The Great Blue Herons of Golden Gate Park need to mash up their crayfish treats before eating, so sometimes you’ll get to hear a wet splat and then see the guts fly.
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KERSPLATT!
A close up view from an earlier day:
Look out, little crayfish…
A Great Blue Heron spotted this waterlogged Coors Light Beer can floating just ‘neath the surface of the Wildfowl Pond at San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and then lunged at the Silver Bullet as if it were something edible. Then all the water drained out of it [cue sad trombone]. Poor little feller.
(Now this was a few years back – could the aluminum can have come from a rowdy pre-ING Group era Bay to Breakers? There’s no way to tell.)
Maybe we’ll be counting on animals more and more to keep GGP clean?
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Anything’s possible.
Poor little feller.
The gigantic Great Blue Herons high atop Stow Lake in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park usually want to stick around their one-hundred pound nests, so sometimes this is how they go to the loo.
Most of it makes it out of the nest, anyway.
Click to expand, go ahead, do it.
Yet another “pretty picture,” per ”Don’t Call Him Crazy” Rob Anderson.
Just as the Cliff Swallows come back to Capistrano every March (or so they say), the Great Blue Herons of San Francisco return to nest on a small island on Stow Lake every January.
See what it looks like via filmmaker Rick Bacigalupi of BaciPix, who presents Nancy DeStefanis, The Heron Lady. Check out SFNature.org for the latest, including new tours of Heron’s Head Park (aka Pier 98) in southeast San Francisco.
This fellow is a regular at the nests in the tops of of the Monterey Cypress of Stow Lake. He’s ready to fight and love all over again this year.
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Welcome back, Ardea herodias
This hungry Great Blue Heron waited around for a few minutes before plucking a pocket gopher from a hole in a meadow in Golden Gate Park.
It’s the circle of life. Poor little feller.
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This one didn’t end well for the crayfish.
Stow Lake, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California
This didn’t end well for the gopher.
The parent bird, the tallest one, just hunted and killed a pocket gopher to bring back to the nest high above Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. The middle chick (fledgling now?) scooped up the undigested rodent to the chagrin of its siblings.
You can see the outline of the gopher slowly sliding down the neck of the aptly named Great Blue Heron.
Canon 600mm 4.0 IS with Canon 2x II extender.
It’s that time of year again when giant herons return to their home island on Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park.
This particular domestic partnership is shown high atop a Monterey Cypress changing shifts as they take turns guarding their nest and hunting for seafood and pocket gophers. Mmmm, pocket gophers.
Come and watch them on Saturdays per this schedule from San Francisco Nature Education when people like naturalist Nancy DeStefanis can hep you to what’s going on and offer you a free close-up view of the avian activities.
See you there!
