On my way to the beach around 5:30 PM yesterday, I spotted a blue heron in the creek, Funny, because these are the spookiest birds in the area, and this one wasn’t bothered by my proximity. I kept inching forward, shooting pics, until I was about 25 ft. away. He stayed there, aware of my presence for sure, but not concerned. Finally I walked past his part of the creek and went around a bend. I heard this fluttering, and he had flown over my head and descended into the creek right in front of me. It was a thrill, this elegant creature swooping so close. (Look at those delicate white plume feathers, nature’s decoration.)
This is the same general area where I talked to an owl one dark night a few years ago — no kidding, owl and me had a conversation — and Ron and I spotted a young mountain lion another time. It’s where a creek comes down from the mountain into an estero and ultimately the sandy beach. Maybe there are spots on this earth where the elements, including planetary vibes, come together in harmony and animals allow us a closer look.
I’ve been walking over to document my neighbor Steve’s progress in moving a house onto a foundation on his lot. I discovered this great predator-proof chicken yard. Steve used rebar to form a dome shape (strength-in-curves) frame and covered it with chicken wire. We are about to build a new chicken coop for our bantams and I’m going to use this setup for their yard.
We now have a flock of about 24 bantams, maybe 7 of which are these Silver Sebrights. We have one Golden Sebright. I fell in love with these beautiful birds a few years ago when I saw a 10-year-old girl’s flock at the Mendocino County Fair. They lay very small eggs, are a bit skittish, but oh those white feathers outlined in black! We get all our chickens from Murray McMurray Hatchery; they come via the U.S. post office overnight.
Here’s a good blog with a lot of practical hands-on tips for raising chickens in urban or suburban areas: https://urban-agrarian.blogspot.com/
The male quail is the lookout while the female shepherds the babies around on the ground, teaching them how to scratch and eat. Quail are ground birds, like chickens or pheasants. We also have a lot of doves, and a flock of wild pigeons, which are birds of the air.
The males are so beautiful, with their top knot and white-outlined black face feathers, they sometimes stop me in my tracks. Such perfection. There are 2 families with babies skittering through the vegetable garden now, the babies starting to fly. We walk slowly around them and they’ve gotten used to us, so we can get pretty close.
Went down to the post office early this morning to pick up a box containing 30 baby chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa. We’ve been getting chickens this way for 30 years. We’ve switched to bantams, and this time got 20 Auracnas (green eggs) and 10 Silver and Golden Sebrings. The Sebrings are beautiful birds. McMurray’s birds are top quality. Their catalog is a delight to look through: https://is.gd/c33K9
I still can’t get over the incredibleness of these little creatures coming halfway across the country on an airplane. They’re shipped when one day old. When they arrive we put them in a box under an infra-red light and get them to drink water fortified with electrolytes. They start eating ground-up grain right away.
A lot of people are suddenly interested in backyard chickens. There’s even a magazine: https://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/
This little starling was hopping around when Jack and I were having coffee at an outdoor table at the Java Beach Cafe out at the beach in San Francisco last week. This guy had kind of a punk haircut. He was probably young. He had poissonality, plus excellent selection of colors.
Today’s my birthday, also a full moon (whoo-whoo!). I was going to skate on the mountain at sunrise, but it was cloudy, so I decided to go to a rocky grotto on a nearby beach. I got up at 4:15, made my way down the “not-for-the-faint-hearted” trail, real steep in spots, It’d been raining and I soon learned that Vibram soles are slippery on wet rocks. Got down to the grotto as the full moon was going down on the western horizon. Rain drops falling. A swell had come up overnight and the waves were powerful and crashing. Vortex of energy! I hung out for maybe 20 minutes, then started back up the cliff. Partway up, I looked down at the beach in time to see a big flock of pelicans fly inches above a breaking wave. They use the wave’s updraft and hardly flap their wings. From my vantage point I could see them doing this beautiful dance, skimming above one wave, then when it broke, switching to a new, yet unbroken wave.
This was on the way home, a few hours ago. Low tide in the lagoon.
I thought this comment from Steve Lamm on my posting of yesterday (4/20/10) was interesting enough to bring up front. It’s feedback on my observations of birds flying in unison. Here’s an excerpt from an NPR program by Nell Greenfield Boyce:
“For any given pair of birds, Biro says, “you can accurately work out which of them is the leader and which one of them is the follower.”
Some birds had more followers than others. This demonstrates a hierarchy of influence within the flock. “You can actually rank birds in terms of the influence that they have on others within the group,” Biro says. “Basically every individual gets a kind of a vote in what the flock does, but the weight of your vote depends on your rank, your position in the hierarchy.”
And it did turn out that highly influential birds tended to fly out in front, according to a report on the study in the journal Nature.…”
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125665334
Photo of common terns in flight by Max Skwarna: https://is.gd/bCqT9
Look at those aerodynamics!
We watch birds every morning from the breakfast nook. Better than TV. There’s a 3″ by 5″ hole in the bottom of the gate that the quail file through to get to the bird seed that Lesley puts out. There’s generally a male (ones with head feathers) sentry that keeps watch from a high point. Here a bunch of them had hopped up onto the gate in a semi-alert (being wary, but not fleeing). When they all take off in a full alert, it sounds like a helicopter.
Pigeon hawk (Falco columbarius) from the same book listed below.
