Showing posts with label california gull. Show all posts
Showing posts with label california gull. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Juvenile raven vanishes, breeding parents set to work on dastardly deeds, home repairs/additions
We last saw it on Sunday perched in a cypress tree eating an unknown food item. It had made an enemy of a California gull that buzzed it persistently to no effect. The most the gull could elicit from the fledgeling were a few low vocalizations.
The next day, it was gone, either fledged or dead. The bird flew well and it is now believed to have predated a western gull nest, so it appears to be more than capable of fending for itself. Also, though it was a bird in it's first year of life, it was significantly larger than the typical raven I observe on the mainland, just like mom and dad:
For size comparison's sake, the adult raven on the right and the human being on the left were equally distant from the camera as took this picture. Well... not really, but our ravens are still huge.
At any rate, though raven breeding season appears to be over, the pair is not taking a vacation. They have been actively collecting nesting materials in recent days and have been seen transporting them back to their home tree. I caught one collecting moss, presumably for nest lining.
Why would the ravens be working on their nest structures? Breeding season is over. Right?
Well, the nesting structures were examined earlier in the year by our park's biologists and portions of them were tampered with or disassembled in the process. The ravens may simply be rebuilding what was destroyed.
Also, nests must be repaired each year as the hatched chicks defecate inside the nest, but it's very, very early for that process to begin. Nest construction and repair usually occurs in the spring.
A more alarming conclusion might be that these birds are making preparations to lay a second clutch. It's hard to imagine that the moss lining they're collecting could keep from year to year and ravens will sometimes lay a second or even a third smaller clutch if the first one fails, but as far as we know the ravens did successfully fledge a single bird this year and it's awfully late in the season to lay new eggs.
We'll keep watching, however, because our giant and wily ravens are not to be underestimated.
Here's a video we took today of one of them eating a gull chick. As usual, sorry for the camera shake.
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Monday, May 31, 2010
Alcatraz has babies! Cuteness overload!
The visitor to Alcatraz wants his Al Capone, his "Machine Gun" Kelly and his "Birdman" Stroud. She wants to tour our rows of tiny cells, to see the narrow cots, the lead paint peeling off of crumbling walls and to hear the loud sounds of cell doors slamming, all behind a curtain of dense San Francisco fog. And we'll give them that.
But not before they find themselves surrounded by these speckled grey balls of pure fuzz and cuteness. Every year around this time, Alcatraz becomes an avian nursery nurturing around five percent of the world's baby WEGUs.
You'll be slain when confronted with three thousand of these. The following pictures are from summers past.
Nowhere else can you buy a ticket for a reasonable price, take a twelve minute ferry ride and experience this. Our baby WEGUs are beginning to hatch!
These were the first hatchlings we saw:
Pardon the graininess. This gull family lives deep in the parade ground area, which is closed for nesting season. As more chicks hatch, we'll have many more photos for you.
Unfortunately, it's our duty as a metal-themed bird blog to bring you br00tality as well. We don't enjoy doing it, but the bitter fact is that these balls of fluff often die at their cutest. One of the first clutches hatched yesterday and each chick promptly died. Amazingly, out of the thousand nests on the island, this was the one featured in our recent post entitled "Now we wait..." I wonder whether I've cursed this gull family. One individual:
But there is optimism to be had. Each nesting season we have our favorites that we root for and many of them go on to fledge successfully.
Speaking of babies...
Well, no one thinks of our fierce little peregrine tiercel as a baby but the little guy still hasn't donned his adult plumage. The books say we can expect him to turn from brown to blue after the breeding season. If he decides to stay and he survives through to winter, we'll have a better idea of where he falls among the three North American subspecies of the peregrine falcon. It's been suggested that he's a Peale's falcon, a coastal, northwestern variety that is the biggest and darkest of the three, and the largest subspecies of peregrine in the world. Our little guy may be a little small for all of that.
One concern with our peregrine is that while we still spot him regularly, the frequency of observation has declined considerably and now your only shot to observe him is to carefully scan the lighthouse. When his crop is full and he's feeling sedentary, he can be found on the upper ledges.
Ryan T. Gosling! Baby goose!
If there were an Intrade contract that Ryan would fledge, it would be trading at 95 cents for a dollar payout at this point. This guy/gal is money in the bank:
While we've been very critical of the geese that nest on Alcatraz, it's been a true privilege to watch this little guy at every stage of his development, from a cute but anonymous tiny ball of fuzzy green confetti, to a little yellow football-sized creature trying to make its way in the world. Now he's going on to be a real goose, quickly growing into his adult plumage. Where does the time go?
One more thing: Maganrord has one thing to say to the following pair of California gulls that has been seen near the old prison incinerator: Nest, or get off the spot! We're tired of seeing you hanging around doing nothing! We want to see some CAGU chicks.
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