Birds at the Ballpark

Once at an A's game I saw an owl or a peregrine falcon take a pigeon on the wing. The pigeon was flying across the outfield at dusk, shortly after the game had started, when this fast, silent bird hopped off a light standard and chased the pigeon down. The predator raced up behind the pigeon and snatched it out of the air and took it up to another light standard to eat it. My companion and I just looked at each other and said, "wow."

Trip to Los Angeles

I went to Los Angeles today. From a window high above Bunker Hill, well above the helicopter pad on the adjacent building, I saw two or three violet-green swallows. I haven't ever seen those from my window in San Francisco, although I see them elsewhere in the Bay Area from time to time. I saw another turkey vulture, too.

Once on a trip to Los Angeles several years ago, I saw a flock of parrots eating fruit from trees in the park outside the Pershing Square Metro station. They were making a huge racket and flinging bits of fruit all around. I remember the fruit as avocados, although walking past today I didn't see any avocado trees so maybe I was misremembering. But there was no mistaking the parrots. The funny thing was that the co-worker who was with me didn't even notice them until I said, "wow, that's a lot of parrots." They couldn't have been making a bigger fuss if they had been a crowd of teenagers, but he was just tuned out to them.

Also at the airport I got to see a crow demonstrating the famed corvid problem-solving behavior. The bird had scored a big piece of bagel, about one-third of the whole bagel. It caught my attention by dropping its big piece of bagel in a puddle and then landing next to it. At first I thought, "that's too bad for you," but the bird didn't pick up the bagel and move on. Instead, it stood there picking off small pieces of the apparently rock-hard bagel, dropping them one by one in the puddle, and then eating them. I guess it likes its bagels dunked. While it ate I could see its tongue (sort of silvery, like a hummingbird's tongue, not pink and textured like a person's or a goose's) and the inside of its bill (white).

Pigeons

I see pigeons out my window, mostly a little below me. They fly really well. Like their city predators, peregrines, they are naturally cliff dwellers. I think of them as city birds, but I've seen a large colony of truly wild pigeons nesting on cliffs at a regional park in Colorado Springs.

I see them in the bus terminal, too. All the ones in there seem to have foot injuries or deformities. I wonder if it's cause or effect.

I always study the bridge on my way to work, and I see where cliff dwellers would nest there, too. But I never see any.

Turkey Vulture

Today's best bird was a turkey vulture. Not a best bird on most days in most locations, but a best bird of the day in the Financial District. It was soaring high above the Transbay Terminal at about 5:30 pm.

Usually I have to look down to see birds from my desk; I get a great view of their backs as they fly below my window. This one made me look up. I got a nice view of its bald red head through my binoculars.

Baby Dark-Eyed Juncos

Dark-eyed juncos breed all over the East Bay. Almost surely they are in San Francisco too, but not anywhere visible from my office because they spend most of their time much lower down. Right now, lots of juncos have fledglings.

I saw a family this morning while running. The babies scurry around on the ground begging their parents for food. They make this noise that sounds a little bit like an old VW Beetle. Listen for it and you will see them.

They are small, and the parents have dark heads as if they are wearing hoods. The parents have white outer tail feathers, too. On the fledglings' stumpier tails these feathers are much more prominent and their whole tails look white.

Only soaring gulls from the office today, though.

Introducing Urban Nature

My goal here is to share the view from my window. It's high above the street in a city, yet I keep binoculars at my desk because of the surprising variety of wildlife I can see without leaving my seat. There's a lot around us if we just pay attention.

The big nature news in the FiDi these days is not visible from my window, though. It's visible from the computer next to my window. The peregrine falcons who nest on the PG&E building in San Francisco have incubated four red eggs for the last month, and now those eggs are fuzzy white chicks. You can see them at www.scpbrg.org.

I sometimes see one or the other falcon from my window. They are usually moving far too fast, or are too far away, for me to tell which one I see. (The female is much larger than the male, and her chest is a little more orange.) Today, however, I saw only California gulls and pairs of soaring ravens.

My view of the butterfly migration seems to be over; in the past few weeks I've seen large numbers of butterflies, all headed north, but today I saw none.