{"id":4834,"date":"2015-06-07T21:31:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T04:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=4834"},"modified":"2015-06-07T21:32:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T04:32:56","slug":"nesting-colonies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2015\/06\/nesting-colonies\/","title":{"rendered":"Nesting colonies"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s nesting season, and this afternoon I managed to take some time out of a busy day to visit two nesting colonies. The first one I visited was the California Gull nesting colony at Baylands Nature Preseve in Palo Alto. <\/p>\n

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The gull chicks still have their downy feathers, but they are looking pretty big, about three quarters the size of the adults. A few White Pelicans sat along one edge of the colony, seemingly ignoring the gull chicks stumbling around near them.<\/p>\n

From there, I drove over to Mountain View where there is an egret nesting colony along a street lined with corporate offices. The only nests I saw had Snowy Egrets on them; but I also saw Great Egrets and a Black-crowned Night-heron, along with the usual suburban passerines. The nests look like Great Blue Heron nests, untidy piles of twigs jammed into tree crotches; and just as with heron nesting colonies, it’s strange to look up thirty feet in the air, and see birds that you’re used to seeing stalking through swamp water.<\/p>\n

The sounds coming from the nesting colony were varied and interesting. It turns out egrets make a wider variety of sounds than do Great Blue Herons, everything from raucous cries like you’d imagine a dinosaur would make, to low burbling noises not unlike you might hear at a gull nesting colony.<\/p>\n