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.

Brown Blurry Birds 2

I think there are a lot of fledglings out this time of year, floppily learning when to flee from nosy humans with cameras. This phoebe, happily, didn't seem to fear me:






Parents of fledglings are getting distracted too. I was walking in the garden when I heard a persistent cheeping coming from somewhere nearby. Turns out it was this little towhee with its mouth stuffed full of bug.

Was it bribing a fledgling to get off of Facebook and get some fresh air, out of the nest? I couldn't locate any other birds around, but given how hidden this one was, I wouldn't be surprised if I missed part of this story. Anyway it kept calling from this one spot, bug in beak, for several minutes. "Mmph! Mm mmmph!"

Here's another towhee chirping with glee as it triumphantly blocks me from getting a shot that isn't backlit:


I was also able to locate this chickadee from its calls. Sometimes you just hear them going nuts in the trees. This was either a confused baby that hadn't learned that low hanging tree branches are unsafe...

Or a parent bird trying to decoy me away from its precious babies. It worked, because I sure couldn't find the nest...

Finally, here is a slightly better picture of a goldfinch than the last one I took.

Joy spring, or What we found in Briones

I got a good healthy dose of wildflowers, oak trees, and green rolling hills this weekend up at Briones Regional Park. I was hoping for more wildflowers actually, but we at least found some lupine, buttercup, and poppy... the usual. A few bird friends came out to play as well:

Here's a Black Phoebe doing the phoebe thing--sallying. They lurk on a branch or bit of barbed wire like the creepy flystalkers they are. And when they see a tiny little flying lunch--


--off they go in pursuit. The phoebe's family is the flycatchers, and even in other languages their name captures this habit. In Italian it's an acchiappamosche (catches-flies) or a pigliamosche (takes-flies). After it nabs the little doodad, it's back to the perch:

(I took this picture by putting the camera up to the binocualrs! Lowest-tech.) Phoebes sally. Two girl names for one little birdy.

Then we saw a fence lizard trying to become a tree-lizard:

And after poking around in a dead fallen tree, Tom found some weird orange things that might be eggs:


And a centipede:
You can tell it's a centipede because it has 100 legs, all of which it is willing to use to murder your babies. If you're a sowbug anyway.

Now for some forensics: MORE DEAD THINGS ALERT:

We smelled a skunkety skunk skunk while hiking, and that made us look around for the source of the smell. And we found it:


Ok, now here is what's super freaky about this. That thing on the right that looks like a possum tail? That's the spine. That pink thing on the left, near the stick? That's the skull, with the nose-end still in the skin and the rear part (the occipital and parietal) skinned and bare. And in the middle are some leg bones, paws, and an inside-out, holy skunk skin, Batman! Help us, Sherlock Bones! What kind of predator would do this? How could it do it without thumbs!? It is very weird. The internet is inconclusive on this subject, and as I often find, all the real knowledge is locked away behind JSTOR or other things that you have to pay for in order to get access. Wikipedia, HMPH. You can't answer THIS mystery.


Here is what I was able to piece together:
--Bears often turn their prey inside out and so do sea lions. Neither is a candidate in Briones.
--Coyotes, bobcats, and possibly foxes are big enough to kill a skunk, but would likely bury or at least move the carcass from the side of the trail where it was killed. So, they are probably not the killers.
--Racoons could probably kill a young skunk, but I didn't find any descriptions where they turned their prey inside out.
--Great Horned owls are known to kill skunks, but I couldn't find descriptions of what parts of the skunk they would eat, or what they might do to the carcass.
--Eagles are also said to skin out their prey like this, as well as leaving talon-holes in the skin. Although I've never seen one, eBird has sightings listed of Golden Eagles in Briones. However, they are also supposed to leave white streaks of poo everywhere around the carcass, which we did not observe.

Well, until I get a chance to dig deeper into some better documentation, this will remain a mystery for now. And now, just so you don't have nightmares about decapitated skunks, here's a little scrub jay and blue sky. SLEEEEEEEP! AND FORGEEEEEET....