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: