Nettlesome Weather

Brown pelican, trying to beat the frame.

"Beating the frame" is something the characters do in some of the detective novels I like to read. I recently got started reading Tana French, whose style of detective novel is so novel that I keep forgetting the main plot while luxuriating in her many beautiful digressions into the kinds of details that are the ecstatic moments of everyday life -- or they could be, if only we noticed them. 

Anyway, I was interested to notice today that the pelicans are still numerous on Seal Rocks, but that the great mass of them had moved to the one that's farthest from shore. 

Whenever I think of pelicans, I think of a line that I've long thought must have come from a cartoon I learned as a kid: "my beak can hold more than my belly can." It turns out to be part of a limerick written by the poet, humorist, and newspaper editor, Dixon Lanier Merritt, and reads as follows:

     A wonderful bird is the pelican,
     His bill will hold more than his belican,
     He can take in his beak
     Enough food for a week,
     But I'm damned if I see how the helican!

My morning walk today took me past the alleged stinging nettles I recently posted about finding at Golden Gate Heights Park. The plants have matured since then and look even more nettlesome, since they are not the kind I'm familiar with from Mt. Tamalpais (Urtica dioica). Thanks to Plant ID, a phone snap of the plant shows it very likely to be dwarf nettle (Urtica urens). 

I was prepared to record temperatures again today, but our heat wave (on the west side of San Francisco, that is) turned out to be a nothingburger. It was 71 degrees at my computer desk at 6:30 this morning, 73 when I left for my walk at 8:30, and thanks to a sea breeze, back to 71 by noon. 

Meanwhile, today's high is going to be over 120 degrees in Death Valley, where the Badwater 135 ultramarathon is only a couple of weeks away....

A disorderly squadron of pelicans flies past the old Cliff House.

Pelican In Suspense

A Cocktail Party of Heermann's Gulls on Ocean Beach

Dwarf Nettle

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Day in the Sun

 

Flying Into The Sun

The main action at the bison paddock today was a group of red-tailed hawks that was using the large meadow as a hunting ground. I spotted a pair of first-years hanging out on a tree stump on the other side of the field when suddenly a commotion broke out as a third hawk swooped in with something in its talons, a meal for the stump hawks.

I circled around the paddock to see if I could get a better angle on the stump hawks, but shooting through the chain-link fence didn't work out very well. On the plus side, a third first-year was perched in a eucalyptus right above my head. I stuck around awhile and watched finches flutter and alight on branches very near the hawk without the hawk paying them any mind. I even went away and came back, which is when I snapped the grab-shot above during another commotion involving the stump hawks. Surprisingly, the eucalyptus hawk remained unmoved throughout the screeching melee.

My next stop was the beach, where there were many more pelicans, cormorants, and even gulls than I saw on Seal Rocks just yesterday. Black oystercatchers chattered out there as well, minuscule black dots too small for me to photograph. 

With a heat wave supposed to begin today, I kept track of temperatures during my morning walk, starting from my apartment where it was 66.8 degrees indoors at 8:15 a.m., just a little warmer than the usual 64-65 degrees. By the time I got to the beach it was 9 a.m., and my thermometer read 75.1 degrees. There was no breeze. On the way home, though, I was surprised to get readings of 71.6 at Sunset Boulevard and 72.9 at 19th Avenue. I wondered if the beach measurement had been corrupted somehow, or if it truly was cooler inland.

By the time I got close to home at about 9:45, it was 75.5 degrees at 14th & Ortega, and I was sweating profusely after the hill climb. I had to spend a little more time than usual to cool down before getting on the bike and heading down to Seal Rocks, where the thermometer read 76.1 degrees at about 11 a.m. There was a nice breeze that made it feel considerably cooler than the 75.1 degrees I'd noted at the beach earlier.

It's 70.2 indoors now at about 12:30 p.m., a beautiful sunny day. Here's hoping the next few days won't bring too much of a good thing....

A couple of first-year red-tailed hawks await their next meal at the Golden Gate Park Bison Paddock.

Perhaps this first-year wanted nothing to with the rowdy stump hawks and waited patiently in a eucalyptus tree a safe distance away.

Pelican Gathering At Seal Rocks

Pelicans take the high ground while cormorants rest below.

A group of visitors safely emerges from the tunnel of doom at Sutro Baths.

This is some sort of in-flight fracas, probably the result of junior insisting on being fed by the red-tail who's old enough to actually have a red tail.

The younger red-tail with its feathers splayed out to catch some lift.

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