Yesterday’s top Berkeley bird: This great blue heron, which was hunting in the meadow near the off-leash dog area in Chavez Park near the Marina. The place is crawling with ground squirrels, and you see herons and egrets stalking them — or staking out their burrows, anyway — fairly frequently. Other people in the park have told me they’ve seen a heron catch a squirrel — spear it, then swallow it whole. That’s what this one did as we passed yesterday, though I didn’t actually see the spearing part. It tossed its catch into the air and caught it, then took several minutes to work it down. I don’t think it was keen on flying while it was trying to swallow such a big lump of protein, and I was able to approach to about 30 feet with my non-telephoto-equipped digital camera for this shot.
Heron
Yesterday’s top Berkeley bird: This great blue heron, which was hunting in the meadow near the off-leash dog area in Chavez Park near the Marina. The place is crawling with ground squirrels, and you see herons and egrets stalking them — or staking out their burrows, anyway — fairly frequently. Other people in the park have told me they’ve seen a heron catch a squirrel — spear it, then swallow it whole. That’s what this one did as we passed yesterday, though I didn’t actually see the spearing part. It tossed its catch into the air and caught it, then took several minutes to work it down. I don’t think it was keen on flying while it was trying to swallow such a big lump of protein, and I was able to approach to about 30 feet with my non-telephoto-equipped digital camera for this shot.
In re: Your Biting Dog
Posted on a telephone pole near what we used to call “the experimental dog park” (for experimental dogs) at Grant and Hearst in Berkeley. As befits a dog park, dogs are almost always there. We’ve taken Scout there a few times, but there’s a little bit of a weird, frenetic feeling to the place and he never seems to want to stay. Somebody in the neighborhood went to the trouble of having a professionally designed banner printed up for the dog run; it says something like, “Please consider the neighbors and stop incessant barking.”
