The pelicans at home

The newly-renovated boathouse/restaurant opened about a month ago, and I wondered what real estate the cormorants would stink up now that their old pier had been removed. Turns out they seem to have followed their old pier to the other side of the lake, where it's now sinking into the mud.


Here, various birds have had no trouble putting their feet up on the coffee table, and their poop all over the couch. Here we see a white pelican, likely on its way to the coast from breeding grounds inland; and double crested cormorants, which are common in summer but will probably leave the lake soon.

Though they nest in very different habitats, at this time of year the three species cross paths for an interspecific jamboree. And when brown pelicans come sit on the porch, they bring the moonshine. No. Not really. They just hum fragments of "Slough foot Sue..."

The brown pelicans have finished nesting in the islands of southern California and Mexico, and are now heading north...

...with an occasional layover on a crowded dock.

Unlike the white pelicans, brown pelicans hunt by diving from the air with a very impressive splash (which I didn't manage to capture.) Here's one post-snack:

It soon takes off again--

--and loops back around for another attempt. Come on, fishy!

Hangin' with Mr. Cooper's Hawk

I spotted an exciting silhouette atop the bird dome this morning:

Periodically, I see a hawk buzz the pigeons inside, making them flap frantically from one side of the cage to the other. This is the first time I had my camera ready.

I'm not really sure what the hawk is thinking as it circles the cage. Does it think that it could really catch a pigeon if it could just get at the creamy center of the bird-cage truffle? Here it is perching on top of the keepers' entrance. "Ahhhh, for the keyring.... and thumbs. Thumbs would be good."

"Or maybe somebody made a mistake and left a panel open?

"Better check all the welds just to be sure."

Maybe it's just attracted to looking at the pigeons? Here it is taking a human's eye view of them.

They don't like that very much.

But the pigeons really HAAAAATE it when the hawk goes all like:

"Pant, pant. Hunting caged pigeons is harder than I thought. They have some mighty defenses."

I used the "burst" mode on my camera for the first time. I only got one good shot that way, but it was a quite artsy one:

So the key in telling a Cooper's hawk from a sharp-shinned hawk is that the former has a rounded tail and the latter a square tail. Also, Cooper's is slightly bigger. Here is another example of a bird where I just don't have enough experience to compare the two well. This tail looks pretty round... right? But then it also looks slightly notched, which is a character of the sharp-shinned.
This bird was larger than a robin, about crow-sized, which would seem to place it in the Cooper's category. But then the female is larger than the male in most raptors, so if it's a lady sharp shinned, it could be as big as a male Coopers'. Making things still more difficult, this is an immature (=brown 'n streaky) bird. I'm sure the birders monitoring the raptor migration over in Marin could tell easily, but I'm an undecided amateur even with this pretty clear photo.

Anyway, hawks are cool. Happy migration, friend!

Mergansers!

Periodically I will see something unexpected at the lake, like these two mergansers. I've never seen a merganser in brackish water/marsh before, but here they are. They've been hanging around the mallards for a few days now.

Mergansers are fish-eating ducks; they have "sawbilled" beaks to help them grab the fish. The rearmost merganser in this shot has something red on its back, like a leaf is stuck to it or something.

There are two very similar species: the common and the red-breasted (aka more rare). I thiiiink this one is the common, because it has a fairly clear delineation between the red head and grey body, but having never seen the other kind, I'm not really sure.

Good OLD Lake Merritt

The Oakland Museum of California has a pretty cool "virtual collection" of old postcards, photos, posters, and other ephemera. You can search it by Oakland neighborhood, so naturally I used it to see what Lake Merritt looked like back in the day.

1977


1985

One thing I noticed was that there are several duck species in these photos that I have never seen at the lake. In the picture below, you can see a few wigeon(s?) just underneath the swan.

And in this photo you can see an entire horde of pintails thronging to be fed.

1920

I'm wondering if old photos like these have ever been used to collect data on population size.


1922


1920-1950


1930

Farewell to Summer

My brief summer blogging hiatus, caused by having a full time job, is now at an end; so is summer. The lake is showing all the signs of California fall.


Falling oak leaves and their accompanying smell are central to the show, but there are some prettier elements too; salt marsh gumplant, part of the sunflower family, is in full bloom. This plant looks a bit like a ratty old weed, but in fact it's quite important to marsh ecology. Highly salt-tolerant, it grows at the edges of marshes and provides food and shelter for various endangered marshbeasts, like clapper rails and salt-marsh-harvest-mice and creatures-from-the-black-lagoons. Also it apparently smells like Juicy Fruit.


Buckeyes are turning their candy-scented flowers into big chunky brown eyeball fruits which will drop to the ground just in time to catch the winter rains.

Naked ladies (Amaryllis belladonna) are blooming and dying. These are South African natives, but they titillate us all over the Bay Area too. They're "naked" because the leaves and flowers appear at completely different times; the pink flowers sprout from a pile of dried up dead stuff, generating their other nickname, surprise lily.

Morning glory has many species, some of which are native to CA and some not so much. The way to tell them apart is long and tortured and involves the word "glabrous," so you will have to enjoy this patch I found without knowing more than the family.

Autumn leaves might drift past Johnny Mercer's window, but here in Oakland it's more likely to be goose feathers. They're pretty much done shedding now; but can you believe they didn't reduce, re-use OR recycle their feathers? They just left them all over the beach. Litterbugs.