No, not the crappy movie from 2000 with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe, but actual proof of life.We thought for a while that there were House Finches nesting in the vines over our front door (we even used the back door for a couple of weeks) but we couldn't see a nest and weren't really sure until Brian cut back the vines (after several days of no finches flitting around our porch). There were several old nests in there, and this is one of them. No, we're not psycho enough to let the foliage take over the whole house! We had to cut them back, really!
In other news: we took a quick trip to Marin County last weekend to go to Point Reyes National Seashore. Borrowed a scope from Golden Gate Audubon; in this picture Brian is scoping out a bird on the rocks below which may have been a common murre (but even with the scope we couldn't tell). Cool and cloudy all weekend, but we had a great time nonetheless.
On Saturday we took a walk along the beach to go by one of the nesting sights (in the wire enclosure) of the endangered snowy plover. We were very lucky to see the mother away from the nest foraging for a little while, otherwise we wouldn't have seen anything because the nest is very well hidden and you can't get very close.
We think this was an egret of some kind that we found on the beach.
HUGE amazing thistles. The picture doesn't really convey how massive and thorny they were. You definitely would not want to fall into one of these.
On our way home we stopped at Audubon Canyon Ranch to see the heron rookery. Each of the white blobs in the lower right of the photo is a great egret on a nest, and this was only one of several popular nesting sites at ACR. It was pretty cool 
We took the long way home and went over the Golden Gate Bridge, which neither of us had done since we moved here. It is far superior in every way to the Bay Bridge, except it costs $2 more to get on.
3 comments:
Bird Nest soup, Thistle Soup, and what the heck is common murre? As in Murre? I think I'll paint the ceiling Murre?
Great shots, nice to see a post!
Any chance the thistle was an artichoke that had bloomed? If you get a chance, visit Castroville, just north of Monterey. There are whole fields of thistles. The artichoke is actually the bud of the plant that they harvest before it blooms. http://www.artichoke-festival.org/farming.html
I guess it should be Common Murre, but in any case, it's obviously an auk! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre (can you not post links in the comments here? how lame!). Murre would make a great color name, though.
And I don't think those were artichokes, or even artichoke thistles (different). We have artichokes in our yard in Berkeley and when we were moving in last year they were already going to seed so I know what those look like. Last year we had two artichokes on that plant, this year we have eight coming along!
Have been to Monterey, but not Castroville, we hope to visit that area again sometime.
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