La Jolla

One last stop on the San Diego birdwatching tour: La Jolla, the Children's Pool at Casa beach. This spot has been nominated by a bunch of harbor seals as "best place to scratch your butt while humans watch."

These lazy, slug-like seals recover from the freezing clutches of the Pacific by lolling (and LOLing) in the sand where there was once a kiddie pool. They rudely sleep, scratch, and even have their babies right where HUMAN babies could be swimming. Apparently some people got mad about the seals acting all "Seal Privilege" and wanted to make the seals leave, or perhaps dress them up like toddlers, and there is a big controversy. So far the seals get to stay.

Like most of the animals I get to photograph, they're habituated to people, looking up longingly in the hope that you'll drop your halibut-flavored ice cream cone.


In addition to the adorable waddling of these Sea Fatties, there were a few birds at the beach. First, a Black Phoebe. Now, these things like water, but this is the first time I've seen one actually on the beach, foraging amidst the kelp.

Lots of brown pelicans do their part to keep the beach stinky and poo-covered:

And I also got some shots of a Heerman's gull. E-bird lists them as appearing in Alameda county (with many sightings at Eastshore park, not too far from Lake Merritt), but I don't think I've ever seen one there. Anyway, like the ring-billed gull, it's something of a gull freebie: the only one with a red beak and greyish body. They have this streaky looking head during winter, and a white head when trying to get a date.

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!

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