Re: Changing Status of East Bay Birds
Sat, 7 Nov 1998 18:07:52 -0800
From: Larry Tunstall
Steve Glover's wonderful essay on East Bay bird species that have arrived within the past century or so is a significant contribution to our knowledge. I will give it a special place on the EBBC website as soon as I find time to prepare a polished HTML version.
I forwarded a copy to Rex Burress, retired Lake Merritt naturalist, and he responded with some very interesting additional history. With his permission, I am passing Rex's message along to the group.
Larry Tunstall
El Cerrito CA
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Dear Larry Tunstall, Steve Glover,
I read the CHANGING STATUS OF THE BIRDS OF THE EAST BAY, and I thank you Larry, for forwarding me a copy. Although I am not a bird detailer, more interested in general nature, I can add a few items about the birds of Lake Merritt since I started working there in 1961. I was down to the lake November 4, and was gratified to see about 300 ruddy ducks, and a smattering of lesser scaup, bufflehead, and canvasback. Most startling was the double-crested cormorants that had taken over the Caserina beefwood egret tree! Over one hundred were resting there in the evening of 11/3, forced there, I imagine, because of the cleaning and reinstallation of the plastic cylinders defining the refuge! The slick floats, without the ballast of tubeworms, spin when the birds try to perch there! That problem occurred when the boom was first installed in 1975, but gradually the cormorants, terns, and gulls used the cylinders when the mussels and tubeworms added ballast, and sometimes you could see 300 cormorants lined up on the structure! I also noted for the first time, about a dozen pair of cormorants nesting in the great egret tree in June, 98.
Paul Covel brought the original Canada geese from Gray Lodge Refuge in 1954. They were gun shot birds with damaged wings, but they started nesting on the Duck Islands built in that period. I have pictures of the geese nesting there when there was no vegetation. By the time I started in 1961, about 20 goslings were being produced each season, and by 1970, the year the present white pelican was brought from Pyramid Lake, two pair of black-crowned night herons built nests and produced young, early. We found a stray baby in February and nursed "out of sight" for release.
As the trees and shrubs grew on the islands, great egret appeared in 1972 and a single pair nested. In 1974, snowy egrets arrived and took over the bottlebrush and thornless blackberry and began nesting. By 1978, several dozen snowys and a dozen greats, and 40 black crowns had started nesting. As you know, presently, well over 100 nests of greats and snowys are tended, as well as 50 or more heron nests. More snowy egrets nest at Lake Merritt than at Audubon Canyon Ranch! Consider that the Lake Merritt Refuge is in the center of a city!! But the great egret tree is being killed by cormorant defecation. Island number three now has no trees, only coyote brush and bottle brush.
Mallard ducks nested at the lake in large numbers before the herons arrived, and at that time we "saved" hundreds of ducklings to rear in the brooder pens. After Fish and Game took the surplus to Clear Lake during the hunting season and released them in the presence of hunters to be slaughtered, we stopped the expensive process and let the herons eat the surplus. The herons also eat the baby rats! Such is the dilemma of wildlife management!
The Canada goose production has hit a high of about 90 goslings being tended at Lake Merritt the last seven years. This adds to the total, since they are long-lived, and when I was there in June, 1998, I counted over 1400 returnees gathered on the lawns for the molting reunion! How many is enough? I love the Canada goose, and it is wondrous to see, and hear, as they sweep over the city skyline to ski in for a landing.
Although your report deals mostly with nesting birds, naturalist Lionel Kett (deceased) and I saw a cattle egret catching flies on the lawn at Lake Merritt about 1965. It was the first sighting that I can recall. We also had a tropical kingbird hanging around one winter, and of course, waterfowl like tufted duck has appeared since the 1960's.
Another unusual nesting was of a cattle egret and a black crowned night heron we had confined to the geodesic dome aviary. They mated and produced two babes that grew to a mature spectacle of half and half. I have a photograph, which I took to Cooper's Club, and they would hardly believe the evidence! The two hybrids died in the cage.
A Canada goose and Chinese goose mated, and produced three undesirable crosses we tried for years to catch and dispose of. Wing-injured whistling swans (Tundra) nested on the lake and the cygnets would ride on the parent's back! Of course, we were always receiving baby birds, and nests, at the Rotary Nature Center, but that is another story.
In the late 1960's/early 1970's, robins roosted during the winter in Joaquin Miller Park by the thousands. In the morning hours, they would roar out of the canyon to raid the city. Starlings would roost in the bay trees with them, and the hill behind the Browning Monument was labeled, Robin Roost. They suddenly stopped roosting there about 1973.
I recall watching a Cooper's hawk nesting in a Monterey Pine in Joaquin Miller Park in 1992, and when the male brought a flicker to the nest, the flicker's head fell off and started dropping to the ground. The hawk dropped over the edge in a power dive and caught the head before it reached the ground! I have a book of unwritten observations depicting such behavior.
I hope these nature notes are of some interest.
In the love of nature, Rex Burress
Steller's Jays in new neighborhoods
Sun, 08 Nov 1998 16:04:26 -0800
From: Phoebe Watts
After reading the messages about Steller's Jays I saw one in my yard (on Grant St. near Rose). Very unusual. It occurs to me that in the past couple of years I have had increasing difficulty in finding enough sunny space in this yard for the vegetable garden that I have planted yearly for more than 20 years, because of the growth of my own and my neighbors' trees. Perhaps Steller's are coming down because it's getting more wooded.
Phoebe Watts
Berkeley
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