Monday, September 7, 2009

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

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3 comments:

  1. judytunaSeptember 10, 2009 at 2:07 AM

    Does the one labeled 1920 say "lake merritt duck banding station" ???? So many ducks!

    Do you hope that one day your photos will be used by people to find out about the ecology of 2000-era lake merritt? Isn't it trippy? Now with cameras everywhere, we are all historians!

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  2. judytunaSeptember 10, 2009 at 2:08 AM

    Are the children on that sign trying to touch the duck??

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  3. LisaSeptember 11, 2009 at 1:45 PM

    Let's hope they don't succeed in touching it; that thing is HUGE!

    re: using my photos... I recently read a study where they used google image search to get a sample of how many people waved right- vs left-handed. So, you never know I guess? Yay history!

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