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