Botanicals

 

Allen's Hummingbird in the Children's Garden

I've been hoping to get out to do some photography for a while and finally had a chance this morning to drop in at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. When I locked my bike, mine was the only one there. After about three hours of wandering the grounds I started to get a little paranoid about theft, but I need not have worried. When I left, the bike rack was full. Do bikes even get ripped off anymore? The park used to be a hunting ground for car break-in thieves (who made light of smashing someone's window by calling it "bipping"), but I haven't seen any break-ins in quite a while. Are the crooks in jail? Did they get a job? Are they deterred by the new security cameras? Or did they finally just get tired of risking jail to steal tourists' underwear?

Anyway, the good news is the incredible weather we've had this weekend. When the skies are blue, all the days of fog are forgotten.

Planter Bloom at SFBG Entrance

One of the big manzanitas in the California Garden is still full of nectar-bearing flowers.

There was also a lot of milkweed in the California Garden, though the monarch is  resting on a coyote bush here.

I've still never seen any monarch caterpillars munching on the milkweed leaves there, but hope springs eternal. Here it's sipping nectar from a manzanita flower.

I was surprised to see such an intact pipevine swallowtail. Many of the butterflies I saw today had beat-up wings. The monarch above has a long slit in its right wing.

A California towhee left its usual haunts on the ground to fly into a tree to drink some monkey-hand nectar.

A pygmy nuthatch also took a break from probing pine cones to get in on the refreshments.

When I first arrived at the tree, a squirrel was chasing a bird out of it.

A Steller's jay appeared to be taking a sun bath in the wood chips. Later on I'd see a panting robin doing likewise.

West Coast Lady on Wild Radish

The black phoebe was quite far away when I noticed it had something unusual in its beak. It looked like a piece of cardboard. It went down the hatch before I could get closer, but if you look closely you can tell what it is.

Yep, it was one of these, a buckeye butterfly. I wondered why the phoebe wasn't eating more of them since there were so many around. Although buckeye caterpillars are toxic to birds, the adults aren't.

I'm not sure, but this might be another west coast lady.

A red admiral was one of several butterfly species attracted to the lilac flowers in the Children's Garden.

Painted lady or American lady? In any event, all three of our ladies are Vanessa species.

Even pipevine swallowtails drank the lilac juice.

From this angle it sort of looks like a mosquito.

A large tiger swallowtail stole the show. It was challenging to get a good angle on it before it flew away.

The Allen's hummingbird would rest in the nearby lilac bush and chase away any interlopers who showed up at this plant, including larger Anna's hummers.

Yet it was frightened off its own flowers by a tiny honeybee. (Incidentally, my wife and I were hiking past Laguna Honda Reservoir yesterday when we heard a shouted expletive from a guy who was poking around down near the bee hives....)

Twice I saw an interesting, mostly yellow, bird flying in the gardens (probably flying away from me). It was much bigger than a Wilson's warbler, though, and my first impression was hooded oriole. My glimpses were too fleeting to be sure, though, and I was unable to find it to make a photograph.

The Wilson's warbler worked his way through the big alder tree at the frog pond, showing itself in the open only briefly.

I'd been hearing the Nuttall's woodpeckers all morning and was glad to finally get a chance to photograph them.

The robin almost looks like it's in distress, but I believe it was just having a nice warm sun bath. It did get up and run off when I passed by (which I had to do to get where I was going).

Sort of looks like a junior Nuttall's, but it was definitely foraging on its own (unlike the junior from my last post).

After carrying the Z8 around for three hours I was ready to put it back in the camera bag, but then this Anna's hummingbird dropped by right next to me.

Aloe Love

Sandy and Luna have been flapping a lot lately, getting ready to fledge. Unfortunately, Sandy accidentally fledged earlier today.

One of the adults just brought a fish home to the nest. Luna sounds very excited by the visit.

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Gone Birdin'

 

Red-shouldered Hawk, Golden Gate Park

We started out with an overcast Saturday morning here in San Francisco, but it's all blue skies this afternoon. If the day had started off with blue skies, I wouldn't have gone birding at all. There's something about an overcast day that lends itself to quietly poking around lakes and gardens to observe whatever nature is up to. 

Right now, one of the main things birds are up to is parents getting their fledglings up to speed so they can make it on their own. I saw several young birds following their parents around, but the parents were no longer feeding them.

The photography went well this morning, starting with a brown creeper sighting at Elk Glen Lake. I set out with the heavy Z8 and long lens in the hope of seeing one, but their arrival always seems serendipitous. I never see them when I'm looking for them. They just suddenly show up. 

I didn't realize until today that creepers have a song -- one that I've heard many times without realizing what it was. (On an unrelated note, check out this song I heard on KALW this afternoon, called Bird, by the South Korean group Leenalchi.)

Master of Camouflage, Elk Glen Lake

Pause for the Cause

Brown Creeper (Certhia americana)
(Certhia comes from the Ancient Greek word kerthios, a term used by Aristotle to describe a small, insectivorous bird that lived and scurried around in trees.)

California Towhee (Melozone crissalis)

It was hard to see details with the strong backlight, and I thought this young robin might be a varied thrush (which I've seen only in December and March in SF).

Hawkeye Tree

The collared dove wasn't taking any chances. It was much lower on the tree when it first realized I'd spotted it, and it soon climbed to the top so it could make a quick getaway.

I was hoping the great blue heron would try to pull something bigger than a minnow out of Mallard Lake.

But a minnow is all it got.

Strolling through the SF Botanical Garden I followed the bird calls to this young Nuttall's woodpecker which appeared to be waiting for its mom to bring some food.

Mom showed up empty-handed.

I could tell the red-shouldered hawk had caught something, but whatever it was was out of sight in front of the bird.

I went around the other side and had to deal with the strong backlight. Here the hawk appears to be licking its chops.

But whatever it was eating was proving difficult to swallow.

The hawk struggled to break it into manageable pieces.

Nearby, a pipevine swallowtail took a nectar break at some wild radish plants.

While I was waiting for either a robin to snag a purple berry from the Tree Fuchsia, or an Allen's hummingbird to get some flower nectar from the same tree, a brown creeper caught my eye.

I was able to follow it around for a while, and a highlight was seeing it nab a spider.

Down the Hatch

Creepers like to hunt by spiraling up a tree trunk, sometimes dropping back down after reaching the top. This one was in fairly small trees and mainly worked lateral branches instead of the trunks.

An Allen's hummingbird finally showed itself very briefly at the tree fuchsia.

Fledgling Finch

Instead of gobbling the berry with lightning speed, the robin seemed to savor this one for a few seconds before sending it down the hatch.

The Anna's hummingbird is no fool. She'll sip nectar from an available perch rather than expend a lot of energy on the wing.

Flared Tail Feathers

Allen's Hummingbird & Bottlebrush Flowers

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June 21, 2026

Farewell to Spring

"Happy Solstice" from Sandy and Luna

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