Nature Where I Live: San Francisco: 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.