Great Birding Day At Lakes Hood and Spenard

 I'm reasonably confident of the identifications because we went with a serious birder friend.  These are the ones that are relatively less common.  We were looking for a long tailed duck that was reported nearby, but didn't sight them.  These were cool enough.  I've saved these files larger than I normally would, so they should get bigger and sharper if you click on them.  

Crowned Grebes

Red Throated Loon

Boreal Chickadee

 Barrow's Goldeneye

When we got home for a late lunch on the deck, a downy woodpecker was banging away on an old cottonwood and some nuthatches seemed to have made their nests in the old woodpecker holes.  

Bike Ride To Rocky Beach

 Biked over to Manitou Beach today.  

Downtown Seattle in the distance

Here's that picture again, cropped.  All of a sudden, all the gulls in the area took flight.  

Click on image to enlarge

This And That, Ups And Downs - San Francisco And Seattle

 We're back on Bainbridge Island.  San Francisco was great.  We tried a new rental car option.  Actually we've used BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and buses in past trips, but we were going to different places over the four days, so a car seemed to make sense. Kyte is a company that delivers the car to you.  And they were cheaper.  Everything worked well except two things.

• They aren't allowed to deliver to the airport so they deliver to Daly City BART.  That's pretty close to the airport and sounded ok.  But it turns out it costs $9 per person one way from SFO to Daly City BART.  So we went to the information office in the airport to get senior BART passes.  In the past a $9 senior BART pass would get us into town and back, plus a trip to see friends in Oakland.  But they aren't selling them at the airport any more.  So the two roundtrips added almost $40 to the bill.
• We were a bit earlier than our appointment and the pick up site is listed as 500 John Daly Blvd.  Well, that includes the entire BART station and two parking lots.  Finding out where we were supposed to be was hard and the driver was late.  

This would be great if we needed to get the car at a residence or anywhere besides SFO.  

Overall, we had a great time visiting good friends on the Peninsula one night and staying with an old Thailand Peace Corps buddy I've known since 1966.  Saturday we walked to the top of Twin Peaks from his house and my son and the two grandkids met us up there.  We spent the rest of the day with them on a glorious sunny T-shirt warm day at Golden Gate Park.  

Twin Peaks involved lots of steps

And flowers - there's a bee in there, but the resolution is too low.  Sorry.

Cool trees.

And birds, like this hummingbird.

And this crow enjoying the view from Twin Peaks

Red tailed hawk?

And for my friend Jeremy, I take pictures of towers like this that interest him much more than the trees or the birds or even the view.  

We also looked at a couple of houses.  My son's family is growing out of the confines of a two bedroom apartment.  It's interesting to visit open houses, but the prices are depressing.  Everything is super staged with furniture, paintings plants.  I discovered it's useful to look behind things - the stagers use items to hide things they don't want you to see.  

Getting altitude is favorite of my grandson.  This was sunny Saturday.

Back in Golden Gate Park Sunday, but it was cloudy and windy and chilly.  That didn't stop the kids from having a great time.  

Monday was sunny again and we had more park time.  Even though it was a much smaller park, there was enough room to play monster and the kids were good at changing the rules if they thought they were going to get caught.  

Broken glass, from my experience, is not an uncommon sight in San Francisco.  This is at a bus stop.  

Dropping off the car was much easier than picking it up and we got to the airport with plenty of time.  An advantage to walking instead of taking the sky train is getting to see the art exhibits all through the terminals.  

Most of these Tabitha Soren pieces didn't excite me, but I did like "Emailed Kiss Goodnight".

This should be larger and clearer if you click on it.

Alison Saar's Flourish

Thought this was interesting.  This isn't far from where my son lives now.  Filmore near Geary.

Finally, we got to our gate and had some ramen.  And I also finally had some time for yesterday's Wordle.  So I started with RAMEN.  

I got two right - one green one yellow -  and I figured I'd try to go through the possible words and make it in two or three tries. 

But as I discovered when we got off the plane and onto the ferry in Seattle, that I'd used the wrong letter as the yellow (A instead of R) one.  An almost totally wasted turn given the two words I'd boiled it down to - ABBEY and ALLEY.  For the first time I got it only on the sixth round.  Bummer.  

But I made up for it today with 99.99% luck.  

Meanwhile, it was 54˚ F in the condo when we got back last night.  A good part of the trip was being away while we waited for the plumber to fix the boiler.  And they called this morning to see if it was ok to come earlier.  YES!

But then they reported it needed parts they had to order.  The fireplace and the two space heaters we got have gotten it into the low 60s.  Oh, and there was fresh snow on the ground.  The weather app reported 32F on Bainbridge and 40F in Anchorage.

So, that's all you missed while I've been gramping instead of blogging.

Oh, my book club met last night.  It was a book I just couldn't finish. Reading it wasn't fun nor was it telling me anything I needed to know.  I didn't want to keep reading.  But that's a different post.  

Birds And Wrack

We'd gotten a bike at Bikrowave for my granddaughter.  They're all used bikes that the do-it-yourself bike repair shop takes in and fixes up.  Yesterday we were going to bike down to the Venice Boardwalk.  But we hadn't gotten far when we discovered her fingers aren't strong enough to squeeze the handbrakes tight enough to stop the bike.  She ended up against a low wall with a hedge on top.  

And the bike rental places at the beach weren't open.  It had rained all day Thursday and more rain was predicted and I'm sure they just said 'it's Christmas Eve, just stay home.'  But while clouds surrounded us, it was sunny though cool by LA standards - high 50s.  That didn't stop my granddaughter from ditching her shoes and pushing up her pants and playing tag with the surf.  

There were various layers of wrack on the beach after the storms this week.

  

"Natural material that washes onto the beach is referred to as wrack and includes algae, sea grasses, and some invertebrates such as sponges and soft corals. Wrack serves as the primary source of nutrients to beach communities and is the foundation for the food chain."  [from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission]

And there was a fair amount of non-natural material in the wrack.  

There was even a woman picking plastic out of the wrack.  

Sanderling were also racing the surf - running down the wet sand as the water retreated, looking for little critters.

"Although Sanderlings are still considered fairly common, some surveys in the Americas show troubling declines of up to 80 percent since the early 1970s. Sanderlings' Arctic tundra breeding habitats are threatened by the rising temperatures associated with climate change, while their migratory and wintering habitats are at risk from coastal pollution such as oil spills as well as coastal development and other forms of habitat loss." [from the American Bird Conservancy]

There are lots of kinds of shore birds with longish legs and beaks, so I won't say for sure these are sandpipers, who moved in after the much smaller sanderlings.  

And we were even treated to a flying octopus.  

And toward the end this enormous flock of sea gulls took off at once and dotted the sky.  

Today was much grayer.  We opted for a walk along Ballona Creek.  This time I took my telephoto lens along.  

I'm including this one because I think the bird on the left is a female bufflehead.  The one in the water slightly to the right of center is possibly a male.  

"Black-necked Stilts are among the most stately of the shorebirds, with long rose-pink legs, a long thin black bill, and elegant black-and-white plumage that make them unmistakable at a glance. They move deliberately when foraging, walking slowly through wetlands in search of tiny aquatic prey. When disturbed, stilts are vociferous, to put it mildly, and their high, yapping calls carry for some distance."[From All About Birds] 

The waterborne American Coot is one good reminder that not everything that floats is a duck. A close look at a coot—that small head, those scrawny legs—reveals a different kind of bird entirely. Their dark bodies and white faces are common sights in nearly any open water across the continent, and they often mix with ducks. But they’re closer relatives of the gangly Sandhill Crane and the nearly invisible rails than of Mallards or teal." [from All About Birds]

There's a bike trail along the creek - really a cement waterway.  

Point White Pier

 I went along with my daughter as she ran errands around the island.  The last one was near Point White Pier.  The sun was below the hills and the light was magical.  The clouds were moving and the water was moving and there was a kaleidoscope effect on the water.  

I saved this picture with higher resolution so you could enlarge it to better see the king fisher sitting on the adjacent dock.  

Here's looking down at the rocks through the water below the pier.