Trip Reports

November 25, 2020 – Lake Merritt

When we assembled for the November 4th-Wednesday not-really-Golden-Gate-Audubon walk, the day seemed perfect – sunny and still, with just enough nip in the air to make a thin jacket comfortable. What could be better? Six birders joined the two leaders, and their day started with an air show: a dozen American Crows chased a young Red-tailed Hawk over the trees behind the boathouse parking lot, dipping and diving and risking occasional wing strikes. (I kept hoping the hawk would flip over and grab one, but no such luck.)

Turning back to the lake near the dome cage, the scene was properly busy for the season, with the floats full of Double-crested Cormorants, both White and Brown Pelicans, and assorted gulls, and the water was lively with the same, plus American Coots, the occasional scaup, and a few Common Goldeneyes. Several Snowy Egrets patrolled the beach, but the local Green Herons stayed resolutely out of sight.

We strolled around the bird paddock, carefully studying each duck in the hope of finding the female Northern Pintail reported to be hanging out there, but no luck there either. Mallards one and all, with orange bills instead of black. The drakes were mostly Mallards too (with mustard yellow bills), except for the new white domestic ducky who’s taken up residence there: huge and sparkling clean, with a brilliant gold bill. The Muscovy Duck flock is down to two or three that I can’t tell apart; they’re all Idaho potatoes with feet and gnarly red faces, each one lumpier than the next.

From the Nature Center shore (still sheltered by the islands and unaware of impending trouble) we spotted a seldom-spotted Spotted Sandpiper, a species last seen here last February and not for five years before that, working the rocks edging the bird paddock. As usual, it was easily identified by its completely unspotted white breast and briskly pumping rump: another member of the Bird Name Frustration Club.  Yes, it sometimes does have spots – for a few weeks in the spring when it puts on its party vest – but then and the whole rest of the year, it hardly takes a step without pushing its tail down and up and down again.

So then we headed alongside the playground in happy innocence, looking first at the Nature Center (to admire the newly re-inhabited Black Phoebe nest) and then at the inland bushes (to enjoy a flock of Lesser Goldfinches and some other small birds among the branches).…

October 28, 2020 – Lake Merritt

The October 4th-Wednesday (non) Golden Gate Bird Alliance lake walk drew a somewhat scary 12 participants, evoking a nervous “Hey, we’re a lot less than six feet apart” on at least one occasion. We do try, but especially under the trees the places from which a given bird can be seen don’t offer a lot of choice. If the turnout continues to grow, we may need to split the group for the park section of the trip in coming months….

But it wasn’t just birders who were crowding around. The day opened with a true feeding frenzy: a few hundred Double-crested Cormorants (mostly bronze juveniles) were playing hopscotch down the lake, clearly in pursuit of something fast-moving, while dozens of Brown Pelicans of all ages swooped and dived above them among a cloud of assorted gulls, American White Pelicans paddled along snarfing things up from the water, and both Great and Snowy Egrets lined the shore looking to grab anything forced close to them. Unfortunately, it was the far shore – making the details hard to make out, especially with only binoculars for optics.

So what were they catching? Fish, presumably, but we couldn’t see until a Ring-billed Gull came flapping over to the floats with something big and white clamped in its beak. “What’s he got? What’s he got?” A ten-inch feather, broad and blunt-ended, which provided several minutes’ play value for the gull and no information at all for the humans.

As the fisher-flock adjourned to the floats and islands to rest and digest, the birders proceeded past the paddock to head down the lake. The big pond in the paddock was full of ducks – practically shoulder to shoulder and beak to tail – almost all in the classic Mallard plumage but of a wide range in sizes. Some were small enough to be true wild birds; others clearly had had parents and grandparents on the farm, picking up the super-sizing genes developed there. 

The area near the Rotary Nature Center was thin of company – just some coots and one adventurous Lesser Scaup – but the little olive tree just past the playground was aflutter with tiny birds. Bushtits for starters, looking as always like flying mice, but in numbers even more outrageous than usual. The joke about Bushtits is that if you have to report a count, say 17: a plausible prime number for lots.…

September 23, 2020 – Lake Merritt

The September not-quite-Golden-Gate-Audubon walk attracted eight masked birders – a record for the pandemic – for a round of amazing delights in perfect air. (Really perfect. For a change, the particulate-meter at the nature center didn’t tinkle even once when we were near enough to hear its penetrating chime.) At various points we encountered three species never recorded on earlier walks:

  • First, a female Yellow Warbler prospected through one of the oaks along Bellevue. With the natural human response to a treat – “what have you done for us lately” – we looked hard for a red-streaked male, but we couldn’t find one.
  • Second, a Willow Flycatcher (and we were fortunate enough to have a participant savvy enough to identify it by its overall brownish tinge and lack of eye-ring, rather than writing it off as one of the near-dozen near-identical “tyrant flycatchers” that frequent wilder parks but almost never appear here. We’ve recorded them on only six occasions over the years, and only named one other (a Pacific-slope Flycatcher in 2018).
  • And third and most astonishing, a series of fluting honks along the lake shore alerted us to a pair of Greater Yellowlegs (Yellowlegses?) flying beak to tail westward right at the level of the path and a few inches out from the wall. We just don’t see them at Lake Merritt – not the Greater like these and not the Lesser Yellowlegs either, species distinguishable mainly by voice rather than appearance.

We also picked up two new-for-September birds – one Golden-crowned Sparrow (common visitors later in the year) and a whole flock of Steller’s Jays (rare in the park and mostly as singles rather than half a dozen at once). This time, they showed their crested black heads and their natty navy-blue jackets twice, one pair and later five or six birds together, much to the outrage of the smooth-crowned California Scrub Jays that regard the park as their own territory.

Despite all these wonders, my personal favorite of the day was an old friend in a new place. “There’s a Bewick’s Wren right over your head!” someone called, and I looked up to find it true: About three feet up, a wren was picking its way along a narrow branch, dipping its beak into cracks in the bark and showing off its striped undertail coverts and pearly gray breast, features I’d never noticed before. 

The Western Pond Turtle – not a bird, but we’re not snobs – lounged on the shore of the garden pond, always a cheery sight.…

August 26, 2020 – Lake Merritt

After a solid week of blazing heat, our small group gathered under overcast August skies, happily zipping up coats in the strong cold  breeze. Later the sun did come out, the coats came off, and the air-quality station by the Nature Center – silent at the beginning of the walk – started a lovely but horrifying nonstop chorus of chimes. Later already? The time jump makes sense, as it was a day of startling sights, defying the usual chronological follow-the-walk narrative.

We collected three different raptors – the most for any one walk – including a Cooper’s Hawk and two Red-shouldered circling high in the sky (besides perched on other occasions). Even better, a young Red-tailed Hawk swooped in close enough to look as big as an eagle as it snatched something to snack on from the grass and then perched low in a pine near Children’s Fairyland. And better still, the Red-tail flew just over the head of a guy flying small drones above the lawn, so we had a lot to watch and were still there when a drone got itself trapped inside Fairyland. We left with it clattering mournfully behind the fence and the pilot heading off along the wall in search of someone working inside who might be persuaded to help him recover his probably illicit toy.

For sheer drama, the raptors couldn’t match of all things the Violet-green Swallows. We’d never spotted these birds in August, but today they darted in a countless crowd near one corner of the big  gray building at Perkins and Bellevue, flashing back and forth and perching briefly on  the top edges of windows ten stories or so off the ground. What were they chasing? No way to tell, except that it almost certainly had six legs and one or two pairs of wings. Later, in the garden, we met someone who lives at that level in the building, who said  she hadn’t seen anything like it, ever.

Heading back to the lake from the swallow building, we heard and then saw a Belted Kingfisher – missing from the walk since last February’s final pre-pandemic trip – perched in one of the bare trees on the cormorant island. This one was a juvenile, the first to show up here without an accompanying adult, and we can hope it was looking for a desirable spot to spend the off-season. 

Any of those sightings could have been the main event on an ordinary walk – but not this time, even though the real bird of the day didn’t make it onto the report list.…

July 22, 2020 – Lake Merritt

The July 4th-Wednesday non Golden Gate Bird Alliance walk made a welcome break in a week of computer hell. (Word to the wise: If Windows crashes, refuses to reboot, and says it can restore itself if you’re willing to reinstall all your programs, say NO. It lies.) That disaster made it especially good to get out in the mask-filtered free air and find some living humans: not just the co-leader but five socially distanced birders, one completely new to the event.

First treat of the morning: a pair of Caspian Terns that cruised almost wingtip to wingtip around the islands, passing practically right overhead.  We’ve seen singleton Caspians from time to time, but never two together like this. Then, while we were still at the meeting point, a Green Heron flew over to our beach and strolled briskly into the rocks, tempting us to walk alongside and try for another look. After a few short flights along the shore, the bird got disgusted and headed off toward the boathouse, and we shrugged guiltily and hiked around the art center toward the bird paddock. Normally we’da cut between the center and the cage, but the usual route was entirely blocked by a cherry-picker truck and a crew of painters – good to see infrastructure work in progress!

The paddock was thin of company as the ponds were mostly dry; a couple of park workers were busily scrubbing them, getting them ready to refill. Nonetheless, the ever-present Canada Geese were accompanied by a couple of gnarly-faced Muscovy Ducks and the Chinese Swan Goose, which let us talk about telling wild from domestic waterfowl – mainly a matter of size and fatness.

We spotted all five herons in the course of the morning (both egrets, Black-crowned Night-Herons of all ages, still more Green Herons – one keeping a grim eye on an island raccoon – and finally a Great Blue). The latter showed up in apparent response to my firm “Now we need to see a Great Blue Heron,” a request of the universe that works often enough to maintain birders’ faith in it – so ours remained unshaken, despite having no luck with calls for a scrub jay and a Cooper’s Hawk. 

Lots of White Pelicans crowded one of the islands, lounging like people crowding a beach in happier times. We peered around for the baby Brown Pelican seen paddling in the area the day before, but no luck – wherever it was going, there it went.…