The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note of any observations you have made of the world around you. Insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds and/or flowers. All are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
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September 17 through 20, 2013; California Coast, S.F. Bay Area
Continued below the orange coprolite
Last week it got to the point where we really needed to get out of town, to get away, to get to the coast. What we needed was trailer time somewhere on the coast, with the added bonus that the migration is going on, so we might see some transiting exotics. So, on Tuesday, September 17 we headed off west. The diary primarily covers a short stretch of the California coast from Half Moon Bay to the just below the Northern tip of the Ano Nuevo preserve at the Gazos Creek Coastal Access point.
The trip from Castro Valley to Half Moon Bay was pretty uneventful, as was the trip down Hwy 1 to San Gregorio State Beach, where we stopped for a picnic lunch.
Like a lot of the CA coast San Gregorio interrupts cliffs that terminate in narrow beaches and is the seaward terminus of a valley of sorts. There is a bench with low cliffs to a moderately wide beach and an impermanent lagoon. The lagoon is the end of a stream that usually lacks sufficient flow to punch through the dunes furthest from the ocean. After a significant rainfall, however, the lagoon becomes an estuary. This transformation also occurs at very high tides and after storm surf, when the barrier is breached by the ocean instead of the stream.
From the bench:
Like many state beaches, there is parking on the bench at San Gregorio. Just off the parking lot was an abandoned killdeer nest which had been subject to depredation, a small sandstone boulder which had fractures in such a fashion as to create a shallow bowl wherein the fractured shells of two eggs reposed. On the beach and about the lagoon were a great many gulls, 2 brown pelicans in breeding plumage and a snowy egret. On the bench there were Brewer's Blackbirds, Chestnut Backed Chickadees, about a dozen artists doing watercolors and a lizard:
About half of the Gulls were Heerman's Gulls, a migrant that winters along this part of the coast. Not exactly the exotic migrants I had hoped to spot. There were also California Gulls, year round residents of the area beaches, harbors, parks and parking lots.
Further down the coast at the northerly end of Bean Hollow State Beach we spotted some Black Turnstones, another Winter migrant and, of course, gulls. At the Southerly end of Bean Hollow, where we lunched on Wednesday, there were gulls, sporadic brown pellican flybys, a soaring red tail, and some soaring Turkey Vultures. Though migrant elsewhere, ye TV is resident year round in our part of CA. The Brown Pelicans are in migration, but to nowhere that I can ascertain. What?
If you look at range maps in sources like Sibley, you see that the Brown Pelican is resident all year in Southern CA, and migratory in Northern CA. You'll also note that there is no more northerly area identified as a summer or other range. It appears that they just migrate around in circlexs up here during an indeterminate period, which matches my observations that they seem be be here all the time, flying back and forth, first north, then south.
We went to the Gazos Creek Access Area which had the usual gulls, a Brown Pelican or two and, as we were about to depart, an Osprey hunting the lagoon there
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It turns out that the Osprey is a Winter migrant to this part of the country. Now I must go track down the one that lives year round at Lake Chabot and tell it the news.
Our campground, Costanoa KOA, featured Brewer's Blackbirds, Red Winged Blackbirds, CA Quail, an American Robin and a Crow,
Returning home along Hwy 1 we saw a few Red Tails, some Crows in a field, and an unlikely female Cooper's Hawk on a 'phone line away from the kind of groves they like to hunt. No migrants there, but at the Hayward Shoreline in a salt pond on the South Side of Hwy 92 there were about 12 to 15 White Pelicans, migrants that winter in the area.
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"Green Diary Rescue" is Back!
Meteor Blades has revived his excellent series. As MB explained, this weekly diary is a "round-up with excerpts and links... of {diaries} bringing matters of environmental concern to the community... "
"Green Diary Rescue" will be posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.
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Your Turn What have you noted happening in your area or travels? As usual post your observations as well as their general location in the comments.
Thank you.