Seeking the Slate-Throated Redstart

 

Slate-Throated Redstart at Pine Lake Park, San Francisco

An email group for local birders has been blowing up the past couple of days with sightings of a bird that's common in the tropics, but not so much in San Francisco: the slate-throated redstart. I don't often try to photograph these special sightings, but this time I thought the bird was not only too cool-looking to pass up, but had the added bonus of being fairly close to where I live.

I envied the other birders who had larger-format cameras, with more acute autofocus and higher ISO capabilities than my little FZ80. The redstart was energetic in its movements, zipping from branch to branch in the blink of an eye. After snapping a shot, the FZ80's viewfinder has to pause for half an eternity while the image is written to the SD card. Meanwhile, the bird has flitted off to another branch. Now I have to find the bird again, then point the camera in its general direction, find it in the viewfinder, get it in focus, and if the bird is still there after all that, I can finally fire off another shot. 

Yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses. Although I didn't get anything great, I'm grateful to have gotten anything at all!

When I first arrived, the redstart had recently been seen but was currently out of sight, so I zeroed in on some of the other bird life in the vicinity. I liked that the hummingbird was on a branch of such a classic hummer-flower as this fuchsia.

This Wilson's warbler was also very hard to photograph as it furiously flitted from branch to branch in search of insects to feed its noisily cheeping youngster.

Here's the youngster.

Another youngster was this pied-billed grebe, which was cheeping incessantly and is seen here trying to get its mother to chuck up a beakful of Pine Lake chowder.

Seeking the Slate-Throated Redstart at Pine Lake Park

Peek-a-Boo

Foraging in the Foliage

Since I'd only photographed a black-throated gray warbler once before, I wasn't totally sure that's what this was until I got confirmation from the other birders.

I stopped by Grandview Park on my way to Pine Lake, hoping I might find Grandview Gus still in residence. This young red-tailed hawk flew in and landed on a street lamp just as I arrived near Gus's burrow, so it's probably just as well that Gus wasn't out and about. That bit of hair stuck to the hawk's beak might have come from a recent meal. The hawk tried to scrape it off on its metal perch, but without success.

I didn't have to wait long for it to take flight once again on this windy day. This shot is a composite of two frames.

I saw this black oystercatcher from the Cliff House on Wednesday. It was foraging on the big rock closest to Sutro Baths, where I'd never seen one before.

Turns out the Kitty Kat, which I've seen before from my Cliff House aerie, is a whale-watching vessel.

I hadn't noticed this old-school fishing boat out there before, and it didn't show up on my VesselFinder app, but its name, KVINS, was easy enough to read. According to this Facebook page, you can pre-order fish to pick up fresh from the boat at Pier 45 along Fisherman's Wharf.

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Red-Shouldered Hawk

 

On the Lookout

Golden Gate Park is a little bit of a mess for bicyclists these days, as construction around the Outside Lands concert creates detours and lots of truck and van traffic. One of the detours took me past beautiful Mallard Lake, which I might check out the next time I ride by. It's situated right next to the detour that takes cyclists off of MLK Drive and up to Middle Drive via a newly paved path (which used to be dirt). Just as I started up that path I noticed this red-shouldered hawk swoop onto a nearby tree branch.

It looked like he was about to pounce, but whatever he saw must not have stayed in the open very long because he didn't go for it.

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Smoke in the Air

 

This Morning's Mt. Tam Webcam View
(Note what appears to be smoke above the fog.)

It looks like wildfire smoke is drifting into the Bay Area, triggering air quality alerts. It's hard to tell anything's going on from my home's vantage point beneath that thick blanket of fog seen in the webcam shot above. We certainly don't smell smoke yet, and hopefully it won't get much worse. Even the brief smoke exposure I experienced up around Sequoia/King's Canyon (aka, SEKI) gave me a little chest congestion that I didn't really notice until the day after I got home. 

I've been monitoring the wildfire cams up around the Park Fire for a few days and include a few of the images I snipped below. 

Colby Mountain Cam on 7/26

Colby Mountain Cam on 7/28

Colby Mountain Cam on 8/6

Grizzly Peak Cam on 7/28

Platte Mountain Cam on 7/26

Stover Mountain Cam on 8/3

Stover Mountain Cam on 8/8

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Giant Sequoias

 

Yellow coneflowers at the feet of giants.
(As always, you can click the image to view it larger.)

I've been looking for a chance to re-visit the giant trees in Sequoia National park this summer, but fires and heat waves have kept me away. Since a small window between heat waves just opened up, and because there are no big wildfires in the general area, I went ahead and made the pilgrimage. 

Even though I've been there before, I felt no sense of recognition on the approach. What had been a forest back then has become a heavily charred landscape that will not be a forest again in my lifetime. But as soon as I got to one of the first groves of giant sequoias I did recognize those trees as old friends. Of course, they are the kind of friends who were special to me, but who don't even remember my name.

After all, they've been visited by so many other beings, all of whom live and die in the blink of a sequoia's eye, who could blame them?

Roadside Giants

I ignored the twinge of guilt I felt about climbing up here since it was obvious that many others have gone before me. Without something to give the trees a human scale, it's impossible to appreciate their size.

It was 47 degrees when I arrived early in the morning, and on my way home I drove through 100-degree heat in Fresno -- a difference of 53 degrees in a very short span of time and space.

A Gathering of Giants

Giants in the Grant Grove

Unfortunately, I had nothing good at hand to include for scale, so these giant sequoia cones look a lot like the much smaller cones of coast redwoods.

I was glad to find this meadow again, since I also photographed it back late July 2009.

Spikes of Hedge Nettle

Giant Sequoia Meadow

California Coneflower
(Rudbeckia californica)

Some of the burned areas had lots of bracken fern covering the forest floor.

Burned forest on the approach to the giant sequoia groves. I'd wanted to visit Crystal Cave, but it's going to remain closed all year in the wake of fires in 2021 and a tough winter in 2023. By the way, Lassen Volcanic National Park has been closed due to the Park Fire.

Although there aren't any big wildfires in the area, there was still quite a bit of smoke in the atmosphere.

The smoke was thick enough to be able to smell it.

Awesome landscape around King's Canyon.

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Beach Day

 

Sea Lions Resting on Seal Rocks

Someone on a local birding list reported seeing harbor seals at Seal Rocks, so I brought along my binoculars today to see if I could find them. On the farthest of the Seal Rocks I did see the sea lions shown above, but no harbor seals. If the report was a case of mistaken identity, I'm still grateful to the reporter for coaxing me to bring the binoculars, as I'm not sure I'd have noticed the sea lions without them.

Since I was down there anyway, I fired off a few frames from the Cliff House overlook.

A Windy Sunday at the Beach

Brown Pelican Drifting Into The Wind

Western Gull Fly-by

The waves were kind of terrible, but this guy was making the most of what was available.

This Western gull was hanging in the wind, and only very slowly dropping down to finally land on top of the Cliff House.

Different Wave, Same Surfer

A young Heermann's gull flies by.

I thought it would be easy to look up the identity of this caterpillar, but I was stumped. I'll update with an ID if I find out what it is. It was munching a small plant growing out of the sidewalk between Grandview Park and the Rocky Outcrop at 14th & Ortega. [UPDATE: The iNaturalist folks put it in the Arctiini tribe of tiger moths.]

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Return of the Whimbrels

 

Whimbrel Tussle

Not the greatest pix, but I couldn't resist posting shots of a flock of whimbrels that was feeding and tussling on the beach near Sutro Baths late yesterday morning. 

I only recently started including the Cliff House on my daily bike ride, and when I started I figured there would be very little change from day to day. So far I've been pleasantly surprised by nuances in pelican numbers, sun vs. fog, surfable waves or just choppy surf, the coming and going of surf fishermen (both on the beach and in boats close to shore), sea stars invading the mussel beds on Seal Rocks, and now the return of the whimbrels. [UPDATE: The next day there were no birds of any kind on the same stretch of beach.]

In other local news, Heckle and Jeckle (as I call them) weren't resting on the Murphy Windmill as they often do (either singly or together), nor were they sitting together in a tree. This time they were resting like a pair of chimney gargoyles on the Millwright Cottage next to the windmill. They both appeared to be quite damp and were busy preening their feathers. Their tail feathers are finally turning red.

Farther east on MLK Drive I was sorry to see that the wasp nest had been obliterated, and not by an accidental sprinkler incident, but by the intentional use of pesticides (prallethrin and deltamethrin, according to a sign at the kill site). I'd looked forward to monitoring the nest over its natural lifetime.

One Whimbrel
(Note all the peck marks in the sand where the flock had been probing for mole crabs.)

Two Whimbrels

Many Whimbrels

The cormorants don't usually pass by the Cliff House this close to shore.

Likewise for the black oystercatchers. It was interesting to see so much energetic bird activity on such a foggy and chilly summer day.

Heckle and Jeckle on the Millwright Cottage

Heckle

Jeckle

Wasp Nest Remainders
(A few scraps of the papery outer nest also littered the ground, but nowhere near enough to account for the whole thing.)

For what it's worth, I was able to watch the wasps from directly beneath the nest several times without stirring them to anger. I'm sorry to see that the park chose to eradicate these keen killers of aphids and other garden pests.

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