Trip Reports

April 22, 2020 – Lake Merritt

The 4th Wednesday of April fell on Earth Day this year, with the Earth rather quieter than usual in the Bay Area, and doubtless many other places as well. Golden Gate Bird Alliance cancelled the walk again as required, but I’d quietly passed the word that I’d be there anyway. My co-leader and two other birders joined me for a safely distanced bit of permitted outdoor exercise, plus a pause by the bird paddock to hang the Earth-from-space flag one of the birders brought.

It was a beautiful clear day, sunny and not hot, but the air seemed strange. Looking out from the starting point at the dome cage end of the boathouse lot – empty because this time the main drive-in entrances to the park really were blocked off – we saw a faint sparkle across the islands, like a thin gold mist. Not gold, but more valuable to the Violet-green  and Northern Rough-winged Swallows that visit the lake in the late spring and summer: a fog of midges, more than we’d seen (or at least noticed) before. Which made it even odder that we didn’t see our most common flycatcher, the Black Phoebe, all morning – the first April since 2010 to miss that bird. Perhaps there were simply too many places for a phoebe to get breakfast for us to spot one in action!

 As hoped last month, the Double-crested Cormorants have at last  established their rookery on the island, with 9 busy nests. It’s smaller than usual, limited to the one really bare tree, so the tree they’ve only half killed seems to be getting the year off. That’s ideal, as far as I’m concerned: cormorants with fuzzy black babies to watch, plus a chance of recovery for a far from full-sized tree. (In case you were wondering, these birds – our only tree-nesting cormorants – prefer to build in the sun. If they can find exposed spots, they won’t bother trees with a lot of leaves… but they’ll take them if that’s all they can get, and the situation corrects itself over the next few years as their droppings convert leafy trees into nice sunny bare ones.)

A Green Heron prowled along one of the islands as we gathered for the walk. Though that’s always a welcome sight, this one was more frustrating than usual as the best the binoculars could do was show us a gray blob balanced on orange sticks floating from one gray rock to another, with a glimpse of the rufous breast and dark beak for those who knew what to look for and where to look for it.…

June 24, 2020 – Lake Merritt

The June 4th-Wednesday unofficial Golden Gate Bird Alliance walk – fourth of the pandemic season – drew four birders besides the leaders, and mixed up the numbers by finding all five of the heron species that frequent the lake. Most notably, a juvenile Green Heron  swooped down at an adult  and got firmly pecked away, unfed. The life of an adolescent is tough everywhere! The youngster landed on the rocky waterline of the bird paddock and prowled toward the human group, snapping things off the rocks and once out of the air on the way. We also had both adult and juvenile Black-crowned Night-Herons and  Great and Snowy Egrets, and a Great Blue Heron flew slowly past like an airborne battleship. (Neither Great had showed up for the June walk since 2006, and we’d seen each of them just once this year, one in January and the other in February!)

In the cormorant rookery, parents tended two youngsters in the last of the nine nests; the babies were almost full-sized but clearly a ways from fledging, being still covered with inky black down. Their juvenal plumage will be various shades of bronze, dark on the back and pale to almost white on the breast, but if (as I did for years!) you look for nestlings lighter than their black parents, it always looks like there aren’t any.

The lake surface was thin of company: the winter ducks are long gone, and we saw no grebes, not even a coot! Of course, there were lots and lots of Canada Geese – several hundred of which are here for molt migration, cruising the lake and grazing the lawns while waiting for their flight suits to grow back. Mallards were out in force, too, more drakes than hens, though they’re hard to spot in their eclipse plumage. And their flight feathers, just like the geese, so it makes sense for them to go for camouflage for a while. Only their yellow bills reveal their sex right now. Once their flight feathers grow back in, they’ll molt the drab feathers and turn bright again – just in time for the fall, which is party season for ducks.

We also saw several White Pelicans here to visit with Hank (our rescue bird) though not nearly so many as the 50-plus reported from the preceding Sunday. Several were fishing the lake, and a squad of seven or eight cruised overhead, looking like pterodactyls come to life.…

February 24, 2021 – Lake Merritt

Falcon Flies at Lake Merritt! And perches. And looks around. And takes a little circling flight. And perches. And sits looking down at the lake and across at the Bellevue Club for so long that the February 4th-Wednesday not-quite-Golden-Gate-Audubon walking party eventually strolls onward, heads buzzing with Peregrine Falcon delight but fickle eyes searching for new wonders…. Though the park offers a seemingly endless pigeon buffet, this was only the third peregrine sighting on the walk since record-keeping started in 2009: high point of the day and maybe the year.

Not that there wasn’t plenty else to see. The nest sites on the island tree were still unclaimed, but a Double-crested Cormorant with crests perched on one of the floats with another cormorant cuddled close, offering hope for this year’s season. The nearby waters held the usual crowd of American Coots, not-yet-ruddy Ruddy Ducks, and Greater and Lesser Scaup, along with the better part of a dozen moon-cheeked Common Goldeneyes, and farther out – toward the other side of the lake – a small flock of Red-breasted Mergansers swam with their long ragged crests blowing in the wind.
All along the lake, we saw lots of grebes – Pied-billed, Eared, and even one each Western and Clark’s. By contrast, the herons were almost missing. One lone lorn Snowy Egret was the only member of the whole class to put in an appearance, which feels like an excuse to add a sighting from the day before the walk: a Green Heron was fishing along the island rocks with all the feathers from the base of its beak over the top of its head raised in a 3″ tall punk hairdo. Though I’d never seen the like – a Green Heron’s head generally forms one smooth line through the spearpoint beak – it can’t be all that unusual: the first handful of images provided by Professor Google includes one from the Audubon field guide <https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/green-heron> that almost matches it, so you can see for yourself.

The lawns were jumping with small birds – mostly White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows, but with a bunch of Yellow-rumped Warblers pursuing the ground-foraging segment of their jobs (eating everything anyone else eats, and more of it if they can get it). Western bluebirds hopped up and down between grass and branches, as always an astonishment of color in the near-summer-strength sun. They’d nested already – several were clearly juveniles (distinctive streaked gray bodies and blue flight feathers), even though the Sibley guidebook says to expect that plumage in May rather than February.…

January 27, 2021 – Lake Merritt

The January still-not-Golden-Gate-Audubon walk was a big day for species count – 55 in all, counting two reported from mid afternoon, a tie with the 2014 record for the month – but what the five of us (three birders and two leaders) were mostly saying was “Where are all the birds?” Numbers of individuals, especially scaup, were way low, leaving large expanses of the lake almost empty.

But only almost. Comforting ourselves by figuring the absentees were probably feeding elsewhere in calm waters, and with what we could see (eventually including two kinds of merganser drake, among the most decorative ducks to visit us here), we settled into our usual practice of savoring what was before our eyes. That began with the barrier floats, occupied by a few dozen Black-crowned Night-Herons of all ages, plus Hank-the-rescue-pelican, a Great Blue Heron, a Snowy Egret, and almost no gulls at all. The Red-breasted Merganser drake swam off to the right of the floats, and a few Common Goldeneyes bobbed up and down beside them.

Then we headed round to the bird paddock, enjoying the ride-‘em sheep toy still clinging to its spot by the dome cage door. The paddock was also relatively thin of company, but our female Northern Pintail was still in residence, standing on the edge of the pond and showing off her slate-gray feet – a big contrast with the orange-footed Mallards.

Along the lake shore, the first Mew Gull since 2019 sat in a line of Ring-bills. Nearby, a pair each of Clark’s and Western Grebes swam together, close enough to make it easy to tell them apart.

The day’s mystery slept on one of the near islands: a biggish lump lying perpendicular to the shore, black head twisted round and buried in a black back between bright white sides, with screaming orange bits on the ground in the middle. Huh what? Mutt Mallard? Careful observation showed the hint of a crest stirring along the back of the head, and that – coupled with the female Common Merganser cruising elegantly in front of the island – told us that this must be a male of the same species… in the least graceful pose ever encountered.

Wherever we went, lots of White-crowned Sparrows bounced through the grass, except along Bellevue outside the park, where they were Western Bluebirds instead. That was another treat, since we’d dipped on bluebirds the past two months despite being sure they had to be around somewhere.…

December 23, 2020 – Lake Merritt

Birds are usually masters of social distancing: if you’re there, they’re not. But something – pandemic frustration? – was in the air for the December 4th-Wednesday (Non) Golden Gate Bird Alliance walk at Lake Merritt this year, and it wasn’t affecting the humans. Only six birders joined the leaders (who’d discussed splitting the group if it got too large), and all seemed extra-attentive to the need to not-get-stupid with vaccines in sight.

The birds, on the other hand…. I lost track of the number of times a small bird – a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, even a Townsend’s Warbler – landed at eye level, close enough to see every feather without binoculars, and others in the group had the same luck. One warbler came so close to another birder it seemed about to jump onto her arm. Bewick’s Wrens hopped cheekily within three or four feet, and White-crowned Sparrows ignored us as we walked past their flocks. The shady oval under the oak by the garden composting station was especially rewarding; besides a mixed party of bug hunters, a male Anna’s Hummingbird flew into the center and hovered, swiveling in mid-air as though checking out the humans for possible nectar.

The view from the starting point (the boathouse parking lot) included four of the five expected herons: both Great and Snowy Egrets, all age phases of Black-crowned Night-Heron, and a Great Blue Heron slouching hip-deep in leafy branches, where some argued it was just another Black-crowned. (It eventually settled the question by turning its head far enough to reveal the gold bill, but the back view with the head tucked down and the legs out of sight made it a real question.) We also got good looks at some Common Goldeneyes from there, including two brilliant black-and-white males chasing each other back and forth, and also two Red-breasted Merganser drakes swimming and diving along the floats, one a bit scruffy looking but the other in crisp green cap, white collar, and rust-red shirt front.

In the bird paddock, the Northern Pintail duck reported but not seen last month was hanging out in the near corner of the first pond with two Northern Shovelers, a duck and a drake just beginning to put on his party clothes. Both species are very rare visitors to the lake, the last (and first) shoveler showed up in January of this year, and the last pintail sighting was in January 2019.…