Updates on feathered friends...
Perhaps the string of young 'uns pictured here - 28 of them watched over by 4 adults on a sunny Sunday afternoon at the pond near Crown Beach - are the same pictured in an earlier posting?
At any rate, Sergei captured them in the pond....
then up the banks of the pond ...and heading toward greener pastures...
... then snacking to their hearts content.
Here the brood samples grasses near Crown Beach public facilities.
View through the trees across Crab Cove and toward Ballena Bay yacht harbor in the distance.
Terns are back!
(Later Sergei corrected Marge: "Marge, they're Caspian Terns. True, "Lesser" and "Greater" are terms often used to distinguish our feathered friends but, in the case of terns, the term is Caspian!) Anyone spotting terns - Lesser or Caspian - at this time of year will see displays of feathered athleticism and hear calls of high-pitched purity - all in service of increasing the tern population.
Speaking - well, writing - of tern populations, seems Veterans Affairs is giving the nod to the tern breeding site continuing - at least for now while the publicity continues - on the former naval base.(Read background.)
This mallard female has 6 or 7 chicks that look like chips off the old block...then there are the 3 blonde chicks that look like the milkman.
Is this an example of duck largesse - is she fostering a sister duck's offspring?
Or is this an example of blowback from a duck tryst in the reeds?
Speaking of mallards, Marge and Sergei have witnessed several incidents of what can only be called, to put it nicely, "sexual harassment" of female mallards by male mallards.
On more than one occasion we've witnessed gangs of male mallards targeting one female and bullying her until she succumbs. We've seen it happen in water (3 males attacked one female) and aloft (3 males hijacked one female, in flight, harassed, yelled, and ganged up on her - all while she squawked in alarm. Perhaps duck for "no" has not yet reached the male mallard ear?Or identity politics - and politicians - have not yet arrived in the mallard population?)
Perhaps these "blondinees" duckings are evidence of other duck species noting that female mallards are...well, sitting ducks... for easy-enough implantation and propagation of their species?
The Pond - site for myriad activities?
If the pond is the site for social transgressions of the feathered variety... it is also the site of transgressions of the not-feathered variety.Not too far from the duck nursery, on the banks of the pond, someone (or someones...Marge hopes that, if transgressions occur, they do so in atmospheres of friendship and bonhomie and, in this case, more than one party-ier participated - else it feels kind of...sad, lonesome, depressing, anti-social...) had a Lime-Rita party.
As you see, the party-ier or party-ers lined up the dozen empties very neatly.
Marge and Sergei passed by after noon and only one can had fallen over by then; Marge hopes that's a metaphor for the kind of party it was...
"Jack LaLanne's Boat"
Red hot pokers create a lovely foreground for a view of what Marge calls "Jack LaLanne's Boat," (center right of pic) and Poopy Point (left, background).Early in his career Jack Lalanne worked feats of athleticism and daring-do at Alameda's public baths.
A local historian mentioned that LaLanne once "lived on a boat in Sunny Cove". (Sunny Cove - picture here - was the site of Neptune Beach Baths.)
Marge likes to think this was Jack's boat, fallen on hard times since Jack's departure (both from Alameda and the planet). Read on article in local paper about LaLanne...then listen - as long as you can stand it - to his All-American views on the American flag.
(Left)
Marge at Poopy Point...
and...(below)...
long shadow evidence of a happy pair...
Marge and Sergei at the end of a long and lovely day bidding you a fond farewell - until our next ramble and report...
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