Things I saw just walking around.

Lots of friends spotted at the lake today.

Lady ruddy duck, resting tidily on a small rock, probably on her way to breed somewhere cool:

When she saw me photographing her, she looked a bit indignant, then waddled off.

Resident pelican is getting all decked out in bright orange, head tuft, and the beginning of a beak bump poking out from behind the wing...

Eared grebes still going strong, but they'll be gone any time now...

I think I bore them: they're always yawning when I approach. Right before they dive underwater to show just how jaded they are.

A rare sighting of a land cormorant. It was pulling at some frayed string at the edge of the rowing dock. Nest materials perhaps?

Night heron with green and gray stripe background.

Some cheerful humans who got excited when they saw me pointing my camera into trees. So I took their picture too. They waved (not pictured).


And another in the series of "animals sniffing the camera."

Friends!

Night Time

Last night, walking home in the dark, I noticed that there were tons of pigeons huddled together on the streetlights. Since they're normally on the ground during the day, this got me wondering about how else the landscape of the lake might change at night. Would I find birds in different locations, or doing different things?

I decided to check it out. I also put the high ISO and flash powers of my camera to some serious testing.

The first, obvious answer was that, yes, the night herons really are active at night. They leave the freshwater duck pond and spread out to various perches overlooking the water. The storm drain outlets are usually claimed, as are the shallow water areas:

I wonder if they fish all night, or only early evening? These pictures were taken between 8 and 9 pm.
More surprising, perhaps, was the number of other birds that are awake and active at night. I spotted some scaups swimming around. I was surprised at first, but then remembered that a lot of scaups seem to be resting and floating with heads under wing for a lot of the day. Maybe they are somewhat nocturnal?



I also found some insomni-ducks:

A lot of mallards and some Canada geese were standing around on Swedish beach, in the shallows. They grunt-quacked begrudgingly at being woken up and forced to move into deeper water. You can see their eyes shining. At the Exploratorium, when you see the cow-eye dissection, one of the things they show you is a part of the eye called the tapetum. It's basically a bonus reflector in the eye that helps animals see in low light; it's also what causes the eyeshine in the photos. I noticed that the mallards' eye shine looks greener, and the geese eyes look redder. This could be a result of the flash color, too, or the angle of the light...

I found some more pigeons sleeping in a tree; seagulls were conspicuously absent. The highlight of the walk was two raccoons washing their paws and drinking from the duck pond:

While taking this picture, I was aiming at a completely dark area, hoping I found the right spot and that the flash would illuminate the racoon. I guessed right, but the camera focus wasn't cooperating... Check out the raccoon's eyeshine:

There is a raccoon inside of this thing. I didn't quite get the camera in time to capture its descent. What is it doing in there? Unknown. I'm guessing it's studying all the legal 3-letter Scrabble words.


I was surprised how much ambient light there was, allowing for a few nice shots.

Joy Fall

It's fall! Some birds are just totally in shock.
Heron: "DUDE it's NOVEMBER WTF!"

Migrant birds are returning to the lake. Here's a glaucous winged gull that attracted my attention with its strange yodeling call. It sounds quite different from a Western gull when claiming food. Or maybe only when it's claiming a bit of roast chicken someone dumped. I don't know whose action is more surprising: the guy who thought it would be fine to throw a chicken to the birds, or the pigeons who thought it would be fine to eat it. Blech, guys, srsly.

Ruddy ducks have arrived. These are easy to ID at long distances because of the white cheek, and the (usually) long pointy tail.

Ring billed gulls are back too and looking for action. "Hey, where's MY roast chicken?"

And of course scaups. I have vowed that this will be the year I learn to tell greater from lesser. I have long wondered why the majority of scaups I see at the lake are male. One theory I had was that females and males arrived and left at different times. The first one I saw this year was female:

PAY HERE, BITCHAZ

Oakland recently extended its pay-parking hours to 8 pm. And it looks like they hired some serious enforcers.

In Which Night Heron Takes a Bath (courtesy of AA Milne)

I happened to be contemplating the bird lagoon's algae, feather, and poo levels (=high) when I spotted this night heron doing something unusual. Not so much bathing as just.... standing. In a melancholy sort of way.

I think AA Milne can help tell this story, with Night Heron is playing the Part of Eeyore:


"Night Heron, what are you doing there?" said Rabbit.

"I'll give you three guesses, Rabbit. Digging holes in the ground? Wrong. Leaping from branch to branch of a young oak tree? Wrong. Waiting for somebody to help me out of the river? Right. Give Rabbit time, and he'll always get the answer."

"But, Night Heron," said Pooh, "was it a Joke, or an Accident? I mean - "
"I didn't stop to ask, Pooh. Even at the very bottom of the river, I didn't stop to say to myself, `Is this a Hearty Joke or the Merest Accident?'. "

"I just floated to the surface and said to myself, `it's wet'. If you know what I mean. "


"When stuck in the river, it is best to dive and swim to the bank yourself before someone drops a large stone on your chest in an attempt to hoosh you there."


"Oh, Night Heron, you are wet!" said Piglet, feeling him.

Night Heron shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.


"I don't hold with all this washing," grumbled Night Heron. "This modern behind-the-ears business."

Stumpy

Sometimes you can get to know individual birds at the lake because of something distinctive about them. A lot of times it's an injury, like a missing toe. Several times in April, I spotted Stumpy the snowy egret, who is missing 3 out of 4 toes on the right foot.

Missing toes might be a big deal for a snowy egret, because they use their bright yellow feet to churn up the mud as they walk, scaring snacks out of hiding and into their waiting beaks. But I saw Stumpy foraging in the shallows and the stump seemed to work just fine as a churning device, and the remaining toe seems to be enough for balance.

There's also Stumpy the Night Heron, who's just missing the tip of one toe on the left foot. Kind of hard to see in the photo but enough to make this bird uniquely identifiable.


Having seen the way these guys fight, I wouldn't be surprised if a nasty peck from a rival caused this injury.

Black Crowned Thug Herons

Young night herons, like the one above, look so different from adults that they almost seem like a different animal. (And considering I've heard people in the park confuse night herons for owls, hawks, and ducks, it's easy to see how a brown one vs a grey one would cause even more difficulty for them.) The Birder's Handbook says that they usually take 2-3 years to reach breeding age, but doesn't mention how long it takes for them to get adult plumage. Though all night herons are as surly as human teenagers, I have been checking the young ones periodically for signs of more grown-up fashion (They stop sagging their pants and their feathers become dry-clean only). Yesterday I spotted a few likely candidates. This one is still fairly streaky, but the characteristic black crown is becoming darker. This one also had bright yellow-green legs (compared to the one above, whose legs were pale yellow-white.)


Looking even a bit more mature is this guy being skeptically eyed by an adult. "Hmmmm, your crown may be black, but the rest of your body is a dingy gray-brown. Come back when you've cleaned up, sonnyboy!"
Interestingly, not all of the young herons are progressing at the same rate. Is this because they hatched at slightly different times? Or another reason?

While I was taking in the magestic beauty of these scruffy juveniles, a woman came over to the fence and started feeding the birds, tossing cheerios, bread, and sundry cheesy pizza crusts into the enclosure.

"What's that you say? Cheesy pizza crusts?"


The addition of food caused a mad scuffle, with geese hissing over the cheerios and herons ready to break a beer bottle over the head of anyone who tried to compete for a cheesy bit. I have never seen them so active. Although my camera was running out of battery and suffering from a delayed shutter response, I got a few pictures of how herons handle conflict.

Step 1:Extend your neck and assess how burly your opponent is:

Step 2: Your opponent is now checking you out as well. Quick, look like you're so gigantic that nobody will question your inaliable right to the Cheerios. Raise up your backles (hackles for birds?) and stick your three white tentacle feathers into the air.

"Thish here'sh MY Cheeriosh, SHEE?"



Step 3: RUMMMMMBLLLLLLE!

Chicks and ducks and geese BETTER scurry! This pizza is MINE. SRSLY.

I didn't get a good shot of the best of the action, where one heron flies up and tries to peck the other from above. I almost got hit in the face by a heron wing though.

After the frenzy was over, I noticed one pathetic survivor of the skirmish. The lady had thrown in some moldy tortillas, bag and all. I asked her about this when I saw her do it and she seemed unconcerned. "They'll get it out."

15 minutes later the bag had been pecked at listlessly by a coot, pooped on by a goose, and stepped on by a heron. The coot's pecking seemed to indicate that it could *see* that there was food in the bag, but it didn't explore further to find the open hole where it could have gotten the food out. If there had been any seagulls there (like those at the Palace of Fine Arts lagoon) I'm sure they would have ripped that thing open immediately, as I've seen them do with other plastic bags, wrappers, and even tupperware. This is interesting to me--are different bird species smarter or dumber than others? Why could habituated seagulls learn to peck open plastic bags, and pelicans learn to get excited when seeing a plastic bag... but other birds didn't seem to associate a plastic bag with food? This can't be the first time bread in a plastic bag has been in the enclosure. Why didn't these birds succeed in getting the tortillas when they were going nuts over all the other food? Or are moldy whole wheat tortillas just as unappetizing to birds as they are to humans?

PS: Another park visitor eventually jumped the fence, dumped out the tortillas, and threw away the bag. Geese ate the tortillas within minutes.