√144PAD

2-7 September

  I'm cheating and posting six days in one--a 12PAD.  It's never been done.  What might happen? We simply can't know.  I've fallen behind and this is the way things must be.

  Birds have been painfully slow but we've had plenty to do with shark watch (one seriously injured elephant seal is our only indication thus far of great white customers), whale surveys, pinniped surveys, shorebirds, gulls, sea-watch... etc. Winds looked real good for lots of bird movement this week but suddenly look not so good.  If you see any migrants please tell them we have many flies and a large forest within which they may live.  Please do high overcast dance.  Thank you.

  Current battle score:
SEFI: 73
SCI:   72

Banding a Cassin's Auklet--this little guy should have fledged by now and should be on its way to eating the same food as Blue Whales (and occasionally being incidental Blue Whale food).

This is a California Gull.

Striped shore crab (Pachygrapsus crassipes) in Jewel Cave

Aulon Islets at sunset: Sugarloaf is on the right and is the favored haunt of The Gannet and other Sulid folk (at present totalling eleven Brown and one Blue-footed Boobies)

Oh! the channel walls are high and steep!

And the channel waves are wild and deep,

And on, and on, they madly sweep,

By Aulone Isle of the Farallones!

On Aulone Isle, Milton S. Ray, late 1800s/early 1900s

The time we caught a MacGillavray's Warbler.

Dragonflies are difficult to remove from nets.  This dragon lady didn't make it.

Peregrines like to eat stuff--sometimes they eat Western Gulls (it didn't eat this Western Gull)

Cuteness incarnate.  This photograph is dedicated to Felonious Jive.

Getting late--this was one of the last Pigeon Guillemots still bringing food to chick(s)--they have mostly fledged or failed at this point and the island Alcid show has plummeted.

Paleo-portrait of Don Mastwell (L) who arrived on Saturday to reinforce us.  Yesterday he found a Mourning Dove.

"The gulls are the virtual rulers of birddom on the Farallones, and that they live on the best the islands afford, those long-suffering subjects, the murres, cormorants, and rabbits, will testify."

Western Gull species account, page 82 of The Farallones The Painted World and Other Poems of California, by Milton S. Ray

Western Gull?  Western Gull.

"And they, too, howl like dogs in the freezing storm,

turning and turning from it as if they thought

one naked side could keep the other warm."

Inferno, 3rd Circle

The Zalophus invasion continues.  They own the terrace.