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.

Signs of summer: Ch-ch-changes

Besides the hundreds of molting geese, there are other changes going on as spring turns into summer. Some are pretty, like butterflies 'n flowers:

Flowering buckeye looks like it just woke up and hasn't done its hair yet... but it smells great.

(Check out the bonus ants on this iris:)

Some changes are not as picturesque, like this horrible sea monster pile of algae. The Lake Merritt Institute explains that as the day length increases, algae begins to proliferate in the shallow water just offshore. When it dies and rots, it smells like you would imagine a horrible sea monster pile of algae would, plus it lowers water oxygen levels, so the city removes it with a special harvester boat just like... they would remove... a horrible monster... OK, I admit it's a bad analogy. Later in the summer, an even more annoying water plant, wigeon grass, will start growing like crazy. The city evidently removes literal TONS of the stuff during July and August.


Sheltering in all that algae are hundreds of cormorant snacks in the form of tiny baby fish. Cormorants, like pelicans, just HATE getting algae on their faces before a big date, so the fish are probably pretty safe hiding in there.

Speaking of cormorants, their numbers are increasing as summer approaches. A few of them are breeding in the dead trees on the islands, and their combined grunting makes the islands sound like they're home to a flock of arboreal pigs. Later in summer I'll probably be able to get some good pictures of them as they herd fish cooperatively.

More Signs of Spring, or, a hodgepogerry of photography

It's staying light in the evening now, long enough to walk around and get some good shots after dinner. Who's hanging out at the lake these days? (Besides me!?)

Forster's terns are still around and eating fish bigger than their heads! Look at the razor sharp tail on that ninja seabird.

Hummingbird that color coordinates itself with its perch:

Check out the lovely blue green face of this great egret.

And check out egret's supercool park bench hangout. I like its posture here--it had just flown up and landed.

It also comes with a very extendable head, and a bad urban attitude. It was actually taller than me when it did this:


Random turtle. They show up in the lake periodically. They may be washing downstream during the rains, or people may be releasing unwanted pets into the lake. Either way, brackish water is not good for turtles. At least this one made it to the beach:


For Heidi: here are the goslings I promised. This is the third group I've seen, and I think this pair is actually the two I made fun of earlier for defending the spot on top of the chain link maintenance cage. I don't know how you geese did it, but I think you did it. There are three babies; can you spot them all?


And buckeye is blooming now, an adaptation that lets a broad-leaved deciduous tree survive California's summer--it makes a very early effort to get pollinated before it runs out of water and sheds all its leaves around July:

Spring!

January showers bring February flowers, I guess. It's spring at Lake Merrit and everybody knows it. Hummingbirds know it because they are busy defending clumps of sage flowers from anyone who comes near. Of course they'll try to stab other hummers, but I also saw this one attack a seed-eating goldfinch ("If I can't eat these seeds NO ONE WILL!") and an unsuspecting human ("Git away from mah nectar!") There's a reason the Aztec god of war is a hummingbird.






Buckeyes and daffodils also got the memo: