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.…