The first historic San Mateo County railway depot on the mainline is 17 miles south of San Francisco in the town of Millbrae (hence the name 17 Mile House).

Millbrae has become a large transit center serving the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) where Caltrain, samTrans, and Bart Area Rapid Transit (BART) meet. The station at Millbrae has been redeveloped and the historic station has been moved, about 200 feet from it’s original site and is little further south down the main line.

Sadly, like the station at Colma, Millbrae’s station no longer serves the purpose for which it was originally designed and built. It last served as a passenger station in 2003 (the year the new transit center opened).

A southbound “Baby Bullet” train pulls into the 2003 transit center at Millbrae. The historic station is about 400 feet behind me.

Millbrae’s historic depot was not the first to be built. The first station was an adobe structure completed in 1864. The banker Darius O. Mills, donated the land so a station could be built on the railway line. He wanted his friends from San Francisco to be able to come and visit his Happy House estate.

That first depot burned down. And a second depot was built, and in 1906, that too burned down. Now while this true story does bear a slight resemblance to the fable , “The Three Little Pigs”, the final structure, built in 1907, did not burn down but has survived now for over 110 years.  This station, unlike the Pig’s house that stood, was not built of bricks, but of wood.

The current depot has a two-story core with two wings, both north and south, that parallel the rail line. The wing to the north is the passenger waiting room and the wing to the south is the baggage room while in the middle is the telegraph and ticket office. The 700 square foot second story was the living quarters for the station master and family.

The original clock used in the passenger waiting room when the depot was closed. The inter ring of red numerals show 24 hour time, the time of all railroads.

The architectural style of this depot was very much influenced by the then president of the Southern Pacific, E. H. Harriman, who controlled the look of the railroads from the engines and passenger cars and the depots. The architectural style is said to be Colonial Revival.

What almost destroyed this station (the Big Bad Wolf if you like), was Southern Pacific Railroad who, in 1976, wanted to level this beautiful building and, you guessed it, put up a parking lot.

The Millbrae Historical Society stepped in (and stepped up) and saved this depot from oblivion. It was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1978. In 1980, the depot was moved 200 feet south to it’s present location, still on the mainline and still a witness to the passage of rail traffic.

A southbound train passing Millbrae’s historic railway depot, on its way to San Jose.

It is an ecstatic experience when your student becomes the master. This happened on a late Sunday morning birding adventure.

I took young Grasshopper Sparrow out to Coyote Point Recreational Area to bird the bay and marsh. He needed to work on his life list and birding skills and this area of open marsh and bay in San Mateo County is as good as any place to hone your observation and identification skills.

There were many birds out on the exposed mudflats: sandpipers, snowy egrets, American avocets, black-belled plovers, whimbrels, and long-billed curlews. Beyond the flats on the San Francisco Bay were rafts of buffleheads, cormorants, western grebes, common goldeneyes, ruddy ducks, and surf scoters. A birding class, returning from the point, even informed us that the rare ongoing male harlequin duck was on the bay but had headed further out and might be hard to see.

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There were many Gashawks in the air, including this massive A380 on final approach to SFO.

There also were many black-bellied plovers out foraging on the mudflats.

As we walked along the jetty to the east, Grasshopper was beginning to see some species for the first time. Out on the bay were surf scoter, common goldeneye, and American wigeon, all birds that were lifers. There where a few glaucous-winged gulls out on the sand spit which was a new gull for my acolyte. In the marina were horned grebe and least sandpiper.

Seeing these birds with Grasshopper, took me back to the time when many of these birds where new to me too. We all begin somewhere and at sometime and the avian world is as new as a summer, sunny morning.

We headed out to the point and scanned the bay waters for the local male harlequin duck. But the duck was out on sight but not out of mind. We then headed back to the marsh area where we watched green-winged teal, shoveller ducks, and a immature peregrine falcon perched on a power tower.

Grasshopper sat down and did a field sketch of the young peregrine on
the power tower while I watched an osprey circling above the bay. We
heard a sora’s “whinny” call from the reeds but the sulky rail didn’t
make an appearance.

We walked back to the parking lot and paused to look at an adult
red-shoulder hawk perched about 30 feet up a power tower. That is when
Grasshopper Sparrow looked south towards the bay and spotted an
unusual bird in the air. He called my attention to the long-winged
bird with a prominent dagger-like bill that was not a gull, pelican,
or cormorant.

“Brown booby!” Grasshopper exclaimed as he ran towards the shoreline
to get a better view.

I hurried over as fast as I could with my sketching bag, camera,
binoculars, and a scope and tripod slung over my shoulder, which turns
out not to be very fast at all. I joined Grasshopper on the shoreline
path and put my bins on the bird. Sure enough, there was a very rare
San Francisco Bay (and very rare for Northern California) bird
circling in front of us: an adult brown booby (Sula leucogaster)! I
took about ten photos to confirm its existence to the birding
community.

Seeing this amazing seabird in flight was incredible but even more
amazing was that my young fledging birder companion first spotted and
identified a rare bird that he had never seen before in his life!

He was hoping to see this booby species on a Disney Cruise on the
western Coast of Mexico. He had seen this cruise as a “five day
pelagic instead of a cruise” and had studied this bird guides to note the field marks and behaviors of the brown booby, but alas, he did not
see the bird on the cruise; And in a location where you would most
expect it.

Instead, he found the booby away from its expected range, far to the north and not over the ocean but over bay waters. These surprises are the reason we leave the house with binoculars. We see the wonders of
the avian wonder, both the common residents and reacquainting ourselves with wintering visitors. But, we always dream of that unexpected surprise. That bird that just shouldn’t be. We live for
these surprises of the natural world. A bird can really turn up
anywhere. They do have wings after all.

There was an over-wintering avian visitor from the far north spending its time on the rocks near the path way of Heron’s Head Park in the south eastern portion of San Francisco. I figured I better make way across the 6.2 miles of the city to see this sandpiper before it headed back up north.

Heron’s Head Park, named because it looks like a great blue heron’s head from the air, juts out into the San Francisco Bay just north of Hunter’s Point (the formal naval shipyard). The parks is a human made landscape that was once going to be an anchor point to a southern bay bridge that was never built. This area has been cleaned up by the Port of San Francisco and is now a 22 acre park that represents on of the few wetlands that still exists in the city and county of San Francisco.

So I figured I’d head east, across town, to see a rock sandpiper (Calidris ptilocnemis) before it really started to rain and before the bird relocated ahead of a December winter storm.

Like it’s name implies, a rock sandpiper, is found on rocks. And Heron’s Head Park provides many rocks for this sandpiper to forage and roost. Now I had to find the piper amongst the rock before the wind and rain made observation a struggle.

I head out on the path to the point noting the large numbers of double-crested cormorants flying from the north, joining a large raft of birds that was growing to the waters of the southwest.

As I headed out to the point, the surge was making whitewater on the southern side of the rock-levy. The first sandpipers I spotted was four least sandpipers on the southern side. This was a good sign because the the northern visitor was associating with least sandpipers. But the rock was nowhere to be seen.

I retraced my steps to the west and I spotted a spotted sandpiper bobbing on a rock to my right. This was a nice consolation.

I turned back to the east and out to the point for one last look for the rock sandpiper. That’s when I saw a larger peep slowly making its way over the rocks to the north. I didn’t need binoculars to identify this bird as I was able to stand right next to it. As Pete Dunne notes, “A tame bird that allows close approach. ”

The rock sandpiper in it’s desired habitat, rocks!