Lincoln Park : Week 6

Date: May 12, 2013
Weather: Cloudy with light drizzle
Temperature: about 60 degrees Fahrenheit
Time of Day: 9:30 - 1030 am

It was a nice sunday morning with clouds overhead and a light drizzle here and there. As usual there was a lot going on in the canopy above me. It was very hard to identify birds with their calls and songs. I heard one song or call the stood out to me and maybe I'll be able to identify this bird later in the course. It was a constant whistle of such, it would be the 4 same notes with 1 or 2 sec. intervals in between. I was able to follow a bird that had a black head and grey-ish body I believe, I was hesitant to go any closer in results of the bird flying away. The bird was about the size of a sparrow looked a little bit like the Savannah and Song sparrows we saw the other day at Union Bay Natural Area. He stayed low to the ground in the grass and later moved on into a shrub, probably finding food to eat. He had a call that was a quick 'check' 'check' and he left flying through trees and shrubs and I was unable to find him again. Hopefully I will be able to ID this bird soon. While I was walking back to my site I was lucky to look up and saw an Anna's Hummingbird flying above me. He was so pretty and small but soon fluttered away. I reached my site and noticed that understory plants were starting to grow more and more of their flowers. There was also a licorice fern growing on a maple that I never noticed when walking through my site. Still no berries on the Thimbleberry yet but hopefully soon. However the Salmonberry had many berries still in the process of ripening but the ones that were, had already been eaten by birds, which is cool. I also noticed that there were a lot of bees out around my area and throughout the whole park. It is interesting to observe a location and how much it changes with the season. I never or rarely saw any bees at my location in the beginning of this quarter but now, they're all buzzing around me and past me. I dropped my pencil and saw some Western buttercup! I can't believe I did not see them before.

As I walked towards the beach part of the park to check to see if the Mallard Duck and her ducklings were still there, I heard and saw 2 to 3 crows fly across me and headed toward the direction of the beach. When I reached the beach I quickly located the Mallard duck and her duckling wading in the water close by the shore. But as I was observing them, I was only able to count 5 ducklings. Last week there was 6, and I wondered what happened to the 6th duckling. The other ducklings seem to have grown a little bigger in size or more fluffier. I decided to leave them alone as more children started to walk towards the ducks. As I was walking back to the upper part of the park I realized where the 3 crows were heading towards. There was a big group of crows on the beach pecking at the rocks for food. I also noticed that they were a bit aggressive towards each other when one got in the way of the other.