San Francisco

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Ben’s Bird in the City of St. Francis

A rainy afternoon is alway a great time to visit one of San Francisco’s museums. In this case I used my recently purchased membership to return to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

I brought my sketching kit and started to sketch an African penguin as it swam around before feeding time. This was a challenge because I did the sketch in small bits because the penguin did not hold still so I took mental snapshot while the bird was facing the right way and eventually pieced together a few penguins for a sketch.

Swimmiing Ass

I then went out of the African Hall to sketch something more stationary. A giraffe mount will do. It was amazing to read that the taxidermy giraffes were first put on display in 1934 at the old Steinhart Aquarium. Here was another connection with the past.

Giraffe

I next went into the Amazon exhibit and sketched one of the blue-and-yellow macaws. It was nice to have them perched for me to sketch but is was even better to see them free flying over the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil last summer! That beats a zoo or aquarium any day!

B and Y Macaw

I overheard one visitor ask the other if she had ever seen a macaw in Hawaii. If she did then that macaw would be very lost but she was referring to a pet that some street performer had as a means of loosening coins from tourists.

I went down to the aquarium and tried a sketch of California’s official marine fish, the garibaldi. This fish was in constant motion and it was hard to capture it’s essence. And the low light in the aquarium didn’t help. At the end I repeated my mantra to perfectionism, “It’s just a sketch.”

I headed over to the alligator exhibit, a direct link with the old aquarium, to look at the seahorse railings and the albino gator. That’s when I saw something very odd, just outside the window.

It was a large bird perched on a railing, almost condor sized and I though to myself, “Is this a new exhibit?” As I walked closer I realized that it was not a condor but a wild turkey.

Which reminds me of the time when I was birding on the Big Sur coast at Grimes Point. At that time, in one view, I had seven California condors in front of me, including a group that was sitting at the edge of the road. A German tourist came up and asked me if they were turkeys! Now how the table had turned! And how condor-like Ben Franklin’s favorite bird can appear.

Perched on the railing was probably one of the only wild turkeys in the county and city of San Francisco. This is listed as a rare bird in San Francisco and one had been seen in this area of Golden Gate Park. According to the staff this female had appeared just after Thanksgiving, nearly two years ago.

So the turkey perched calmly on the railing which gave me an opportunity to do a quick sketch of the bird from behind. (Featured Sketch)

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Sketching at the California Academy of Sciences

On a recent field trip we took 90 fourth graders to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I had come here myself when I was in elementary school, back then it was known as the Steinhart Aquarium. The museum was completely rebuilt in 2008 and bears little resemblance to the museum of my youth.

When the museum reopened, which is about a 45 minute walk from my dwellings, I bought a membership and visited some of the 46 million specimens on display many times. I had since let my membership lapse, but on our recent field trip I thought I would take advantage of the teacher’s discount and reconstitute my membership.

So the week after our field trip, after work, I headed to Cal Academy and bought a teacher’s membership. This museum is a wonderful resource for the natural world and I came prepared with my sketchers kit.

At mid-afternoon, after all the school groups had departed, it seemed that I had the museum to myself. I took advantage of this time and did five quick sketches.

I started by sketching an African penguin. This bird is also referred to as the Jackass penguin, a name that makes fourth graders blush and laugh at the same time, but refers to their braying call. These penguins were easy to sketch as they were roosting on their rocks and posing for me. (Well that statement was very anthropomorphic of me!)

I then headed up to one of the best features of the new building ( well it’s just over ten years old), the living roof. I did a quick sketch with Sutro Tower in the background.

living roof

I then headed into the basement where the aquarium is located. Here I sketched a massive but stationary red-tailed catfish(all sketched in pen) in the drowned Amazonian flooded forest tank. I had a grand time sketching a moon jelly with my sepia brush pen, all without a underlying pencil drawing (featured sketch).

redcat

On the way out I passed under the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton at the entrance. When I was a kid I remember an allosaurus skeleton in a similar place. I liked this little reach back to the past and I sat on a bench for a final sketch. Sketching the entire skeleton with the museum soon to close for the day seemed a daunting task so I just sketched the skull.

T.rex

I look forward to many more visits and more sketchbook pages filled with knowledge and life!

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After Work State Bird

There is nothing like ending the day with a little birding. Especially after a day of rainy day recess and rambunctious ten year olds! Also I had looking for a rare bird in the pouring rain on the previous Saturday and had whiffed.

I was determined to try again so I headed to Twin Peaks, a vista that provides some of the best views of downtown San Francisco.

The view of San Francisco from Twin Peaks, looking straight down Market Street.

I pulled into the dirt parking lot, right in between the peaks, it was just after 3:30. I replaced my work shoes with my mucking boot (always in the trunk) and grabbing my car binoculars (ditto) and headed towards the drawn where my target bird was being seen.

I reached the edge of the road and looked down on the chaparral draw, and immediately I saw a bird flying away down around the curves of the hill and stopping in a coyote brush. This bird did not seem to be a local, something looked off. I walked 20 yards along the road and looked down where I found the bird in my binoculars. Here was my target bird: eastern Phoebe, a very rare bird in San Francisco.

I got great looks at the lost visitor as it hawked from its perch and then returned moving its tail in circular motions which shouted out it’s name, this behavior being very diagnostic of this energetic flycatcher.

I watched the bird for about five minutes then some movement off to  my right caught my attention, just a congress of ravens circling above the South Peak, and then I return my gaze back to the coyote brush and the flycatcher it was gone. Other birders had previously noted that this bird can appear and then suddenly disappear and not be seen again for hours.

Luckily for me I only had to wait for another five minutes before I spotted the bird flying across the road up towards the South Peak where it got in a light tussle with the residence Black Phoebe, two species of Phoebes in one bush is not a bad day’s sighting. And it certainly is a great way to end the day!

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Nemesis Bird

Nemesis (noun)

the inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall.

Nemesis Bird (definitely a verb)

the avian agent of a birder’s downfall

I have had a few Nemesis Birds in the 20 years I have been birding.

These are birds that you try to add to your life list, but after repeated attempts, you fail, making you want to pull out the hair that you still have left on your head and chuck your binoculars into the nearest body of water or a deep, dark crevice, whichever is closest.

I’ve had a few nemesis species in my birding life, the plumbeous vireo comes to mind. This small, gray bird’s range skirts the eastern part of California on it’s western edge. The vireo is to be found around the Mono Basin which lies between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains.

Well this should be easy, I thought. Just show up where the bird has been reported and with a little patience, you have a lifer.

Such is not the case with a nemesis bird (hence the name), I tried and tried for the plumbeous video all around the Mono Basin in different locations and at different times of the breeding season. No luck. (I finally added this vireo to my life list, not in California but in Arizona’s Madera Canyon.)

My latest nemesis was a rare visitor from Alaska that was summering on the western edge of San Francisco on Hermit Rock, a mere 15 minute drive from my residence. Well this should be easy, I thought to myself. You get the picture.

It should be a piece of proverbial cake to see the lone parakeet auklet on the entire west coast of California. So I headed out on my first attempt during the summer of 2017 after I had returned from birding in Costa Rica.

As the Jimmy Cliff lyric says, “You can get it if you really want but you must try, try and try ’til you succeed at last.” Went I did the try, try, and try bit but the murrelet remained as illusive as Bonnie and Clyde at a Sunday afternoon church potluck.

Birders had reported seeing the small black alcid with a white tear streak but somehow I had always managed to arrive ten minutes too late. The parakeet had just been on the water or was preening on the cliff face of Hermit Rock but now I was left intensely looking at every pigeon guilimot that flew to or from the rock with the growing urge to take my binoculars by the strap and hulling them around in circles and pitching them into the Pacific!

At the end of the summer of 2017, the auklet remained off my list and I was resigning to going to Alaska in June during my retirement years to add this nemesis bird to my ABA list.

Epilogue

Then during the summer of 2018, after I had returned from Ecuador the parakeet auklet had returned to Hermit Rock! I tried once and failed and then I returned the following day and the coast was fogged in and I began my search. I was soon joined by three other birders.

The fog slowly lifted and an hour after I started my search, a small black alcid with a white teary streak appeared on a low rock, just below the lookout. The auklet remained in view for about five minutes and then flew around the rock twice before disappearing behind the rock on the far side, probably where it had been on all my previous attempts. Bingo! My Nemesis Bird was a Nemesis no longer.

The parakeet auklet (Aethia psittacula).

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County Birding

As I slowly creep towards 600 ABA birds on my life list I have looked for other birding challenges in my home state of California.

California is a great place to bird because it has just over 600 species that have been found here, only Texas ranks higher in species total. It is also one of the most populated states which means more traffic, higher housing prices, and more expensive lattes but is also means more birders in the field, reporting more birds!

My latest challenge has been to increase my species totals by county. Three counties are the focus of my challenges: San Francisco (were I live), San Mateo (where I work), and Santa Cruz (where I relax). The goal for each county is to see 200 species in each county. Which means that previously a bird that is being seen in San Mateo County ( a black vulture, for instance) that I had already seen (in the Everglades, for instance), then I was less likely to chase it. But now I gave myself the challenge that if a rarity showed up in one of my three target counties, I would give chase, even if the bird was already on my ABA life list.

Which brings me to the subject of my featured sketch: the California thrasher (Toxostom redivivum). As the name implies, this mimid is endemic to California and I have seen this sometimes illusive and sulky bird in the North and East Bay Area and in Joshua Tree. In fact in it’s range it is listed as “common and widespread”. Normally if one is reported, I wouldn’t go but when one wintering individual was reported on a hillside off of  Diamond Heights in San Francisco, I grabbed my bins, and headed east! A California thrasher in San Francisco is considered rare for the county. A new bird to add to my City List was only 15 minutes away!

in-pursuit-of-phantoms

A journal spread about my issues with thrashers, from Joshua tree.

So 15 minutes later I was on the sidewalk on Diamond Heights, peering into the dense bushes on the hillside. Nothing. I looked up to the west and saw a large congress of ravens, circling over Twin Peaks. Before the 1980’s the common raven was not so common in San Francisco. Their population has risen since that time and they are now very common on the west side of San Francisco. Could the same thing be happening to the California thrasher? Too early to tell.

After twenty minutes of searching I was still having no luck. And then off to my left I heard the unmistakable song of California’s coastal thrasher. I ran over and found the bird singing, perched on top of a bush. I had great views of the songster for over five minutes before it finally dove down into the bushes.

A new San Francisco City and County bird!

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Sea Watch: Northern Fulmar

On a Saturday morning in early March, I headed to the platform just below the Cliff House, I set up my tripod and scope to scan the Pacific to the west.

Before I focused my scope on the horizon, looked down at the tideline, sanderlings ebbing and flowing with the tide and a group of willets hung back and rested. I then scanned the rocks, just below my position. It didn’t take long to find the resident black oystercatchers who proclaimed their existence with their raucous calls, a call that carries above the din of the surf. A closer inspection revealed black turnstones and surfbirds working the inshore rocks.

I removed the lens caps from my scope and began to scan the waters beyond Seal Rocks. There was some movement of red-throated loons and cormorants but the bird I was looking for was a true pelagic species. A bird that remained on the outer range of most binoculars but in the winter of 2018, a number of northern fulmars had come closer to shore than in previous winters.

I continued to scan the water looking for something that stood out, something different from the roll of species that normally visited these waters. A 7:20, I caught a bird in my scope that was shearwater-like, flying low to the surface. A dark bird with a large head that was flap-flap gliding near the surface of the waters. This was it! Life bird #546, northern fulmar. toward the end of my sea watch I spotted another fulmar flying off to the south.

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Goldsworthy and the Presidio

The British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy seems to like creating work in San Francisco and he shows a fondness for the Presidio. In all of its 2.3 square miles, the Presidio is home to four of Goldsworthy’s works.

The Presidio, which is nestled into the northwest corner of San Francisco, is a former military post going back to the very birth of the United States. In 1776, it was built as a military base for New Spain. It later transferred to the United Sates in 1848 and on October 1, 1994 it was decommissioned as a military post and transferred to the National Park Service, ending 219 years of a military presence.

What to do with a former military base in prime real estate? How about some art?

I first became aware of Goldsworthy’s work by looking through his monographs at Green Apple Books. I later saw the documentary Andy Goldsworthy Rivers and Tides (2004). This is one of the best documentaries to capture the struggles and passions of the artistic process. Around this time he was being commissioned  to do works in San Francisco, the first that came to my attention was Drawn Stone (2005) at the entrance to the new de Young Museum.

So on one Wednesday I headed out to the southeast corner of the Presidio to do an After-Work Sketch. My subject was Wood Line (2011). This Goldsworthy piece sinuously snakes through a eucalyptus grove in what the artist defined as a piece that “draws the place”. I set up my camp chair and started my sketch in the golden fading light. This was my second attempt at sketching this piece. The first time I fitted Wood Line into a vertical spread, this time I decided to go landscape. I used a bit of sketcher shorthand as I kept the sketch to the simple form of the piece and the eucs in  close proximity. In other words: I had to leave a lot of information out.

This sketch was much more serene and peaceful than the previous time I attempted to draw the sculpture, which was on a Saturday afternoon when hordes of families and couples taking engagement photos filled the grove. There were few people around and there were no interruptions like my previous sketching experience at Stanford. To add a new layer, a great horned owl started to call at 4:35 from the eucalyptus trees off to my right.

EarthWall

Tree Fall (left) and Earth Wall (right) are two new recent Goldsworthy pieces right off Main Post. Tree Fall is unusual because it is inside a Civil War era powder magazine and is only open on weekends. Earth Wall is in a courtyard of the Presidio’s Officer’s Club.

Spire

Spire (2006) was Goldsworthy’s first piece in the Presidio. This is a sketch from December 29, 2010. I have sketched all of Goldsworthy’s permanent works in San Francisco, but the epicenter of Goldsworthy in San francisco will always be the Presidio.

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Cougars of San Francisco

Last week there was proof that the city and county of San Francisco has not been fully tamed. Living in San Francisco’s “wild” west side, I have seen raccoon and skunks threading their way through the Sunset’s twilight streets.  I have even seen coyotes in Golden Gate Park. One at the intersection of Lincoln and Great  Highway and a whole family at Middle Lake. Seeing a family with healthy coyote pups, thriving in the midst of such a vast urban area restored my faith in the power of nature to survive in the absence of  a “traditional” habitat and speaks to me about the resilience of nature in the face of compromised or destroyed ecosystems. And now an even bigger mammal has crossed into the southern border of San Francisco.

An adult mountain lion was captured on a home security camera in the Seacliff neighborhood, sometime on the evening of June 30th. The lion was spotted on two other occasions making it’s way south, the last sighting, on July 3, was at Lake Merced in the southwestern part of the city.

The real question I ask myself is: are mountain lions creeping into our habitat or have we been creeping into their’s? I will let you answer that question for yourself, I know I have an answer.

The anchor for this sketch was a lion mount at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. I was told the lion was shot in the Carmel Valley in the 1970s because it was preying on livestock.

M. Lion Page

I have been lucky enough to see a live mountain lion in the Bay Area. It was on a backpacking trip in Pt. Reyes in April of 2011. I was just heading back from Arch Rock when I saw the large reddish cat with a long tail cross my path about 20 yards away. It was a brief look but I later found out that a motion camera about a mile a way  from Arch Rock capture an image of a lion about once a week.