tuesday looking for an owl and snapped these images of the shy one:
Grant Hough, a Cal student and photographer, saw the same owl on Wednesday and came away with six good photos, of which I’m sharing these two:
More than two dozen park visitors snapped cell phone photos while I had the camera up focused on the Shy Owl. I won’t see most of those photos. Here’s a cell phone shot by Feleciana Feller, not bad at all.
I took some pictures of this owl also, but I really don’t have to do that anymore. Better photographers with better cameras are doing a great job documenting this bird.
Thursday morning I met a couple of City staff members who don’t believe that the owls in the park are real. They’ve seen the signs but don’t believe the birds exist. I’m hoping that the set of videos and photos on this website from a growing list of witnesses will make them into believers. Of course, they could just go to the spot and see for themselves …
Other Feathers
The owls were by no means the only avian attractions in the park. For the first time in memory, we have had Greater White-fronted Geese spending time here. Eildert Beeftink, who saw one of these big birds in the air last week, saw a small flock of five of them in the water this week. Combined with the recent Tundra Swan, we’re seeing birds here considerably outside their usual range.
Lew Jacobson, who came for the owl, also captured this shot of a White-tailed Kite on top of a shrub in the Protected Natural Area, near the Burrowing Owl site. It’s been quite a while since a kite has been seen here. They hunt voles and are not a threat to Burrowing Owls.
Lew also got a photo of the Common Loon that has been foraging in the waters around the park for a week or so.
I’m going to end with the sweetest photos of all: Hao Tran’s portraits of the elusive Rock Wren. Only Hao can reliably find this bird. His photos of this delicately tinted survivor in a self-selected desert of stones are the stuff of poetry. As if to nudge us back to reality, Hao closes with a much more familiar bird that almost everyone has seen, a Song Sparrow.
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It is unbelievable that those City staff members don’t believe the owls are real. This is willful ignorance. What is their agenda in denying the owls’ existence? You, I and many other people have pictures and photos proving their existence, and like you said, all they have to do is come down and look. Please post the names of those city officials so I can contact them myself.