23 March 2015 - Birding in SF plus Pterodactyls

While I was working hard in San Francisco, I did get a couple opportunities to go birding. In addition to seeing so many beautiful birds that I don't get at home, I was able to add twelve new birds to my life list. Hooray!

Common loon

Red-throated loon

Bewick's wren

 Orange-crowned warbler

Black-and-white warbler

Acorn woodpecker

Pelagic cormorant:  he is the one in the middle and smaller than the two double-crested cormorants that flank him. Notice the DC cormorant on the right is showing his crests--little white fluffs.

Brandt's cormorant

In addition to these, I had really good looks at four more birds but did not get photos, darn it.  I added Hooded oriole, Cassin's auklet, Rhinoceros auklet, and Pigeon Guillemot. 

The following birds are not new, but it was a fabulous high diving show.  I was able to spend almost an hour at Heron's Head Park watching twenty Brown Pelicans diving for food. It looked like they were eating both fish and bat rays. But the diving positions make them look like pterodactyls. Scarily so. The pictures below are all different birds, not a progression of a single bird in a dive. The sun was behind the birds which turned the pictures into black silhouettes.

All of these dives ended up in various iterations of this:

So much fun. So little time.