Thief of Sticks

 

Great Blue Heron Stealing Nest Material at Blue Heron Lake

Some of the first nesting activity of the season has begun at Blue Heron Lake with an early bird getting the jump on refreshing its nest -- by taking sticks from an unattended nest nearby. It looked like the old nest was fairly tightly constructed since the klepto-heron was removing such small twigs that it hardly seemed worth the effort of all that tugging.

Yesterday I spent part of the day among a tumult of teens and tweens, visiting The Exploratorium with a friend who hadn't been there since it was at the Palace of Fine Arts. The staff told us (as we got our Senior Citizen discount) that we could have a less hectic experience after 1:30, when the kids have to head back to their schools, but it was interesting to see how the kids interacted with the place. (Spoiler alert: It appeared to be more about play and socializing than learning about science.)

I was particularly interested in the biology section on cells, where they have sculptures showing the relative sizes of different cells (including the leukemia cell, which my friend has been fighting off for years), all compared to a human hair, which towered over all the puny cells. 

I finished my second go-round with The Secret Language of Cells the other day, and it seemed toward the end that watching the fascinating interplay of each of our human cells as they go about the intricate business of living, shows us a microcosm of the activities of the animals, plants, and microorganisms that comprise any wild ecosystem. We are not in the habit of ascribing intelligence even to non-human animals, much less Golgi bodies or mitochondria, but to see them in action leaves us wondering what else we would call it, if not intelligence.

The mama hummer in West Portal was still apparently sitting on unhatched eggs this morning.

Although I did wonder if there was room for babies underneath the warmth of those feathers. It was only around 9:30 a.m. when I was there, and the sun hadn't yet reached the nest. I'll have to check it out again later in the day, maybe tomorrow or Saturday.

Heron's Leap

Klepto Heron

Flying to the Twig Store

All In A Day's Work

Basking Sliders

Snuggled Mallard

Traffic Jam

Ruddy Duck (Female)

Ruddy Duck (Male)

A large carp swims below a forest of reflections.

A red-tailed hawk circles to new heights.

I'd been wondering what those "weeds" were in our garden, but thankfully I didn't pull them out before they gave themselves away and began to flower. I'd forgotten about the San Francisco wallflower seeds I'd tossed onto the soil last summer with little hope that any would survive the juncos, hermit thrushes, sparrows, and California towhees that forage back there.

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