Park News 10/28/2024
Owl Hiding
This morning (Monday 10/28) a Burrowing Owl perched so low in Perch B that I had trouble digging it out even with my telephoto lens. This is the most I saw from the paved trail outside the fence:
Often, moving my camera to the Open Circle Viewpoint, aka the Spiral, yields a full-body image, or almost. Not today. The owl had chosen a perch where only its head could be seen from that angle. But that was better than from the path. Out of almost ten minutes of video, I chose these excerpts that show the bird at its most active. If you look carefully you can see that its pupils are of unequal sizes when one eye is in the sun and the other is not. That’s something only owls can do; if your pupils acted that way, a doctor would send you for an MRI to check for brain injury.
I can’t tell whether this is the same owl we saw on Friday. I couldn’t see enough of its torso. But, given that this owl chose the same perch, chances are better than even that it’s the same individual. Where it goes on its off days remains a mystery.
Other Feathers of the Week
The Brown Pelicans were putting on a diving show Sunday morning (see these snippets on YouTube), and a trio of Forster’s Terns added their acrobatics. While my camera could often keep up with the stately motion of the big birds, catching the swift terns proved frustrating. When I got the pictures home, I saw that a tern had flown into my picture of the pelican, without my being aware of it at the time. Photographer’s luck! Later I managed to get another snapshot of a tern purely by pointing the camera in the general direction of the streaking bird and holding the shutter button down. It’s not high art but sometimes it works. One good tern …
The Snowy Egrets were back this week, six of them, four hanging together and the others roaming individually. These pictures came from the east side of the park on Saturday morning Oct 26.
After weeks of hearing but not seeing them, I was finally able to get some better pictures of the migrant White-crowned Sparrows. These are amazing birds, able to fly thousands of miles from their nests in the Arctic to our park, relying in part on their sense of the earth’s magnetic field. We also have a small population of year-round residents, the Nuttall’s subspecies, that mostly show themselves in the Native Plant Area. I saw their migrant siblings mostly toward the shoreline.
A byproduct of scanning the rocks for Burrowing Owls was this encounter with the pretty Yellow-rumped Warbler in its winter plumage. They hopped around on the rip-rap and flitted in the Fennel bushes.
And here’s a collection of miscellaneous other birds I saw during the past seven days.
I’ll have more photos and stories in the next edition. If you subscribe, you won’t miss it.
Zoom Meeting on Park Path and Restroom
Another meeting with City staff regarding planned work on the paved perimeter trail and a permanent restroom is scheduled for Wednesday Oct 30 at 6pm on Zoom. For a review of the first meeting in this series, check this link. The Zoom link for the Oct. 30 meeting is here.
At the previous meeting, the perimeter trail project moved with consensus, apart from a bicycle racing advocate who argued for a yellow line down the middle of the path, with one half for fast-moving bicycles. There was strong opposition by participants who felt that the trail was mainly for pedestrians, and bicycles were fine so long as they moved at a safe speed. Conceivably the interests of bicycle racers could be accommodated by staging organized bicycle races, where the path would be closed to pedestrians for an hour or so, two or three times a year.
On the restroom project, the city at the last meeting displayed little progress. In the meantime, a soil analysis has been performed (See “Drilling for Soil,” Aug 24 2024) and the results of that should be on the table.
Summer Schedule
This blog has switched to “Summer Schedule” year round. That means posts will drop whenever there’s material and motivation, which may be more or less often than the former regular-as-clockwork Friday 5 pm publication schedule. To avoid missing out, subscribe.
Great pictures Marty. It’s really fun to see the owl again even if it’s being elusive.
Owl: Several of us saw the owl very late in the day Sunday, almost dark. It was standing right up on top of a rock by the shore where we could have more easily seen it from the path outside the fence where we were — had it been a little earlier/lighter. It was about midway between the spiral circle and the other circle, maybe closer to the spiral. Sorry, no camera. We looked for a couple of minutes or so. One of us coughed right as we were leaving and the owl disappeared. We were so glad to have our first sighting this year, however hazy.