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| Red-shouldered Hawk, Golden Gate Park |
Temps in the low 50s, windy, dense fog swirling nearly to the point of drizzle, and most of the tourists such as yellow-rumped and Townsend's warblers gone for the season, taking their bright splashes of color with them. A few squirrels foraging in the Oak Woodlands, clattering through dry leaves and jumping into trees to escape an approaching human, but doing it just to add a little spice to a gray, ho-hum day.
I didn't envy the red-shouldered hawk overlooking the Fuchsia Dell and Horseshoe Courts, feathers flickering in the chilly wind while looking for a bird or mouse to forget, just for a moment, that the world can be a dangerous place.
Wait, did I say I didn't envy the hawk? That might not be quite true. No, not quite true.
Even more envious was the song sparrow walking on water at Lily Lake, where the lily pads and duckweed spread out a chlorophyll carpet for an ounce of dinosaur fluff gleening tiny seeds.
Up on Whiskey Hill I followed the sound of a telltale cheep to a hummingbird that appeared to be building a new nest on an oak branch swaying in the wind. She sat in the middle of her shallow bed of lichen, moss, and fluff, and used her beak to make a couple of minor adjustments to the edges. Farther along I spotted another hummingbird that looked so fresh and athletic that I suspect it was probably born and fledged nearby within the last month or so.
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| Song Sparrow, Lily Lake |
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| Iris at Lily Lake |
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| Hummingbird Starting Her Nest |
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| Whiskey Hill Hummer |
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| Youthful Beauty |
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| Dark-eyed Junco, Blending In |
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| I thought the tapping I heard must belong to a woodpecker, but it turned out to be this little pygmy nuthatch. |
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| Some interesting mushrooms growing in the wood chips just west of the stalactite tunnel at Alvord Lake. |
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| There was a troop of these big Agaricus mushrooms in the leaf litter at the SF Botanical Garden (that I forgot to post yesterday). |
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