The Olympic Club is a world renowned golf course here in SF. It's an exclusive club, and didn't even admit women members until 20 years ago. Another barrier fell this past week when they allowed Christmas Bird Count participants onto the course. It's part of my count area and I was sorely tempted to assign myself to the course, out of curiosity about the Terra Icognita. But we hope that this will be a long-term situation, so it seemed important to get the best team in there to do a baseline count. They covered the area thoroughly, made notes of on the course map for future use, and even found a few good birds (palm warbler and red crossbills).
OK, so I didn't do any country club birding myself. But there are actually three golf courses within my count area, and this year we also got greater access to the public links, Harding Park. (Previously, we'd been limited to a single path along one side.)
Well, it may be a public course, open to all, but it sure looked to us like they had very blatant discriminatory policies toward some Sparrow-Americans, probably due to some story ginned up by Fox Sparrow News:
Lake Merced has the best habitat for rails anywhere in the city, and one of the responsibilities of the area leader is to make sure that someone goes out pre-dawn and broadcasts for Virginia Rail and Sora. Since I'm always awake by 5am anyway, it's not a problem to do it myself. For the past two years, I've been joined by a friend who happens to work as a biologist studying rails. He's currently focused on Clapper Rails, but he knows all the "swamp chickens" pretty well, and has a great ear for picking up their calls even with city traffic as the constant background noise. We got great response to the calls, and picked up 8 Virginia Rails and 7 Sora at our first stop. Some years, we've only had a handful of rails for the entire day; if we'd quit counting at that point it would have been our second-best rail day since I started.
We met up with the rest of the group an hour later at The Concrete Bridge, in the southeast corner of the lake. There's an impoundment that's cut off from the rest of the lake, and ducks gather there overnight. We get there at daybreak to try to get a count before they head out for the day. It's been interesting to see the changes in duck populations here over the past few years. The water levels at Lake Merced had been lowered substantially by overpumping of the aquifer; development in the surrounding area reduced the amount of rainwater than could filter down to recharge the aquifer. The impoundment used to be very shallow water, and attracted a wide variety of ducks - shovelers, gadwall, wigeon, teal. Now that the water level is rising, it's mostly mallards and ruddy ducks, with a few buffleheads mixed in. The restoration is better for the lake as a whole, but it's not helping boost our species total... just sayin'.
We birded together as a group for about an hour, counting ducks, coots, grebes and gulls on the water, along with the land birds. The area near the parking lot is a popular pigeon feeding area, so that helps consolidate them for easy counting. The willows on both sides of the concrete bridge usually harbor some little birds; this year we also had a downy woodpecker and a lovely female kingfisher. We then split into teams to cover Harding Park, the San Francisco State campus and a nearby housing development, Park Merced. I went with the Harding Park team, so that we could continue to work the reedbeds along the shoreline for rails, and to check into some areas around the course that are being managed to encourage wildlife.
Did I mention that it was raining on and off all day? I probably didn't need to. You can almost guarantee it will rain on count day here, even in drought years. Anyway, that's why you see some water spots in this photo of the peregrine who surprised us across the lake. We weren't quite as surprised as the parking lot full of pigeons it scared up, though.
One large corner of the golf course is being restored with native plants in hopes of providing habitat for California Quail. There a few tiny populations left in the city, but most wild areas that would attract quail also attract feral cat feeders - but the feeders can't get onto the golf course, so it would be a safer place for quail to raise a family. (We counted three feral cat feeding stations around the lake, all located in primo bird habitat.) Of course, cats aren't the only threat to birds out there. We watched a redtail make a purposeful dive to the edge of a green....
... and could see that it had grabbed something. Nice of it to help out the course with rodent control, we thought. When it flew up, we saw red... lots of red. No, not blood. It had actually grabbed a flicker, not a rodent. Another flicker was perched just above it in the tree, calling repeatedly. Kinda hard not to anthropomorphize what it was carrying on about.
It was cool to get a new perspective on Lake Merced from the course - I never realized how high above the lake you get. Here's the view from the 14th hole tee area(course map - opens in new window), looking out toward the concrete bridge where we met in the morning. The area beyond the bridge, to the right, is the Olympic Club. (Why yes, it is starting to look pretty grey and drippy, isn't it?)
We continued to work along the shoreline, finding some really birdy spots with nice mixed flocks working the willows and shoreline scrubby stuff. My friend worked his rail mojo (below) and we managed to pick up another half dozen for the south lake. We mapped the birds we found to try to avoid double counting - and still finished the day with an amazing 23 Virginia Rails and 12 Sora. This almost doubled the previous high. Have their numbers really increased that much? Hard to say. Maybe the higher water level is helping them, or maybe it's just causing them to hug the shore more (and making them easier to detect). Maybe it's that we had access to new areas (though even without the new locations, our numbers still would have been the highest since I started), or maybe it was that we made more of an effort throughout the day, not just pre-dawn. In any event, it was fun.
No photos from the afternoon - the weather closed in and made the birding much harder. We couldn't pish up the Yellow Warblers who'd been reported near the Boathouse, but we did manage to scrape up a few uncommon birds for SF - White-throated Sparrows, Red-breasted nuthatches - and even a few that required write-ups. One party found a Hooded Oriole (common in summer, rare in winter). When I was meeting up with the guy who'd done Olympic Club, we stood in the rain, looking out over the lake and a swallow flew into view. And another, and another and another and another. Five Tree Swallows, another bird requiring a writeup this time of year. Not a bad way to end the day.
BAY AREA KOSSACKS BIRDING TRIP
The date has been finalized as Saturday, January 29. Barring unforseen circumstances (e.g., reports of something truly amazing elsewhere local), we will be going to Solano County and Woodbridge Road. If you're interested in joining and have not previously contacted me, my email is in my profile.