Park News Feb 3 2026

February 3, 2026

With two events focusing on them, the Burrowing Owls in the park held center stage in the park last week. But thousands of Scaup are in the wings and could make a dramatic entrance any day.

On Wednesday at noon, I presented a Zoom talk on the Burrowing Owls in our park as part of a Bay Nature magazine presentation. The event sold out early, according to Bay Nature events coordinator Lia Keener. Exactly 100 people participated. Most came from around the region. Others came from Oregon, Washington State, Kansas, and one participant from Hamburg, Germany. I showed a 41-minute slide show containing numerous video segments. A Q&A session followed, wrapping up the hour-long program. Later I met several participants in person in the park. The program helped to brand Chavez Park as a place to see Burrowing Owls.

On Saturday, birding class teacher Rachel Katz brought more than 20 mostly young people to the park to see what feathers they could see. They saw a Savannah Sparrow, an American Pipit, Western Meadowlarks, a Great Blue Heron, a Double-crested Cormorant, many Western Gulls, and a Great Egret just on their way to look at the Burrowing Owls. Both of the currently resident owls were visible at the time, although the Shy Owl was well concealed in the brush. The owl at Perch E (look at the map) was much more cooperative. It put up with a mob of binocular-bearing birders without any sign of special nervousness.

My inbox has been flooded with Burrowing Owl photos as a result of all the attention, and I’m going to publish all of them, even though many are similar. Remember, a photograph is not just a subject, it’s a subject as seen by a person. So even though the subjects seen in these photos may seem identical, the persons doing the seeing are entirely individual. In the galleries below, Amy Faulkner (@naturewalkswithamy on Instagram) lives in Marin and came to our park after hearing about our owls in my Bay Nature talk. Trish Powell and Rick Meyler are members of Rachel Katz’ birding class. Each of the other contributors has been featured in these pages earlier.

This first gallery is of the Burrowing Owl at Perch E (look it up).

Note that this owl sometimes hunkered down so low that you could only see the top of its head and its eyes. Many park visitors walked right by it and never noticed it.

Next is a smaller gallery of the Shy Owl at Perch C (map). This owl mostly stayed concealed in the shrubbery but occasionally came out a bit and took the rays. When approached from the traditional angle, near the southern gate of the owl preserve, the bird was practically invisible, as in the fourth photo below. You had to position yourself further south, near the Marina bird sign, to get a better angle.

This photo survey wouldn’t be complete without the dark shots achieved by Hao Tran. With his high-ISO camera, and great patience and some luck, he captured images of an owl or owls outside the reserved area after sunset.

Other Feathers

Before we get to the Scaup, here are some other birds lensed this week:

Great Blue Heron in flight. Eildert Beeftink photo.

Short-billed Gull. Eildert Beeftink photo

Male Mallard resting on the riprap east of the Burrowing Owl area

Red-throated Loon. Eildert Beeftink photo

And some smaller images:

And Now the Scaup

This photo by Eildert Beeftink only begins to hint at the number of birds involved. It shows two rafts of birds, one nearby and the other a bit farther away, both off the north and northeast coast of our park.

This panoramic video below, taken on Feb 1, scans one raft of birds from one end to the other. It took more than three minutes to complete the span, and that’s at a speed where you really can’t see much detail. If you want to try to count them you can advance the video frame by frame. I heard estimates around two to three thousand. The huge majority are Scaup, most believed to be Greater Scaup, but there are also wigeons, gulls, and others mixed in.

Here, finally, is a fixed-position video of somewhere in the middle of the bird mass, giving a better look at their activity.

Sun and Moon

When I first started taking pictures in the park, one of my main themes was the sunset. I put together an album of dozens of sunset photos. But I haven’t posted a sunset photo in a long time. That’s why it’s a special pleasure to post two of them now, plus a moon photo.