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| Tropical Kingbird, Lake Merced |
Creature of habit that I am, I have four standard walking routes and two standard bike routes for my daily hike-and-bike sessions. Today I was lucky to get a break from the routine that satisfied both my desire to photograph interesting birds and my desire to get in a decent bike ride. The bird had been reported at Lake Merced, so I rode all the way down Ortega Street to the beach, then turned south to reach the lake. After photographing the bird at the concrete bridge I circumnavigated the lake, then picked up Sloat to return via Sunset Dunes Park and Golden Gate Park.
If I had seen this bird on my own I might have confused it with a Western Kingbird, which looks quite similar and whose breeding range includes parts of California.
Tropical Kingbirds, however, ain't from around these parts. When around people, they no doubt hear a lot more Portuguese and Spanish than they do English. A tiny bit of their breeding range rises into Arizona, but their year-round range extends deep into South America (although they're often seen along the West Coast in fall, and as far north as Canada).
Despite having to point my camera lens into the sun, I lucked out almost immediately when a kingbird landed on some bare branches right in front of me. And then I double lucked out when a second kingbird landed, although the two didn't stick around very long.
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| Twice As Tropical |
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| Até Mais! |
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| By 10:30, the sun was starting to come out at Lake Merced. |
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| The kingbird is a flycatcher and rarely perched for more than a few seconds before hawking into the air to try to capture a passing insect. |
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| When the tropical kingbirds finally ditched me, I checked out the lake, where I soon spotted a lone White-fronted Goose paddling around. |
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| It dipped its beak in the water to drink a couple of times. |
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| It kept getting closer as I watched through my lens, eventually landing on the beach to join several mallards who had their beaks tucked into their wing feathers, snoozing. |
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| One of the "mallards" paddling around just offshore made a strange sound, and I saw that it was actually a Green-winged Teal when I zoomed in on it. She, too, soon landed on the beach. |
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| She waited to get her feet on land before taking a drink. |
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| Some Canada Geese flew over the lake in the distance, passing over a flock of gulls. |
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